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Arthur Dent wrote:Cool. It's too bad that Earth will be rendered uninhabitable far sooner. Less than a billion years left.

A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say – if the finding holds up.

Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported their surprising result in 2015 on the arXiv preprint server, and this January in the journal Physical Review Letters1. But the report – which posited the existence of a new, light boson only 34 times heavier than the electron – was largely overlooked.

Then, on 25 April, a group of US theoretical physicists brought the finding to wider attention by publishing its own analysis of the result on arXiv2. The theorists showed that the data didn’t conflict with any previous experiments – and concluded that it could be evidence for a fifth fundamental force. “We brought it out from relative obscurity,” says Jonathan Feng, at the University of California, Irvine, the lead author of the arXiv report.