IN THIS week’s print edition we report a recent result from the T2K collaboration in Japan which has found strong hints that neutrinos, the elusive particles theorists believe to be as abundant in the universe as photons, but which almost never interact with anything, are as fickle as they are coy.

It has been known for some time that neutrinos switch between three types, or flavours, as they zip through space at a smidgen below the speed of light. The flavours are distinguished by the particles which emerge on the rare occasion a neutrino does bump into something. And so, an electron-neutrino conjures up an electron, a muon-neutrino, a muon, and a tau-neutrino, a tau particle (muons and tau are a lot like electrons, but heavier and less stable). Researchers at T2K observed, for the first time, muon-neutrinos transmuting into the electron variety—the one sort of spot-changing that had not been seen before. But their results, with a 0.7% chance of being a fluke, was, by the elevated standards of particle physics, tenuous.

Now, T2K’s rival across the Pacific has made it less so. MINOS beams muon-neutrinos from Fermilab, America’s biggest particle-physics lab located near Chicago, to a 5,000-tonne detector sitting in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, 735km (450 miles) to the north-west. On June 24th its researchers annouced that they, too, had witnessed some of muon-neutrinos change to the electron variety along the way. To be precise, the experiment recorded 62 events which could have been caused by electron-neutrinos. If the proposed transmutation does not occur in nature, it ought to have seen no more than 49 (the result of electron-neutrinos streaming in from space or radioactive rocks on Earth). Were the T2K figures spot on, as it were, it should have seen 71.

As such, the result from MINOS, which uses different methods to study the same phenomenon, puts the transmutation hypothesis on a firmer footing. This advances the search for a number known as delta (?). This is one of the parameters of the formula which physicists think describes neutrinos spot-changing antics. Physicists are keen to pin it down, since it also governs the description of the putative asymmetry between matter and antimatter that left matter as the dominant feature of the universe after the Big Bang.

In light of the latest result, it remains unclear whether either the American or the Japanese experiment is precise enough to measure delta. In 2013, however, MINOS will be supplanted by NOvA, a fancier device located in another Minnesota mine 810km from Fermilab’s muon-neutrino cannon. That ought to do the trick. Then again, nature has the habit of springing surprises.

And in more ways than one. Days after T2K’s run was cut short by the earthquake that shook Japan in March, devastating the muon-neutrino source at J-PARC, the country’s main particle-accelerator complex, MINOS had its own share of woe when the Soudan mine sustained significant flooding. Fortunately, the experiment itself escaped relatively unscathed. But the eerie coincidence spurred some boffins, not a particularly superstitious bunch, to speak of a neutrino curse. Fingers crossed that isn’t the case.