For a science magazine, this article does a terrible job of talking about spin. Saying "spinning as it zips along—to the right like a football thrown by a right-handed quarterback or the left like a pigskin thrown by a lefty" is immensely confusing to anyone who actually wants to understand what's going on.
Quarks don't know anything and they don't spin like a football, bad science reporting is bad science reporting.
Awesome result. I think it's vitally important to acknowledge achievements that happen in parallel with research at the LHC because otherwise we're going to miss a lot of very neat results. I don't know enough about particle physics to be able to comment on the techniques involved unfortunately, but I love reading about the progress that's being made.
For someone that Wikipedia's a lot of this stuff, does someone know if this type of spin asymmetry is in any sense related to CP violation? [1] As soon as I read the article I thought of CP violation and I'm assuming this is basically the "P" violation.
Finally, reading this article actually triggered a totally different question:
"Using the electron accelerator at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, the researchers shined 170 billion electrons on a target of liquid deuterium over 2 months in 2009."
Shined or shone? Turns out to be quite the discussion topic (e.g., [2][3][4])!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
[2] http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/shined.html
[3] http://grammarist.com/usage/shined-shone/
[4] http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/has-the-sun...