This has been a pretty big deal for a while now -- its a huge, unexplained effect that ever theoretical physicist in a remotely related field will have poked at

This has been a pretty big deal for a while now -- its a huge, unexplained effect that ever theoretical physicist in a remotely related field will have poked at. (And the expected result is actually pretty easy to calculate, as far as anything in QED is.) A lot of folk were betting on some sort of experimental error (just as ended up happening with the superluminal neutrinos), so if they've managed to replicate the result with more in depth experiments, that's kind of important.