Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to neutrino 'flavor' change

The Nobel Prize for Physics has previously been awarded to scientists for things like the study of the Higgs Boson particle and for complicated work that deals with graphene. This year is no different with Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald coming across a discovery that has the power to change our current understanding of the universe. The two scientists are being awarded the prize for working out that neutrinos have mass. In case you're not down with physics-lingo, a neutrino is a subatomic particle that travels at (almost) the speed of light and passes through almost anything without effect. In fact, billions of neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this.

In order to detect these quick moving, impossible to distinguish particles, giant tanks of purified water are built underground and on a rare occasion when a neutrino collides with an atoms nucleus, it produces a dim streak of light. Neutrino's come in three 'flavors' (although they don't carry a taste, just like Domino's pizza) called electron, tau and muon. It was previously thought that these subatomic particles had no mass and therefore couldn't change flavors but at a neutrino detector called Super Kamiokande in Japan, it collected evidence that these particles can oscillate, and therefore, change states.

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