News for Youse: Bieber fever is real, but breaking the speed of light is not

Some days, we really wonder about the wisdom of quoting certain people in news stories. Like former Formula One racer Jacques Villeneuve.

See, there’s a little thing happening in Montreal this weeked: the Canadian Grand Prix. However, there’s this major thing happening called months of student civil unrest.

Protesters stripped to their skivvies last night in an ongoing protest over student fees and Special Bill 78; the nearly naked protest was, of course, planned to disrupt the kickoff cocktail party for the auto racing event. And the police only ended up arresting 39 people that night.

But Mr. Villeneuve, he’s tired of the whinging. The multimillionaire, who was once engaged to Dannii Minogue, so you know he’s completely down to earth and in touch with the common people, has but one message for the Quebec protesters: stop because you’re embarrassing your country.

“It's time for people to wake up and stop loafing about. It's lasted long enough,” Villeneuve told reporters on June 7. “We heard them. We listened. They should stop. It's costing the city a fortune. It makes no sense.”

Jacques Villeneuve, you may have pretty eyes but we here at News for Youse think you’re the one who needs to shut up.

In this space back in September 2011, we told you that scientists had finally cracked the speed of light! But then they didn’t. But then maybe?

Well, we hate to be the bearers of bad news (who are we kidding? We love it!) but the final results are in and those neutrinos are totally respecting the speed of light.

Four separate studies—Borexino, ICARUS, LVD, and OPERA—have found that neutrinos cannot travel any faster than light speed, which is really bumming out all the would-be time travellers out there. Except, of course, the ones who live among us who have obviously travelled back in time from a technologically superior future.

“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” said CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci. “The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action—an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward.”

Whoa, does anyone else find it incredibly sexy when people accurately explain how science works?

What else is happening in the realm of science? Bieber fever is a real thing now. Well, kind of. A study out of the University of Ottawa has tracked the spread of Justin Bieber’s popular and determined that mania over the 18-year-old hair farmer follows a path akin to that of an infectious disease. The only known inoculation against this destructive pathogen? Formal music lessons and a steady auditory diet of Frank Zappa.

And let’s end this off with a curious video of a strange light, which was visible in Israel, Syria, and other places in the Middle East last night. MSNBC is calling it a Russian ICBM test, others are calling it a UFO. Considering the majority of the videos of this mysterious illumination are subtitled in Russian, we’re inclined to believe that both theories are, in fact, correct.

Follow Miranda Nelson on Twitter. She inoculated herself against Bieber fever two years ago.