Yes thank you for pointing this out. I read something similar at a science-y blog the other day. Basically it comes about from assuming a particular form of a complex action as opposed to the standard real one. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/10/14/spooky-signals-from-the-future-telling-us-to-cancel-the-lhc Basically there is a good more or less layperson explanation about it. All this hub-bub about time travel is exaggeration.

So after doing some digging it turns out that even the authors of the papers admit it is a somewhat shaky proposal. Basically they assumed that something called the action, a quantity in physics usually taken to be real, maybe had an imaginary part and then played around with it a bit and assumed it would have a strong effect on a scalar field (such as the Higgs). They found the imaginary part of the action had a strong dampening effect on actions even if they were minima (which are the usual ones we work with). Basically from what I have read/gathered this imaginary part appears in the form of non-local effects in space-time by forcing a consideration upon an entire trajectory through time not just what is local. So basically it would imply the universe as a whole could be on a trajectory where the Higgs just couldn't be created due to the dampening effects of the imaginary part of the action. No backwards propagating signals or anything...just the way the universe is. Of course the whole thing is pretty shaky (invoking at least two 'tooth faries') but it is fun nonetheless.

So it begins; wonder how long before fake stories on other news sites start up?

According to the article the method is currently too slow to be implemented and fails for encrypted traffic. So not quite the BT killer yet.

You make it sound like they put pure mercury into them. Ethylmercury does not bioaccumulate like the more dangerous methylmercury which is NOT in vaccines. Even upon removing it there was no real change in autism rates. The last statement though is a current area of research--there may very well be some environmental factor. Certainly the environment we live in today is far different than that of the past; there are whole hosts of new chemicals ingested by mothers or infants, food sources have different levels of heavy metals in them etc. That is why there is currently a large scale national study getting launched to try and figure out some of these potential environmental factors since the vaccine route was long ago dismissed.

Well in a sense it is already known how the Maxwell equations would transform with hypothetical monopoles (you get the divergence of B to look like the divergence of E and there is a "monopole current" term in the curl of E equation). In any region where there isn't a monopole everything would remain the same, so nothing already known changes. But for regions where we'd have these monopole like things quite a few equations where you wind up with div B would become more interesting to say the least!