Hoax? Work unlikely to be published (Score 1)

Bear in mind that Nature only joined the cohort of news agencies *reporting* on a 5 minute talk at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in DC. The research in question has not been written up as a scientific article (nor refereed through the peer review process). Many in the community feel that the basis for the claim is not grounded, and in fact is based on flawed assumptions (for instance, some of the relations that the author uses are believed to be instrumental effects and not intrinsic properties of gamma-ray bursts). Even if the statistical analysis is correct, the author has only found evidence for that gamma-ray bursts were slightly brighter in the past (for which there is evidence from other observations) not that the universe is even more wacky than we thought.