Many harmful or controversial forms of pollution are either not measured - as is the case for carbon dioxide and small particle emissions - or the data is not made public, as is the case for ozone.

Particle colliders automatically flag collisions that look interesting and store data for further inspection.

Physics blogs are alive with chatter about a possible sign of the Higgs boson - or perhaps an entirely unexpected particle - in data from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.