Popular story on vacuum energy

Nature magazine listed its most popular stories of 2011, and this story was emailed more than any other story in its history:

A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space1. If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and "a significant milestone", says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

This is what has always been called the aether, and I commented on these results before.