The real question is
Can we harvest these cosmic rays. And if hit by them will we gain superhuman powers like invisibility, or stretchyness.
Scientists at the South Pole have moved a step closer to figuring out the origin point of the cosmic rays which can damage electronics on Earth and zap astronauts in space. IceCube Lab by moonlight The origin of the high-energy particles has been baffling boffins for decades, but the latest study, which uses data from the …
Ice Cube home with interactive media and image galleries.
According to Google:
1eV = 1.60217657 × 10-19 joules
So, quite a few. I've heard people who research these things claim that the highest energy cosmic ray particles have an energy roughly that of a tennis ball struck by a professional player. Which is pretty impressive, given that we're talking about a single hydrogen/helium nucleus.
A few things to bear in mind:
Nowhere does the article refer to a single point, but always to a collective "data".
In English, "data" is also used as a collective singular noun.
In English, datum generally refers to an originating or prototypical example of a thing. See for example "datum line", generally shortened to "datum", being a guaranteed line from which measurements are taken or from which distance is calculated in a variety of fields.
Datum might be the latin singular and data the plural, but we aren't speaking latin. My wife speaks classical latin and has taught it at a university level, yet she'd bop you over the head with her copy of The Golden Ass if you tried pulling that sort of pedantry on her. Attempting to shoehorn latin rules of grammar into English is the reason why we have to put up with complaints about split infinitives and the tortured house style of The Economist, that once rendered the unforgettable sentence "Yet even as big data are helping banks, they are also throwing up new competitors from outside the industry." Which is a complete and utter nonsense.
And finally: language evolves. Words change meaning. Often they can change quite fundamentally and even transform into antonyms of their origin, as you might find if you look up the historical meanings of "nice", "artificial" and "awful".
Data is the singular, plural and collective noun in English. That's not how it started, but that's what it is.
"Where's the Corn in My Corned Beef?" (it would puzzle a yank. Not sure about a Brit.)
What would "puzzle a yank"? Many people over here eat corned beef, and a good number of us are aware of the phrase's etymology. (I think it was mentioned in the Straight Dope years back, for example, so at best it's moderately obscure.)
That said, English etymology can indeed be an engaging subject. The kleptoleptic history of the language and its resulting irregularity often make it quite difficult even for the well-educated to guess a word's origin. (jejune is a good example - many people think it's derived from French, possibly from jeune or a cognate. It isn't.)
Of course you're correct. The singular has become "data point", or the phrase "a single piece of data". Rather like cake. Though of course that also comes in slices. But then, so does data.
You see English is a very functional language. It has lost most of its inflection - not all, given we still pluralise and inflect for number, amongst other things - but certainly most, so of course when English adopts a word from an inflected language, such as Latin or Greek, it will tend to adopt a single form and discard the rest. Other forms of the noun might then turn up in other contexts, for related but distinct concepts.
One of the reasons I personally tend to rail against attempts to enforce foreign grammatical rules on imported words is that it leads to hyper-correction. That is, the proscriptive applicatiopn of "the rules" to situations where they have no reason to be applied. Virus and Octopus both still have their pedants insisting that they pluralise as virii and octopi, when English orthography would render them as viruses and octopuses. Yet there is no attested plural of virus in Latin, and octopus is greek, and should pluralise as octopodes.