A number of sources[2][3] today reported on the possible detection of dark matter particles or WIMPs from the CDMS II experiment. This is pretty slick for a number of reasons. First, one of the research teams on the CDMS II experiment is located right here at Texas A&M. Second, the other dark matter experiment that's mentioned in the nature blog, LUX, also has a team of researchers working here at A&M. I was sitting in a professor's office discussing using liquid helium as a scintillator for the h-ray experiment a few days ago and he mentioned their use of liquid xenon as a scintillator on LUX, and now this! For those interested, liquid xenon makes a better scintillator than liquid helium for a few reasons. The most interesting of these to me is that helium is small enough to penetrate into a photomultiplier tube and ruin it's vacuum over time. Basically, it's very hard to keep helium from penetrating containers. What about...