Signs of Dark Matter From Minnesota Mine

thomst writes "Juan Collar, team leader of COGENT, an experimental effort to detect WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), recently presented a paper detailing 15 months of data collected via a pure germanium detector located deep in a Minnesota mine which seems to confirm similar results reported by a European effort called DAMA/LIBRA. The results are particularly intriguing, because they appear to show a seasonal variation in the density of WIMPs that accords with models which predict Earth should encounter more WIMPs in Summer (when its path around the Sun moves in the same direction as the Milky Way revolves) than in Winter (when it goes the opposite direction). The most interesting thing about the COGENT experiment is that the mass of the WIMP candidates it records is significantly less than most particle physicists had predicted, according to popular models. (Ron Cowen wrote an earlier article about COGENT last year that goes into a lot more detail about how COGENT works, what its team expects it to find, and why.)"

Comments

Way, WAY off topic, but ...

[thomst]

On April 27, I posted this comment on another story about an entirely different topic. Eventually, it got modded to +3 Insightful. Then, this morning, I discovered it had been modded all the way down to -1 Overrated.

There's only one reason why a single moderator would spend that many mod points on down-modding a single post: to put it below the browsing threshold of virtually all /. readers. The question is, "Why?" And I suspect the only credible answer to that question is, "Because he is so consumed by dedication either to communism or to libertarianism (the two political philosophies whose fundamental assumptions I criticized in the post), that he feels compelled to suppress any criticism of it for which he is unable to muster an argument in response.

Now, because communists are so thin on the ground around here, I have my strong suspicions which philosophy my censor espouses - but it doesn't matter either way, because, in either case, this is clearly a case of someone systematically attempting to suppress dissenting speech. The act of suppression itself is one of craven philosophical cowardice, and it does nothing whatsoever to enhance the credibility of the political philosophy it purports to defend. To the contrary, it merely establishes that the moderator, at least, can muster no useful counter-argument. Instead, he substitutes moderation abuse for intelligent discourse.

In the interest of fairness, I urge you to read my comment. Whether or not the down-mod is undone, it deserves at least that much consideration.