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Dark Matter, WIMPS, and NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Data

cylonlover writes "Recently the media has been saturated with overly-hyped reports that NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer may have detected dark matter. These claims may have some justification if the word 'may' is shouted, but they rest on a number of really major assumptions and guesses, some of which are on weak and shifting soil. So just what was seen in the experiment, and what are the possible explanations?"

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  1. Improperly worded summary by AchilleTalon · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the summary: "... reports that NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer ..."

    AMS isn't a NASA experiment, it is an international collaboration and NASA is only one among many other collaborators. Source: http://www.ams02.org/partners/participating-institutions/

    I believe this summary is badly worded letting people think the AMS experiment is even a NASA initiative while it isn't neither. It is a CERN experiment that is taking advantage of the ISS and hence the NASA collaboration. Even other space agencies have contributed in this experiment.

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    Achille Talon
    Hop!