There's a chance that today will go down as the day of the first
announcement that we've detected the presence of particles of
dark matter. Two talks from members of the CDMS consortium,
which runs a detector designed to spot the presence of a likely
dark matter candidate, have indicated that they've spotted two
events that bear the signatures of something called a
neutralino, a hypothesized particle that has many of the
properties of dark matter. With only two of these detections,
however, there's still a 23 percent chance that random
background events produced the signals. We've been looking for
dark matter for quite a while, as its presence was suggested by
simple observations: lots of things in the Universe behave as if
there's more gravitational attraction than the visible matter
could possibly produce. That suggests that either our
understanding of gravity's wrong, or there's matter we can't
see. As the observational evidence for dark matter has piled up
in the intervening years, scientists have gradual