The Dark-Matter Ages
The opening of a new laboratory should be cause for celebration, but there is an unpleasant subtext here. The Homestake site was supposed to house a far more ambitious new National Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, which would provide the deepest site on earth, allowing for scientific investigations into topics from dark matter to evolutionary biology. In 2010, however, the National Science Foundation?which had commissioned several R and D studies for such a laboratory and which had picked Homestake as one of two possible sites?decided to drop out of the project. Thus ended the prospect of a new national laboratory, and South Dakota, Sanford, and the DOE were forced to scramble to keep the smaller scale operation afloat. The deepest underground laboratory will remain in Sudbury, Canada?meaning that the United States has again ceded leadership in this aspect of laboratory infrastructure supporting frontier physics and astronomy.
amzn white house correspondents dinner phoenix coyotes bruce irvin charlie st cloud celtics josh hamilton