CDMS

Remember how I told you earlier this week that DAMA was going to announce that they found dark matter, even though the signal that they found is not consistent with other experiments? Looks like my powers of predicting the future are pretty damned good. They have a new plot with more data showing the continued modulation at a certain energy range: and also one showing the fact that they see a bunch of extra events happening in that energy range: So here's the stuff that DAMA has seen: a nuclear recoil that has many events in a certain energy range, and has a 2% annual modulation in that…

The DAMA collaboration, an experimental team searching for dark matter via direct detection, is poised to report this week that they have discovered Dark Matter. And I'm here to pre-empt that by bringing you the truth: no, they haven't. They take some very cold (cryogenic) atoms, look for nuclear recoils resulting from dark matter collisions, subtract the background, and draw conclusions based on whatever's left over. Their expectations are based on the following: Neutrons, neutrinos, and other standard model particles from the Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the…