Perhaps the most under-reported science story of the past year: the LUX (Large Underground Xenon) detector, designed specifically to detect theorized Dark Matter particles, comes up completely empty in its first three-month run. Success would have been Nobel-Prize territory, and the failure should be equally important. Earlier detectors had given unconfirmed hints of Dark Matter at the limits of their sensitivities, so LUX was designed to be 10 times more sensitive than earlier machines. If those hints had been real, LUX would have detected DM particles very easily. This negative result gives impetus to alternative theories of the universe not depending on the existence of Dark Matter, such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).
Why you would think LUX would have detected dark matter easily? For one thing it's only looking for one DM theory, it's not set up to detect axions...which is probably as hard if not harder to detect than the Higg's Boson. The observation of the effects of "dark matter" have yet to be explained by MOND, especially the observations of the Bullet Cluster.
possum thinks it's a spidey web from a space spidey... Earth may be growing dark matter 'hairs' Nov. 24, 2015 - "If we could pinpoint the location of the root of these hairs, we could potentially send a probe there and get a bonanza of data about dark matter," astrophysicist Gary Prézeau said. See also: Research reveals how hypergiant star quickly sheds mass Nov. 25, 2015 - "Massive stars live short lives," study author Peter Scicluna said.
