In the 1960s scientist Ray Davis arranged to set up a small lab in the Homestake Gold Mine. More than 1,463m under the earth, Davis used a large natural cavern pool as a way to detect and measure neutrinos, or tiny subatomic particles. At first, his calculations were considered way too large to be accurate. But his figures stood up to scrutiny over time, and in 2002 Davis was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. Read more
Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings - a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter. Workers began construction Monday in an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research. The site is ideal for experiments because its location is largely shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.