"Discovery of dark matter's behavior would solve many outstanding mysteries in physics...Dark matter makes up five times more of the universe's mass than visible matter (~25% vs ~5%), yet scientists have yet to directly observe this ultra-abundant substance. Scientists also have yet to observe dark energy, which may well beat out normal energy in universal abundance. This lack of direct observations means that scientists know precious little about two of the most important physical components of our universe."

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.