Next Tuesday (June 4, 2013) I will be speaking at SciencePub RVA, a monthly gathering at The Camel in Richmond, Virginia. The doors open at 6 PM, and my talk starts at 7 PM. The event is free, but we’d love it if you would register, so we have an idea of the crowd size. (Also, tip your servers. Seriously. They’re your friends.)

Mining for dark matter

Dark matter makes up about 80% of all the mass in the Universe, but what exactly is it? To see how scientists are trying to answer this question, we’ll examine the evidence for dark matter in the Universe, from the early days of the cosmos to the structure of galaxies. Then, we’ll travel a half-mile underground to the Soudan laboratory in northern Minnesota, where one experiment works to detect dark matter particles directly.