Keep in mind that the Tevatron is only the last stage of a whole series of accelerators. The Booster and the Main Injector, the next two biggest rings, are still operational, as well as various other linacs and beam lines (neutrinos, pions, muons, name your particle). In fact the Main Injector is probably the new focus of the site, for long-baseline neutrino studies.

In addition to commercial uses, accelerators have huge potential for medical use, especially proton beams, which are an exploding cancer treatment option. Fermilab already has a strong medical physics program, so expanding into industrial applications is a reasonable move.

Disclaimer: I do experimental searches for dark matter for a living, so I may be biased in my judgement of these types of papers that crop up so often. There was a similar paper a few weeks ago from someone claiming that quantum vacuum polarization could account for dark matter PhysOrg link.

The issue with both of these explanations, is that they only address galactic rotation curves. Those are among the first and easiest to explain indications of the need for something like dark matter, but are not the strongest by a long shot. For instance, this guy's explanation can't explain things like the famous Bullet cluster , nor can they explain the evolution of structure formation or the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which, in the field, are considered much stronger constraints.

The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of cosmology fits all of the astrophysical measurements reasonably well, and has a nice tie-in to supersymmetric particle physics, which is one of the current leading theories. No one in the field will take any new theory seriously until it can reproduce ALL the phenomena at least as well as the current model (which of course is exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work!)

...and the validity of the models that are being used to predict future developments ...and the appropriate level of response to undertake based on those predictions ...and how to afford that response ...and whether things like cap and trade would do any good under any circumstances or are just another revenue stream for a small group

There's plenty to question even if you agree with the basic scientific premise (as most do, I think).

I'm pretty sure exactly 50% of the population has below average intelligence...

Thank you. One of the most astute (and eloquently phrased) statements I've heard on the subject.

What no one has ever been able to explain to me is, if there are two models, one that is completely safe and one that _might_ be safe but still uses ionizing radiation, why in the hell are there any of the latter operating???

I agree whole-heartedly on the comment about JWST. It was an enormous eater of funds, but the science potential was even bigger.

Regarding the dark matter issue, there is a small minority in the astrophysics community that believe these sorts of so-called Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs, a name chosen to specifically counter Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPs) might make up the dark matter.

The majority of the community is in pretty solid agreement that dark matter must be something more exotic, a new particle outside our standard model. There's lots of evidence for this, but the most compelling is from variations in the cosmic microwave background; see results from WMAP and the links therein for a pretty good description aimed at the general public. It's pretty hard to make WMAP's data consistent with the idea that all dark matter is made up of MACHOs.

what keeps this approach from generating a separate key for every site?

I hate having to be pedantic, but please at least do enough fact-checking to get the name of one of our country's premier scientific institutions right! It's the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) or Fermilab. There is no such thing as Fermi Labs.

There was some attempt a while back to assign dark matter to things like this, or free-floating black holes, brown dwarf stars, etc. I.e., somewhat exotic (or not) objects composed of normal matter.

However, in the past maybe 10 years, the constraints for dark matter come much more from cosmological arguments than from observations of the galaxy today. If you're interested, I'd suggest googling WMAP and baryon acoustic oscillations. The basic idea is that we can study the cosmic microwave background, which is the left over radiation as the universe cooled below a critical point some few 100k years after the big bang. In the CMB are embedded small fluctuations like ripples in a pond after you throw rocks in, which are the imprint of pressure waves spreading outward through the primordial plasma. By studying the size and spacing of these ripples, and applying a whole crapton of cool math, you can deduce things like the speed at which those ripples propagate, which is a direct function of both the total matter density and the baryonic (i.e. normal) matter density.

Of course I'm skipping all the details, but the basic result is that, although we first noticed dark matter from observing the motion of galaxies today, it was confirmed to a much better degree by observing the universe in its birth stages, and it's these latter measurements that tell us that dark matter absolutely cannot be due to the behavior of matter and general relativity as we understand it today.

Very few collaborations of this size release all of their data publicly. Partly it's a practicality issue: how do you share several TB of data with whoever wants it? Plus, it's very easy for someone not familiar with the setup to misinterpret the data (an argument often used by climate scientists for why raw data is not released).

As I said, I don't think anyone disputes that DAMA sees _something_ with an annular modulation,just their interpretation of it. As far as the community is concerned, the WIMP explanation HAS been falsified already. But the DAMA people hold out that, since the other detectors use different target materials they are not directly comparable. Stalemate until someone else can get ahold of some of their crystals.

The most often-cited hypothesis are cosmic rays, which do show a similar annular modulation due primarily (as far as we know) to changing temperature and density in the atmosphere. This modulation is measured extremely well by MACRO, a detector in LNGS (the same site as DAMA). But, the phase (time of year when the signal is at maximum) of the cosmic ray modulation seems to be inconsistent with the DAMA (and to a lesser extent, CoGeNT) oscillation.

WIMPs are also not a particularly defined particle; only the "vanilla" WIMP is excluded by CDMS and Xenon. Every theorist has his or her favorite way to reconcile all the experimental evidence, usually by just changing one or two parameters. For instance, you can make the Xenon signal agree by proposing that the WIMP interacts differently with neutrons than with protons, which is actually well-supported by some models. The thing that NO theory can do is reconcile the CoGeNT and CDMS signals, since they are both germanium detectors; those two will be where the interesting showdown happens I think.

There's a huge controversy right now in the field. The DAMA/Libra experiment has been claiming an 8-sigma excess for years which they say is consistent with dark matter, but they keep getting excluded by other experiments, most notably CDMS and Xenon. Every time their favored region is excluded, they come up with a new way to reanalyze their data to make it consistent again. But they have not ever released any of their data to the community (and hold patents on the type of crystal they use for their detector) so it's impossible to directly verify.

CoGeNT first released hints of a low-energy excess which could be consistent with DAMA-type dark matter about a year ago. I was at the APS conference earlier this week where Collar released the seasonal modulation results which make it seem even more likely that they see the same thing as DAMA. However, just the next day, CDMS presented an analysis of their low energy data which is below their normal dark matter threshold (because the rate of background events in that region is quite high and poorly understood). They showed that, even if they didn't account for the known sources of background, the rate in their detector is inconsistent with CoGeNT's. As many people rightly point out, CoGeNT is seeing an exponential signal near threshold, which is what you'd expect to see in just about any detector with or without dark matter present.

The whole situation is muddled even further by politics and personalities. Collar is respected as a scientist, but is also generally agreed to be an asshole. When he announced the annular modulation result, he spent 25 minutes of his talk attacking xenon on mostly pointless grounds, then had only a single slide showing the important result of the modulation. He finds tiny holes in other's analyses, but doesn't often present a very convincing picture of his own.

tl;dr: The community is far from agreeing that what he and DAMA have seen are in fact WIMPs. CDMS and Xenon tend to have better established analysis programs and pay more attention to their systematics, and they still rule out both DAMA and CoGeNT. However, I think everyone at this point agrees they are seeing something interesting, just likely not WIMPs.

Ummm, methinks you should look up the definition of science

There may be bugs in the Android DHCP, and who knows what else, but I think this is much more likely just typical crappiness of Princeton's IT department. As a grad student here, I've encountered a huge number of examples. I've had at least 3 devices banned from the network because they did "improper" things. Most were genuinely misbehaving (like a crappy router that spilled the occasional 192.168.. address onto the WAN), but not to such a terrible degree that they shouldn't have been handled.

Want to run gentoo? The network flat out won't respond to DHCP queries. Own a Wii? Can't connect to the wireless net because of some technical issue Princeton hasn't bothered to fix for over 2 years.

Forgive me if I'm skeptical of the severity of the Android issue knowing how awesomely capable our IT department is.