The front page of The New York Times reports today about
the announcement the Italian physicists will make at the meeting
on Dark Matter in California next Friday. WIMP stands for
the "weakly interacting massive particle" presumably found
through the "cumulative analysis of data collected over the
three year". There is a public web site about it but it did not
see it (www.lngs.infn.it).
They say that billions of WIMPs (each at least 50 times more
massive than a proton) pass our bodies each seconds but the
interaction cross sections are extremely small. The particles
were presumably discovered via scintillations in a sodium
iodine detector. Hard to believe, but who knows?
Ludwik Kowalski