Why is it in news?

1. Dark matter experiments have increased in frequency around the world, as scientists have become more and more desperate to pin down this elusive substance. (ET)

2. An unusual signal picked up by a European space observatory(XMM-Newton observatory) could be the first direct detection of dark matter particles, astronomers say. The findings are tentative and could take several years to check, but if confirmed they would represent a dramatic advance in scientists’ understanding of the universe. Astronomers noticed that the intensity of x-rays recorded by the spacecraft rose by about 10 per cent whenever it observed the boundary of Earth’s magnetic field that faces towards the sun. (The Hindu)

3. The handful of unusual events observed in the underground experiments at the Kolar Gold Field (KGF) mines during the 1960-70s and the 1980s, which have remained unexplained to this day, may have been due to the decays of hitherto unseen Dark Matter (DM) particles. This interesting hypothesis has been put forward by Profs. G. Rajasekaran and M. V. N. Murthy of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, in a paper published in the latest issue of the physics journal Pramana.(The Hindu)