The outlook for building a US underground laboratory nosedived in late 2010 when NSF pulled out of the project. But quietly and with little fanfare, such a lab is being realized in the defunct Homestake gold mine, thanks to unwavering support from the host state of South Dakota and philanthropist T. Denny Sanford and to the Department of Energy. In August 2011 DOE stepped up with operations money to keep alive two experiments in the mine: the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) search for dark matter and the Majorana Demonstrator for neutrinoless double beta decay (see Physics Today, February 2011, page 21, and August 2011, page 23).
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