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Bill Harlan, spokesman for the research facility.
• The unveiling has been a long time coming: The Homestead mine opened during the Black Hills' gold rush in 1876 and outlasted many counterparts. In the late 1990s, it still employed about 1,000 people, but as the value of gold dropped, it became clear that the mine's days were numbered. It shuttered for good in 2003.
• The science community seized on the closure. Dark matter is too sensitive to detect in normal laboratories, but one so far underground would help shield it from pesky cosmic radiation. Also, the LUX detector is submerged in water, further insulating it.

• Gaitskell said he's worked with 70 scientists and 14 institutions over the past four years to finally make the LUX experiment a reality.
• That detector will be in the Davis Campus, named after Ray Davis, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics for an experiment he started in 1965 inside the then-working mine. Nearby in a new hall called the Transition Area will be the Majorana Dem

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