SUSY may not be dead, just shy

A few experiments deep in the mines of Italy may have seen dark matter, in this case neutralinos, one of the stable and low energy states of proposed supersymmetry particles.

If this holds up, there is a double win for particle physics. First candidates for dark matter and for supersymmetric particles will have been detected. On the down side, it took more than a year to detect 20 putative neutralinos so experimental progress may be slow for a while. On the second down side, the detected particles appear to have much lower mass/energy than theorists wanted them to have.