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Science 16 November 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5546, p. 1433
DOI: 10.1126/science.294.5546.1433c
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ScienceScope

The underground science movement is still kicking. Congress last week included $10 million in a housing appropriations bill to prevent an abandoned gold mine from flooding. The money, for a skeletal crew and equipment to keep the mine dry, keeps alive scientists' hopes of transforming the Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, into the world's deepest underground laboratory (Science, 15 June, p. 1979). Scientists studying certain phenomena, such as neutrino signatures, need such sites to shield experiments from cosmic radiation.

Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) and mine owners last month worked out environmental and liability issues that threatened to scuttle the plan. Ironically, Daschle aides were hammering out the final deal in the senator's Washington, D.C., office when they learned that a staffer had just opened the anthrax-bearing letter, according to The Wall Street Journal. While members of Daschle's staff wait to return to their shuttered building, researchers await word from the National Science Foundation on a $281 million proposal to build the underground lab.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)