By Wendy Pitlick
Black Hills Pioneer
LEAD — Sanford Lab Safety Officer Tom Regan can sit down with a blank sheet of paper and completely map out any given level of the underground lab.
He knows every drift.
He knows every feature.
He knows every working system.
He knows every hazard, every nook and every cranny of every level of the 8,000-foot former gold mine.
 “I have been to every drift and every place you could humanly get to underground,” Regan said. “Even to this day I can sit down with a blank sheet of paper and draw out a level, draw out all of the features on that level. You can take a regular map and put them side-by-side and they’ll be pretty close. I don’t have the greatest memory in the world, but something clicked with that.”

By Wendy Pitlick
Black Hills Pioneer
LEAD — A planetarium film that includes information about the Sanford Lab and the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment could reach as many as 110 million people a year worldwide, producers say.

An artistic shot of the Sanford Lab is one of many from the Lead facility that will be featured in the new planetarium film, “Secret of the Dark Galaxy: From the Higgs Boson to Dark Matter.” The image is circular because it will be projected onto the ceiling of planetarium domes around the world. Courtesy photo

The 25-minute film, which is still in production, is tentatively entitled “Secret of the Dark Galaxy: From the Higgs Boson to Dark Matter.” The project is a collaboration between the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Texas in Arlington, and Michigan State University. It is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
The segment, which is fully rendered for a planetarium dome, features advanced animation and live footage of the Sanford Lab and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in order to explain dark matter. The show starts with the Big Bang theory, which is where scientists believe dark matter originates, and takes viewers on an exciting three-dimensional trip through dark matter theories and experiments — effectively explaining the LUX experiment and ongoing dark matter exploration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Laboratory.

By Wendy Pitlick
Black Hills Pioneer
LEAD  —  The start of a new school year marks the beginning of another wave of education and outreach opportunities at the Sanford Lab, and this year the opportunities for youth education are abundant across all age groups.
Whether she is hosting college students at the Sanford Lab for educational activities, or setting up tiltmeter experiments for eighth graders in their earth science class, Peggy Norris, with the Sanford Lab, said she is very busy spreading the message that science is fun—especially when it's right out your back door in Lead.