Setting up an underground lab doesn’t come cheap and in recent years, many have started to diversify. This month, Sean Paling of Boulby Mine and his colleague Stephen Sadler – director at DURRIDGE UK Radon Instrumentation – describe the renaissance in the science taking place far beneath our feet. Studies in underground labs now range from Mars rovers to muon tomography and from radioactive dating to astrobiology. Last year’s reports that the BICEP2 telescope had uncovered evidence for cosmic inflation turned out to be a false alarm, but researchers in the field haven’t given up. Matthew R Francis describes how a new generation of telescopes is entering the hunt.
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