The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 02 is moved to the International Space Station aboard the station's robot arm for installation on the orbiting laboratory with the shuttle Endeavour and the Earth's horizon as a backdrop is this still image from NASA TV May 19, 2011. 
 
 GENEVA | 
 
 GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists said on Wednesday they may be close to tracking down the mysterious "dark matter" which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but has never been seen. 
 
 A final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would solve one of the biggest mysteries in physics and open up new investigations into the possibility of multiple universes and other areas, said researchers. 
 
 Members of an international team had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station, said the head of the Europe- and U.S.-based research project Samuel Ting. 
 
 He told a packed seminar at the CERN research center, near Geneva, the team had found a surge of positron particles that might have come from dark matter. 
 
 In the coming months, he said, the CERN-built AMS particle detector on the space station "will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or if they have some other origin". 
 
 Dark matter, once the stuff of science fiction, "is one of the most important mysteries of physics today," Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 1976 Nobel physics prize winner, has written. 
 
 Sometimes called the sculptor of the universe's millions of galaxies because of the way its gravity shapes their formation, its existence has long been recognized because of the way it pushes visible stars and planets around. 
 
 But efforts in laboratories on earth and in deep underground caverns to find concrete evidence that it is there, and to establish what it is, have so far proven fruitless. 
 
 Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation. 
 
 But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible "to get a first hold on dark matter really soon". 
 
 "That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world," said Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on ATLAS, one of the two CERN teams that believe they found evidence of the elusive Higgs particle in the centre's Large Hadron Collider. 
 
 NEW PHYSICS 
 
 John Conway, a physics professor from the University of California, Davis, working at CERN, said a confirmed discovery would push scientists into uncharted realms of research. 
 
 He said fresh insights could be gained into super-symmetry, a theory that says the current known 17 elementary particles have heavier but invisible counterparts, and dimensions beyond the currently known length, breadth and height, and time. 
 
 Other scientists, especially cosmologists now trying to peer back beyond the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, suggest identification of dark matter could give new clues to whether the universe itself is alone or one of many. 
 
 New research could start at CERN's Large Hadron Collider when the vast machine resumes operations in early 2015. 
 
 The huge subterranean complex running under the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains was shut down in February to double its power and multiply the millions of "mini-Big Bang" particle collisions it can stage daily. 
 
 Until last week, dark matter was thought to make up around 24 percent of the universe, with normal matter - galaxies, stars and planets - accounting for about 4.5 percent. 
 
 But then the European Space Agency's Planck satellite team reported that mapping of echoes of the early cosmos showed dark matter made up 26.8 percent and ordinary matter 4.9 percent - together the total of the material of the universe. 
 
 The dominant constituent is the non-material "dark energy", as mysterious as dark matter and believed to be the driver of cosmic expansion. 
 
 (Editing by Andrew Heavens) ||||| Levon Biss for TIME 
 
 Ten days is an awfully long time to have a toothache — especially with the kind of week Fabiola Gianotti had ahead of her. It was December 2011, and the annual seminar at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — was imminent. Gianotti, one of CERN’s head scientists, was preparing to present preliminary findings on the hunt for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that physicists had been seeking for the better part of half a century. Gianotti and the thousands of other scientists who work at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were getting very close to bagging the thing, and she was eager to share what she knew. But there was the matter of that toothache. 
 
 So she took a drugstore painkiller, then started taking two when one didn’t work, then went to three. Finally she woke up the night before the seminar with a raging fever and chills and had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency dental surgery. When she was done, the doctor told her she had to stay home. “I said, ‘O.K., I can stay home — for 20 minutes,’” she says. That was the time she needed to race back to her house, take a shower and get to CERN. 
 
 (VIDEO: The Higgs Boson, Particle of the Year) 
 
 It was an admirable case of a leader soldiering on in the face of pain, but Gianotti’s reputation was already legendary. Her native smarts and intuitive people skills had earned her a spot managing a team of 3,000 at the greatest research facility physicists have ever built. And all that was before this summer, when she and her CERN colleagues announced that, yes, they had well and truly captured the Higgs. In doing so, they had nailed the particle that gives other fundamental particles their mass. That in turn completed the so-called standard model of physics, the grand framework that ties together the universe’s three great forces — the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism — and governs the behavior of subatomic particles. Look around at the familiar universe of planets and suns and moons and people. What happened at CERN helps explain why they exist as they do. 
 
 Cover Photograph by Levon Biss for TIME 
 
 The announcement caused the kind of global sensation you don’t always see in response to a scientific discovery, and three names earned an equally unusual level of fame — Gianotti, who headed one of the experiments that confirmed the Higgs; her colleague Joe Incandela, who led the other; and Rolf Heuer, the research director of CERN. It was Gianotti who perhaps received the most attention, principally for her leadership role and her manifest gifts but occasionally for a reason as predictable as it is misguided: her gender. Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t. 
 
 But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes. Of course there are many women in leadership positions at CERN, said one physicist. Why do you think the experiments have been so successful? If you want to know the real reason Gianotti, 51, deserves the attention she’s gotten lately, you need to get to know her better. 
 
 Gianotti’s background is different from that of the ordinary particle experimenter — if there is such a thing. Her mother studied literature and music; her father is a retired geologist. When she began her high school studies in Milan, she seemed to be taking after her mother, focusing on literature, art history, philosophy and ancient Latin and Greek. Math and physics were part of her curriculum but way at the bottom. Her interest in philosophy and the big questions it raises, however, actually led her away from the humanities. “I thought that physics, the little bit I knew of it, would allow me to address those questions in a more practical way,” she says. “I mean, being able to give answers.” 
 
 (Interactive Panorama: Step Inside the Large Hadron Collider) 
 
 It’s not likely that the answers she had in mind back then concerned what gives particles their mass, but she eventually chose that field because she was attracted to its fundamental nature. She decided to be an experimenter, working with the complex hardware of physics, for equally primal reasons. “I like manual things,” she says, “doing things with my hands, the feeling of touching.” What’s more, she was involved in her university studies in the early 1980s, when the W and Z gauge bosons — which mediate the weak force — had just been discovered at CERN, so she knew this was a field on the move.
– "Prankster" may not be the first word that comes to mind when describing a scientist, but a group of them at Switzerland's European Organization for Nuclear Research (aka CERN) may have just elevated the term in an odd and creepy way. The Guardian reports the research organization is looking into a video that popped up online last week showing what appears to be a mock human sacrifice, filmed in the dead of night at CERN's Geneva headquarters (where the Large Hadron Collider is housed). The Blair Witch-style tape, shot from the POV of a person watching from a window above one of the lab's main squares, shows a woman in white being pretend-stabbed amid a group of black-cloaked mysteriosos (the Independent notes one appears to be wearing hiking boots) in front of a statue of the Hindu deity Shiva. "These scenes were filmed on our premises but without official permission or knowledge," a CERN rep informed AFP via email, adding the organization frowns upon such a "spoof" as it can "give rise to misunderstandings about the scientific nature of our work." Snopes notes CERN and the Large Hadron Collider have become "conspiracy magnets" because of the complicated research there, with some even insisting that scientists are plotting to take over the Earth or open a portal to hell. Although the video raises concern about campus security, the lab's rep stresses that entry to the campus is secure and that the disguised occult wannabes must have had access badges. "CERN welcomes every year thousands of scientific users from all over the world, and sometimes some of them let their humor go too far," she says. (CERN has been trying to keep Satan at arm's length.)