Last June the high-energy physics community celebrated a
long-awaited result. The Japan-based Super-Kamiokande collaboration
announced that it had detected oscillation in the elusive subatomic
particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos come in three
"flavors," and it now appears that they oscillate between
these flavors as they propagate. The fact that they do so means that
they have mass—a discovery that explains some of the missing
mass in the universe, a major puzzle in cosmology. The authors
describe the huge, water-filled underground detector that finally
allowed physicists to detect and characterize the rare interactions
that neutrinos have with other particles.