Probably no signs of gravitational waves, signs of dark matter but not a discovery. That is the word from this first day of the American Physical Society's meeting in Denver Colorado. 

 In the plenary keynote session of the meeting today, I asked a question of Lloyd Knox of the PLANCK collaboration. My question regarded the B mode polarization data and what it may show. He said that this data would be officially released next year. He also expressed the professional opinion that the data may not show a strong gravitational wave signal. This would be significant since the simplest models of inflation predict a strong gravitational wave signal. Dr. Knox went as far as to state “the simplest models are probably ruled out” (not quite verbatim.)

 In the session dealing with dark matter detection, the CDMS collaboration discussed the detection of three events that are not background with a three sigma significance. I specifically asked Dr.Kevin McCarthy if requiring a six sigma threshold for discovery was appropriate for research of their kind. Six sigma being the threshold used in high energy physics. His response was, essentially, that they should be held to an even higher standard due to the amount of noise in their experiments. So, while there are tantalizing clues of dark matter no discovery yet. 

 I am here at the APS April 2013 meeting in Denver Colorado. I will report anything I find of interest. Stay tuned for updates.   (Updated to fix formatting.) Here is the video of one of the talks where I asked my questions at APS Denver April 2013.