A single anomalous event recorded by the LUX-Zeplin experiment — a highly sensitive dark matter detector buried underground in South Dakota (USA) — has reignited scientific interest in WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), once considered the leading candidate for explaining dark matter, the invisible substance thought to hold galaxies like the Milky Way together. The international research team detected the event while using a broader search strategy involving higher-energy atomic recoils in their ten-tonne liquid xenon detector, and found no known background effect that could account for it. While physicists caution that a single event falls far short of the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery — and the 0.5% probability of a random fluctuation remains substantial — the finding has nonetheless prompted dozens of theoretical papers and unusually positive reactions from the physics community, which has gone without a major particle physics breakthrough since the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012.