Physicists have conducted a worldwide hunt for dark matter. Literally – they turned Earth itself into a giant detector.

Weirder still, the experiment picked up dozens of candidate signals that fit predictions for certain types of hypothetical particles that could make up dark matter.

Those signals still need verification, and there’s plenty of other things that they could be before they’re dark matter particles. But it’s a clever experiment with some tantalizing new clues to one of the most mind-bending cosmological puzzles.