The letter was forgotten as, on Aug. 29, 1859, Drake and Uncle Billy and his sons got feverishly busy pumping oil and filling wash tubs and whiskey barrels (why we speak of "barrels" of oil today) with the black liquid.

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Elephant guns have given way to telephoto lenses, but the essentials remain: dawn and dusk game drives, stately canvas tents guarded by warriors with spears, and drinks around the campfire, with the mawing and bellowing of animals in the liquid black night beyond.

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On the plus side, the black-and-white liquid crystal display is crisp and easy to read, and the software so intuitive that reading the manual is more luxury than necessity.

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There are several underground experiments worldwide that are aiming to detect these dark matter "WIMPs, " such as the LUX Dark Matter experiment in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where liquid xenon is stored a mile underground.

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The last century has seen only a few major display innovations, among them the move from black-and-white monitors to color and the introduction of flat, liquid crystal displays to replace cathode ray tubes.

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