How we're searching for Dark Matter, and when are we going to finally find it!

The Universe is a wild and wooly place, simultaneously very cold (with a CMB temperature of 2.7 K) and exceedingly hot (full of ~10⁶ K intergalactic x-ray emitting gas), and made up of things like the strangely named Cold Dark Matter (whose temperature in our neighborhood of the Milky Way is ~10⁸ K). In an effort to understand the inner workings of the Universe, physicists have been coming up with new detection schemes and resurrecting old ones in order to detect an elusive particle that makes up the majority of the Universe's mass. This talk will discuss the field of dark matter direct detection: the underlying techniques that people, the current status of the searches, and the plans for the future.