Deputy Dog has posted an excellent story on the 5 coolest research facilities, of all the Super Kamiokande detector at Kamioka observatory in Japan is the coolest.

It reminds of the human battery farms from ‘The Matrix’ except there are no electric spiders but plain mortals. Located 1,000 m underground in the Mozumi Mine it consists of a cylindrical stainless steel tank 41.4 m tall and 39.3 m in diameter enclosing 50,000 tons of ultra-purified water. The clever people built the machine to detect neutrinos, proton decay and cosmic rays: this is done using the 12′000-ish photomultiplier tubes (extremely sensitive light detectors) visible on all walls of the ‘ultra-purified water-filled’ tank.