From Ron Cowen and Science News

Cosmologists are agog about the possibility that an orbiting observatory may have discovered particles of dark matter — the proposed, invisible material that researchers believe makes up most of the mass of the universe.

At two meetings in August, researchers analyzing data from the Russian-European observatory PAMELA, short for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics, reported preliminary evidence that the device had recorded more positrons from the Milky Way than could be accounted for by the standard model of elementary particle physics.