Interesting...."current data is suggestive but not yet compelling"...at least they are proposing further tests.Should make for some coffee talk over the winter meetings.
Are we now to assume that the vacuum with it's permanent "defects" is no longer Lorentz invariant, and that we can expect in our travails along the spiral arms of the Milky Way, to run into some defects, too?...that might be seen in a particle physics detector? Perhaps a predictable violation of conservation laws will occur?...or a new wrinkle in Special Relativity? That'd be nice for Christmas.
There is as yet, still, the old data showing roughly twice as many galaxies per square degree of sky in the Southern Hubble Deep Field as opposed to the Northern Deep Field, with as yet no commensurate doubling of missing dark matter to boot, though the two are said to be gravitationally in cahoots. One might surmise that we are two thirds of the way across some universal diameter, to accomodate the galaxy count difference,but that ought too, bring with it a doubling of dark matter,and a "bump" in the distribution of fainter galaxies unless Southern galaxy rotation profiles are distinctly different from Northern ones........be careful of things that go bump in the night.
catch a falling star,...pete

__________________
A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov