There’s plenty of coverage today about the latest from the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) — a collaboration between Italy, Russia, Germany and Sweden, which studies high-energy electrons and anti-electrons in outer space.

As we reported in August, between 2006 and 2008 PAMELA saw an unexpected excess of positrons (anti-electrons) whizzing around space. That excess could be from a nearby astrophysical source, or it could be from the annihilation of dark matter—heavy, rarely interacting particles that make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The news today is based on the fact that the work has appeared in this week’s issue of Nature.

Incidentally, this issue also has a pretty nice Q&A about dark matter and dark energy with Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College and Marc Kamionkowski of the California Institute of Technology.