Dark matter seems to be as pervasive as all get-out.

"In a kind of belated birthday present to Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity is 100 years old this year, astronomers say they have confirmed an essential but previously unconfirmed prediction of general relativity: namely, that the entire universe can act as a magnifying lens.

"The light from distant quasars, enigmatic and violent galaxy-birthing events on the shores of time, some 10 billion light-years away, has been magnified by the gravitational force of lumps and irregularities in the structure of the nearby cosmos. So the quasars appear slightly brighter in telescopes than they actually are, according to a multinational team of researchers led by Dr. Ryan Scranton of the University of Pittsburgh... The astronomers said that cosmic magnification gave them a new way to weigh the universe and to investigate its evolution.

"They reached that conclusion after sifting a mountain of data about 13 million galaxies and other celestial objects, obtained by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a continuing effort to remap the heavens.

The magnification, they said, confirms the dark picture cosmologists have built up in the last few years, in which the atoms that make up stars and people are overwhelmed by clouds of mysterious dark matter. That dark matter is in turn overwhelmed by something even stranger: so-called 'dark energy,' which seems to be wrenching space and time apart faster and faster, taking the galaxies for a potentially fatal ride into endless cold and loneliness."

[Thank you, NYT, for that exceedingly bleak and dismal summation.]