Fundamental Constant May Depend on Where in the Universe You Are - ScienceNOW

Fundamental Constant May Depend on Where in the Universe You Are - ScienceNOW: Light from the quasars must pass through clouds of gas on its several-billion-year journey to Earth, and the atoms in the gas absorb light of specific wavelengths. So the spectrum of the light reaching Earth is missing these wavelengths and looks a bit like a bar code. The overall shift of the lines tells researchers how far away a gas cloud is and, hence, how long ago the light passed through it. The relative spacing of the lines lets them estimate the fine-structure constant at that time. Analyzing such data, Webb and colleagues argued that the fine-structure constant was about 1 part in 100,000 smaller 12 billion years ago than it is today...
Now Webb and his colleagues have scoured the southern sky themselves using the VLT. Their 153 clouds suggested a difference of 1 part in 100,000 in the fine-structure constant 12 billion years ago. Except in the southern sky, the constant seems to be larger. Connecting the two extremes with a line, the team found that absorption patterns in the clouds along that line are consistent with the fine-structure constant changing slowly through space—smaller in the distant northern sky and larger on the southern side.

Really dark matter: Is the universe made of holes? - space - 23 August 2011 - New Scientist

Really dark matter: Is the universe made of holes?:  ...he found something unexpected: thousands of objects that were brightening and dimming extremely slowly. They turned out to be quasars...
He wondered if the variability was down to a phenomenon called microlensing...
...to see the effect with every quasar, which we do, means the bodies bending the light around must add up to far more than double the number of baryons we see in the universe. "There just isn't enough baryonic matter for the lenses to be ordinary stars," says Hawkins. "They must be dark matter."...
if everything made of ordinary matter is ruled out, that leaves Hawkins with only one candidate: small black holes weighing about the mass of the sun...

Variations in fine-structure constant suggest laws of physics not the same everywhere

Variations in fine-structure constant suggest laws of physics not the same everywhere: By measuring the quasar spectra, the researchers could gather data on the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by quasars at high redshifts, corresponding to a time about 10 billion years ago. During the time the light traveled through space to reach the telescopes, some of it was absorbed at specific wavelengths by very old gas clouds that today can reveal the chemical composition of the clouds...

The cloud compositions could help the scientists determine the fine-structure constant in those areas of the universe at that time, since alpha is a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles...

By combining the data from the two telescopes that look in opposite directions, the researchers found that, 10 billion years ago, alpha seems to have been larger by about one part in 100,000 in the southern direction and smaller by one part in 100,000 in the northern direction...

The results also violate the Einstein Equivalence Principle, and suggest that the universe may be much larger than currently thought - or even infinite in size.