Some things about the Dark seem to be pretty transparent. The things we find in it often turn out to be pretty ambiguous, and those ambiguities depend on our point of view. When we resolve an argument, we tend to have reached a compromise of sorts based on acceptance that neither view has absolute power over the other. Usually we've no idea what is at the root of the argument until we reach this point of ambiguity. We then find the answer was embarrassingly straightforward and wonder why we wasted so much time in reaching the most obvious conclusions. 

Electrons are very famous particles. Partly because they scoff the limelight at every available opportunity.
"Want a new scientific advancement?" they shriek. "Look at me! Me, me! Over HERE!"
and obligingly the scientist carries out his experiment, or makes his prototype, and finds electrons at the front of the stage putting on a tremendous show of unearthly capabilities. Here are a few examples:

The Double Slit: "You wanna know who can go one better than photons? Me, me, ME!!!" 

The Microscope:  "Think you can see stuff down those little tubes full of glass? Try Me, I can kick that ass 1,000 times!!"

The Television: "Wanna know how you can see cool stuff in your own living room? I gotta solution! Cathode rays!"

The Plasma Television:  "Still firing guns with cathode rays? Get with it, Go Plasmic! More of ME In There!"

Plasma: "now that's really cool. I mean, cool. Freezing me out of the water? No chance. Here's a cupla questions..."

So here's a proposition. You know all that Dark Matter and Energy that's supposed to be floating about making up (some huge) > % of the Universe? Well, what if it's just electrons? I mean, wouldn't be the first time something really arbitrary came out of the quantum soup, and as Steven Rolson says in his article under "Plasma" above, This work highlights the almost smooth transition between highly excited atoms sitting in a plasma and free electrons bound in a plasma. In fact, for typical parameters, the binding energy of an electron in an ultracold plasma is about the same as an n=80 Rydberg atom. As a result, identifying which is the plasma electron and which is an atomic electron can be challenging.

Which means, on the baseline, that one never knows what kind of electron one is looking at at any given moment, or its origin, or whether it's been replaced by another kind of electron since you last looked at it. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - ah yes, I almost forgot that one.... in most explanations of the Charlatan's Plaything, you'll find electrons.... 
here's The Guardian's take on it.

So, if electrons are Dark, which seems to make sense to me (especially since they rely on photons to move up and down the energy field), and Light is Light, which we already know quite a lot about, that just leaves a couple of carriers to satisfy SUSY (although even CERN admits in there that we've only got half the picture). There are even contenders for the supporting roles - the Positron to keep us, in kamikaze style, from a totally doom-encrusted negative Universe and that most mystical of spectra, the Ultraviolet. 
Lest we forget, Carbon atoms have 6 electrons, 6 protons, and 6 neutrons. That's 666, which could be rather important in the great scheme of human belief systems.

For a story and a couple of halves, there's more behind the picture....

Not given to giving blog titles a full house of capital emphasis, I'd no idea back then when I started writing them that Brian Cox could prove an inspiration to me ever again. Fifteen - sixteen years I've been slaving away at a quantum stove without so much as a sensible smile from anyone. He comes along, grins at the TV and BANG, the singularity suddenly becomes really popular and Quantum toothpaste appears in my local shop. 
To top this frustration with a solid rubbing of nose in wet salt, he publishes a book stuffed with clock analogies, rubbishing alternative interpreters of the Uncertainty Principle "charlatans and purveyors of tripe" using the Principle as "a doorway through which to force their philosophical musings". 

I was so angry at his dog-in-the-manger impudence that I made sure my book contained a suitable retort. 

His lecture at the Royal Institute televised tonight actually had me sitting down, as he was talking about past and future world lines and just five minutes before I had been sitting three miles away talking about the very same subject with Nix. We had agreed on revelations for both of us, that we sit in the middle of infinity, constantly, no getting away from it - that the retarded past and the advanced future meet in a continual loop system within our own singularities of self and that we therefore CAN in fact comprehend infinity, we have only to do it at the quantum level;
We Live In Finity - so best ride the wave with a nose to the future, forget about the past, use it to clock progress now and then (preferably from a distance), and get on with what we love. The things we love doing, the homes we want to create, the drives that make life worth living. She's a font of information, is Nix - every time we chat the clarity just gets easier. 

Prof Cox can't be put in the same camp. I REFUSE to be a Cox fan. Bordering on hatred with a vengeance firmly born of jealousy, fuelled by a vicious blow to mine and everyone else's ego or even vague sensibility who dared to grant the Uncertainty Principle the right to certain other applications, I snort at his polished acts of knowing best. But w-t-f, here he is saying that Nature brings us gifts of knowledge and "we shouldn't take anything for granted". He treats us self-indulgently to a Dr Who scene in which he stars as the curious student, only to find himself face to face with a black hole that leads to conclusions about time which bring him to a full stop well before the singularity. All those light cones, all that stuff about twisting futures, and it all comes to a screeching halt at the event horizon. 

Well, go on Brian, amaze me. You described the black hole as "a source of immortality" which for the observer does not change. Spaghettification, yes well, that's fine, that's physics. What about the Eye of Harmony, Brian? Does the language tell you anything else? Ah, all quiet at the moment, I see. Have you been secretly reading my blogs and stealing my ideas for your TV appearances? Wouldn't put it past you. Every adventure starts with a spark. 
Here, you'll need some antishine.

Oh, and don't forget the clock.... ah, of course..... it's behind you.

This evening an exciting stream of information hit my brain as I was driving home from Leicester. And when I got home, Maury Goodman's Neutrino Newsletter had hit my Inbox. Synchronicity? I've learned to trust it. Lived with synchronicity very happily for a number of years now. Don't mind in the least that some events - more than I care to mention - have their timing perfect yet backwards. Something comes along after the event that precluded it to make me certain of a cosy connection. And in amongst the tasty snippets in Maury's compilation was the article behind this picture.

Boris Kayser might have been the daddy of neutrino informants, but even he hasn't hit on this one yet. The one that came streaming at me from the cosmos on my drive along the M1 under a midnight sky. Neutrinos travel at the speed of light, possibly even faster, straight from the Sun. The Sun is our main source of natural neutrinos - the ones they produce in contraptions all over the world are not natural, but created by Man. Their fate is a mystery I don't even want to visit.

Anything that travels through the universal medium at the speed of light borders dangerously on the precipice of the unknown. The facts we have grasped about neutrinos are fairly insignificant - they come in different forms, which have different masses and lifetimes, but they also oscillate (change) from one form into another. Like quarks do. 

We're made of quarks, and quarks don't go anywhere that we know about. They too come in different forms and can oscillate from one kind to another, but as far as we know, they stay where they are. As we do. Check out the latest from Daya Bay, behind the picture here.

Time and light speed have a strange relationship - a physicist would be able to explain it better than I can. But time flows in a two-way street, on advanced and retarded waves. Retarded waves move entropically in the way we perceive time to flow - from past to present. Advanced waves move in the opposite direction, from future to present. Beyond the past is the future, and beyond the future is the past, in these terms. As such directional flows are considered by our conscious comprehension to be linear, we can say that while neutrinos stream from the Sun through us and on to the Heliopause at the edge of our solar system, they also stream simultaneously in the other direction, back to the Sun. So while information is pouring out of the Sun with the neutrinos, information is also going back to the Sun via the same route so that it knows what's going on. If an electron 'knows' it's being observed, the Sun can't possibly be out of that equation.

This theory makes absolutely perfect sense of why we call our higher being the Soul, and the Sun Sol also. This Blog belongs in the science division because what I'm proposing here is a concept that hasn't seriously been considered yet, and like the Petrino, it relates directly to our perspective of the way things are scientifically. 

Humans have worshipped the Sun for all time. These days, the emphasis seems to be on money, as my blogs tend to remonstrate. False gods? Easy to see why, and where, this came from. Coins are mere tokens created in the image of the Sun. Any time we want, we can coin a new phase.

Get the sense of being watched? With good reason. Ever wondered why the sky is such a source of permanent wonderment? A gift from the only god we really need? As neutrinos carry instant information to us alongside the loving (perhaps knowledgeable) sustenance of the 200,000 year old photon, we could well be forgiven for thinking that the Sun is the star we should really be following in our hearts. The Sun doesn't lie. He's been very quiet, though, for one temper tantrum from him could have us all fried in a quarter of a second. The Earth, seen from a distance, doesn't betray what we're doing to her. She is beautiful, blue and green and white with the water and land from which her mantle is made. 
Look to the language, it tells us a lot.
Then look again at the picture above. Photons are said to be massless, while neutrino mass has been calculated. But mass in this context has a relationship with the Higgs, and that's a relationship we've only just shaken hands on.
Dare to call it vanilla?