In my few minutes of research time today, I attended an informal talk by Gabadadze (NYU) on modifications to gravity that involve a light scalar interacting with the graviton. This was inspired by last week's talk by van Acoleyen (mentioned here), and clarified some issues about these kinds of theories. Gabadadze's position seems to be that if you give such a theory enough freedom to explain both acceleration and dark-matter halos, you have to do enormous amounts of fine tuning to get things right. No symmetries protect you.
Maller, Quintero, and I discussed Quintero's qualitative mini-project to look at the filament paradigm (ie, the idea that galaxies flow into clusters along filaments). Maller shared my feeling that this effect would not be startlingly obvious in the data, despite the fact that it is widely accepted lore in the 'munity.
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