It's looking good on paper, so far. It's mostly untested, and the field is still in the early-discovery stages. It looks like the idea has found some international support, including support from Cal Tech. However, I didn't read the words "peer reviewed" in anything I found.

Basically, what I understand is this:
There is a model which describes some of what is known about dark matter, and which speculates a new mechanism with measurable implications. It proposes that dark matter is composed of particles similar to pions (pions are a kind of meson, or 2 quark structure). Except that these are not made of the 6 quarks we know and love from the Standard Model of Particle Physics. They are something new - dark quarks (or something... I made that name up).

There is speculation that some currently operating experimental facilities (such as the LHC at CERN) are already set up to perform the experiments to look for these pion-like particles. If they can show a mass-energy discrepency in the experiments, then they can speculate that some of the mass is escaping via these dark matter pions. It's going to be a tricky thing to isolate, but that's what they do at CERN.

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The pentaquark thingies are news, too. The LHCb at CERN wasn't looking for them, but found them, and with a bit of a sour taste in their mouths, they reported their accidental findings. It's sour because a different group published a similar result a few years back and it was a false positive. So there's a lot of skepticism in the physics community about the existence of 5 quark structures.

If they are real, then it will be lead to advances in our model of the nuclear strong force. Are the 5 quarks bound as a single, albeit highly unstable, particle? Are they more like a molecule with a Baryon (3 quark particle) weakly bound to a Meson (2 quark particle)? Either answer will help us gather more data about how nucleons interact.