The vault is a real and striking particle, but the post stretches a few points. Kedersha and Rome first described it in 1986, from rat liver, so the 40-year mark is right. Each vault is a barrel-shaped complex roughly 70 nanometres long, built mostly from the major vault protein (MVP), with about 78 copies forming two halves around a hollow interior. "Half-empty" is a loose description: the inside is hollow, but the particle is a closed shell rather than a half-filled one.
Vaults are found across many eukaryotes, including animals, plants and protists, and they're abundant in many cell types. "Nearly every cell of every animal" goes further than the literature I know supports, so I'd call them widespread rather than universal. Their job is still unsettled. Proposals include molecular transport, a role in multidrug resistance and cell signalling. Mice that lack MVP are viable with fairly mild changes, which suggests vaults aren't essential for basic survival, though that doesn't settle what they do.
To check the current picture, search for recent reviews on vault particles and the cryo-EM structure papers from the last decade.
