Showing posts with label About. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About. Show all posts

Sunday, 6 November 2011

The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry

Last week, the world was shocked—shocked!—to discover that downloading an electronic book to a device such as a Kindle actually increases the weight of the Kindle. Not by any truly measurable amount, said the New York Times, but still: adding data to a device apparently results in trapped electrons which "have a higher energy than the untrapped ones."

And though the amount of data contained in a tiny e-book file is so miniscule as to render it almost irrelevant, the results become more meaningful when you measure a much larger set of data. In that spirit, how much does all the information on the entire internet weigh?

The conclusion: about as much as a strawberry. Check out the above video for the explanation, which includes details about the Kindle stuff, too.

How Much Does The Internet Weigh? [YouTube via Buzzfeed]

Saturday, 5 November 2011

Turkey's Earthquake and Wising Up About Natural Disasters

Rescue workers walk past damaged buildings in Ercis, near the city of Van, Turkey, October 24, 2011.

The earthquake that tore through eastern Turkey on October 23 was as inevitable as it was shocking. It was inevitable because Turkey lies in one of the world's most active seismic zones, crossed by numerous fault lines. As much as in northern California or Japan, earthquakes are a fact of geological life in Turkey. But it was shocking because so many people — at least 279, many in the city of Ercis — died in the 7.2 temblor. It was a strong quake, but hardly a monster like the 9.0-scale disaster that hit northern Japan this spring. Yet scores of multistory buildings simply collapsed when the latest quake hit, burying hundreds of Turks.

"The buildings around us, the coffee house all went down so quickly," 42-year-old Abubekir Acar told the Associated Press. "For a while, we could not see anything — everywhere was covered in dust. Then we heard screams and pulled out anyone we could reach."(See photos of the devastation from Turkey's earthquake.)

The quake was yet another reminder that the damage and death toll from a natural disaster often has much less to do with the strength of a quake or a storm than it does with the preparations — or lack thereof — among victims. For earthquakes — which still can't be predicted, and may never be — the best preparation is strong building design. Turkey is home to some sturdy, earthquake-ready architecture, that's by no means the rule there. Buildings made of unreinforced brick simply pancaked, turning schools and apartment buildings into tombs. "In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction," the seismologist Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado wrote in a Nature article last year.

That's a horrifying thought, but what's really scary is that the threat from quakes like the one that struck eastern Turkey is only increasing. It's not that there's any evidence that earthquakes are becoming stronger or more frequent. Instead it's us: global population is growing, set to pass 7 billion people at the end of the month, and we're concentrating in megacities that are orders of magnitude bigger than any human settlements in the past. There are now more than 380 urban areas with at least 1 million people, and according to Bilham's work, more than 400 million people live in cities that face significant seismic risk.

Some of those cities you've heard of, like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Tokyo — all of which have suffered major quakes over the past several decades. But the great wealth of the developed nations mostly — but not always — means better building designs. San Francisco may sit near the powerful San Andreas fault, but years of experience with quakes mean that not just buildings but citizens are as ready as they can be for the Big One. Ditto Tokyo; strict building codes in Japan kept the death toll from this spring's quake and tsunami much lower than it might have been.(See how social media is helping quake survivors in Turkey.)

The real danger is in poor but rapidly growing cities in the developing world. Much of the population growth in the next several decades will occur in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — and in the slums of emerging megacities. By mid-century, most of the biggest cities on the planet will be in the developing world — places like New Delhi, Dhaka or Karachi. That's a lot of poor people living in densely packed conditions that are not built for major quakes — a recipe for catastrophically high death tolls.

One way to improve resilience is simply through economic development — a richer population is in general better able to deal with disasters. But being better off isn't enough, as Turkey illustrated. And you don't have to be wealthy to be ready for a temblor. Civil engineers like Santiago Pujol of Purdue University have designed structures made of cheap materials like straw, clay and gravel that won't collapse in the event of a quake. And when buildings made of relatively light materials do collapse, they cause fewer deaths. Groups like GeoHazards International have sent seismologists and architects to help leaders in cities in the developing world shore up these and other defenses against natural disasters.

With earthquakes — as with so many other problems — we rarely give prevention enough emphasis until it's too late. That needs to change. Over the next half-century, as the world adds 2 billion or more people, it will construct as many as 1 billion housing units. Earthquakes will happen — we can't stop them. How many people will die needlessly in a temblor, however, will depend on how strong those buildings are — and that much we can control.

See videos of the quake in Turkey.

Read about the seach for survivors in the Turkey quake.

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Some AT&T iPhone 4S Users Seeing Much Improved 3G Speeds – What About You?

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Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Scandal and the Vatican: Let's Not Talk About Kansas City

St. Peter's Basilica

The news that an American bishop had been charged with failing to report child abuse should have been collosal news in the Vatican. But the response has been as if the case is far away and far removed from the Holy See — and the Papacy that is so quick to come down on questions of celibacy, women priests and the rights of gay Catholics appears to regard the American scandal, involving a priest and what seems to be child pornography, as a matter for local jurisprudence.

On Friday, prosecutors in Kansas City, Missouri, secured an indictment from a grand jury that alleges Bishop Robert Finn neglected to inform the police for months after discovering "hundreds of disturbing images of children" on a priest's laptop in December 2010, including photographs focused on the crotch, upskirt pictures and at least one image of a child's naked vagina. The offending priest — Shawn Ratigan — was relieved of his position as a church pastor and transferred to a convent, but neither the police, his parishioners, nor the parents of a nearby Catholic school were informed of the pictures until May 2011. In the interim, Ratigan continued to attend events involving children, including birthday parties and a first communion, and allegedly attempted to take lewd pictures of a 12-year-old girl. Finn and Ratigan have both pleaded not guilty to the charges against them. See pictures of President Obama meeting Pope Benedict XVI.

The case against Finn marks the first time a bishop in the United States has been indicted for failing to report abuse by a priest under his supervision. It comes nearly 10 years after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted policy mandating that dioceses report allegations of sexual abuse to the public authorities and seven months after the Vatican urged all bishops across the world to institute similar measures. It also comes three years after a $10 million settlement in Kansas City with 47 plaintiffs alleging abuse at the hands of priests, in which Bishop Finn agreed to immediately inform the police of any suspicion of sexual abuse by members of his diocese. However, when the Vatican was contacted for comment, regarding the allegations, it demurred, citing the pending charges. "There is a legal procedure under way," the Vatican's spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi told a reporter for the AFP. "Any intervention could be interpreted as interference."

The Vatican's tepid response highlights a chasm between the public perception of the way the church is organized and the structure by which it usually operates. While most outsiders imagine the Catholic Church as a monolithic hierarchy, with a direct line of command from the Pope down to most junior priest, for many inside its ranks the better analogy is a community, in which the Vatican plays a coordinating role for a host of almost completely independent dioceses. "The church doesn't work at all like a centralized machine, in that a command that comes from above is automatically communicated to the parts of the machine below," says Sandro Magister, editor of the Rome-based website Chiesa (Italian for "church"). "The autonomy of single bishops is very strong." Thus, while an outside observer might draw a line of accountability directly to Rome, from the Vatican's point of view responsibility for a sex abuse scandal would more traditionally lie at the local level. Indeed, in other cases, lawyers for the church have explicitly argued that bishops don't work directly or the Vatican. (Read about the charges against Finn and the Kansas City Diocese.)

But, under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican has nonetheless begun to ratchet up the pressure, according to Phil Lawler, editor of CatholicCulture.org, and a long-time critic of the Church's slow response to the 25-year-old sex abuse scandal. "The Vatican is gradually getting a grip on it, if not in this country, in others," he says. In Ireland, for instance, the church forced the resignation of three bishops who failed to report abuse by priests. "I think you're starting to see steadily more active supervision," says Lawler, adding that the Vatican would nonetheless likely continue to have a largely hands off approach. "The autonomy of bishops isn't going to away," he says. "That's fundamental to the structure of the church."

Yet for the victims of the abusive priests, it's not an argument that has much resonance. After all, when a priest advocates ending the tradition of celibacy or in favor of the ordination of women, the Vatican is quick to clamp down. "Rome does have a direct influence on diocese around the country and around the world," says Michael Hunter, the Kansas City director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) who has filed a new lawsuit against Finn for breach of contract, alleging that the bishop failed to live up to the terms of the earlier settlement. "The Vatican really could and should come down on the moral side of this and really chastise this diocese," he adds. "And the heck with the legal issues."

Friday, 14 October 2011

Physics Nobel: Why Einstein Was Wrong About Being Wrong

The research that leads to a Nobel Prize in physics can sometimes be a little obscure. In 1990, for example, three scientists got the nod "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons." Got that? The next year, the prize went to a scientist "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter."

But sometimes, you just can't help saying, "Wow!" and maybe: "What took the Nobel folks so long?" That's what Adam Riess's friends kept asking him — and this morning at 5:30, the phone finally rang. "I knew that was the famous time," says the Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer. "The voice sounded Swedish, and I was pretty sure it wasn't Ikea." Sure enough, Riess and two other astrophysicists had just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for the astonishing discovery a little over a decade ago that the universe is expanding faster and faster as time goes on. The most likely reason: a mysterious cosmic force known as dark energy. (See photos chronicling the life of Albert Einstein.)

Riess and his collaborator Brian Schmidt, of the Australian National University, had no intention of discovering dark anything when they launched the High-z Supernova Search in the mid-1990s. Neither did Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, when he and his colleagues started the competing Supernova Cosmology Project. Both teams knew the universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. The question they wanted to answer: Is the gravity of 100 billion galaxies, all pulling on one another, slowing the expansion down? And if so, by how much?

To get the answer, the scientists looked to supernovas — exploding stars so bright they can be seen all the way across the universe. The farthest of these cosmic bombs detonated when the universe was still young. It's taken billions of years for their light to reach us, so that light is a snapshot of what the expansion looked like back then. The closer ones are a snapshot of more recent conditions. Once the astronomers found them, they clocked the supernovas' speed — and thus, the expansion speed of the universe at different eras — by measuring subtle features in the wavelength of their light.

What they found, to their astonishment, was that the universe wasn't slowing down at all. It was speeding up. "We spent at least a year struggling to understand what we were seeing," Perlmutter told TIME. In the end, improbable as it seemed, both teams concluded independently that there must be some unseen, unknown force pushing the cosmos apart. Their joint discovery was named Breakthrough of the Year for 1998 in the journal Science. (Read to see if Einstein was right about dark energy.)

What's even crazier is that just such a force was predicted, nearly a century ago, by Albert Einstein himself. When he put together the equations of general relativity back in 1916, Einstein applied them to the universe as a whole. To his consternation, they predicted that if the universe wasn't expanding, it should be collapsing. It seemed obvious that it wasn't expanding — but since it wasn't collapsing either, something must be propping it up. Einstein called the something the cosmological constant and added it to his theory with some distaste, because the work had been so mathematically beautiful without it.

Then, a decade or so later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding after all. Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant with relief, declaring that its invention had been "my greatest blunder." He was talking about his failure to trust his elegant equations in the first place — but it's also true that Einstein would probably have bagged himself another Nobel for predicting the expanding universe.

The idea of a cosmological constant didn't go away entirely. "It was something theorists would pull out in desperation," says Riess, "when they couldn't make the age of the universe come out right." As University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner once put it: "The cosmological constant is an idea that's come and gone ... and come ... and gone." (Read about dark matter and how galaxies are born.)

But the accelerating universe brought the idea of some kind of such invisible force back with a vengeance. Even so, the Nobel committee took its time, and despite what Riess's friends say, he thinks the lag was perfectly justified. Even though the odds were against both teams being wrong somehow, it was impossible to rule that double error out either. Maybe supernovas were different in the past, for example, which made it look like the universe was accelerating. It was important for other groups to confirm the acceleration using different techniques. One particularly strong clue that Riess and the others were right: the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the universe actually did slow down early on, then sped up as the dark energy kicked in. With enough confirmations in hand, everyone could finally relax.

Everyone, that is, except the theorists. Just because dark energy is the leading explanation for the accelerating universe, it doesn't mean anyone actually understands what it is. Asked whether he thinks scientists are any closer to figuring that out, Riess answers bluntly, "I do not." But, he adds, "They're getting more creative about it, and maybe that will be the key." If they finally do crack the mystery, another Nobel is pretty much guaranteed.

See photos of the universe, to scale.

See photos of the Hubble telescope's greatest hits.

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

The Case Against Eating Baby Animals: It's About Flavor

Piglets on a farm in the German town of Nordhausen on Feb. 2, 2011

It's odd, given American meat eaters' sporadic bursts of conscience, that as a nation we are so O.K. with infanticide. Veal cutlets, suckling pigs, spring lambs, game hens — with or without the euphemisms, I know that I've made my peace with eating very young animals. But it's hard not to be struck by the peculiar blindness of people who fawn over puppies and kittens and devour their barnyard analogs.

I don't have much to say on the subject of morality, and wouldn't presume to offer advice to fellow sinners even if I did, but I can say this: if you want a good reason not to eat baby animals, consider the fact that they really don't taste that good. (See the top 10 miniature animals.)

Animals, like most everything else in nature, grow stronger as they move from infancy to adulthood: they develop more fat, more muscle, more everything. They've eaten more food, and the food they've eaten changes them; it makes them taste like their food, which can be a very good thing indeed. I am against eating baby animals on gastronomic principle alone. The flavor of all immature animals is uniformly bland. The real taste of sheep isn't to be found in lamb, but rather in mutton; no teensy little 4-lb. chicken is ever going to have the flavor of a fat old hen.

So why, then, do we persist in eating babies? One reason, though not the real one, has to do with texture. Baby animals don't taste great — really, they don't taste much like anything — but their flesh is tender and so satisfies a country where the greatest compliment any meat can receive is that "you can eat it with a spoon." Yes, baby animals are "like butter," but so what? Take an old tom turkey, or the shoulder of a 250-lb. hog, and cook it for many hours in a heavy pot, a slow oven or a sous vide bag, and it'll be "like butter" too.

No, the real reason we eat a lot of baby animals is much cruder than any misguided preference for tender meat. Here's the thing about raising meat: Americans don't like to pay a lot for it. The longer an animal lives, the longer its owner has to shelter it and feed it; so every day it's allowed to live makes it less profitable. That's why the ribs at Burger King are the size of dominoes, and the chicken at Popeyes is barely bigger than quail. It's not pure evil on the part of the producers; even small farms can't afford to keep many animals alive for many years. (See photos of animals that can think.)

Which is sad, both for the animals and for us. I was in Italy last week, and, as you might expect, I ate a lot of good things (spaghetti, obviously; there was spaghetti flying at all four walls). But the thing that made the strongest impression on me was probably the single ugliest thing I ate during the whole week: a plate of braised wild boar in Montalcino. That boar tasted powerfully of pork. Not sage, not smoke, not soy or mustard or red-pepper vinegar. No, it tasted like pork. If you had a pork chop like that in Chicago or Atlanta, your first thought would be that it had gone bad. It was "gamey," a catch-all adjective that we use to describe meat tastes that aren't mellow and sweet.

But that's O.K.; grownup people should like grownup tastes. In any case, the art of cooking is supplied with a lot of strong flavors to complement and support big, bold tastes. "I like tastes that know their own minds," wrote A.J. Liebling, one of the all-time great gastronomes, in 1959. "The reason that people who detest fish often tolerate sole is that sole doesn't taste very much like fish, and even this degree of resemblance disappears when it is submerged in [sauce]." Liebling thought such indifference to intrinsic flavor was a sign of weak-mindedness, and he thought that it also explained the popularity of such things as Golden Delicious apples, American cheese and vodka cocktails.

If you want to taste what meat really is, then don't eat lamb: eat mutton. You already know how much better a great steak is than a thin, wan piece of veal, so wouldn't it follow that that steak would taste even better another year down the road? Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten is still talking about a 10-year-old draft ox he ate a couple of years ago in Spain. Maybe I'll go there on my next trip.

Ozersky is a James Beard Award—winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History. He is currently at work on a biography of Colonel Sanders. Taste of America, Ozersky's food column for TIME.com, appears every Wednesday.

Read about what goes on in the mind of an animal.

See photos of 10 animals facing extinction.

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

The Case Against Eating Baby Animals: It's About Flavor

It's odd, given American meat eaters' sporadic bursts of conscience, that as a nation we are so okay with infanticide. Veal cutlets, suckling pigs, spring lambs, game hens — with or without the euphemisms, I know that I've made my peace with eating very young animals. But it's hard not to be struck by the peculiar blindness of people who fawn over puppies and kittens and devour their barnyard analogs.

I don't have much to say on the subject of morality, and wouldn't presume to offer advice to fellow sinners even if I did, but I can say this: if you want a good reason not to eat baby animals, consider the fact that they really don't taste that good. (See the top 10 miniature animals.)

Animals, like most everything else in nature, grow stronger as they move from infancy to adulthood; they develop more fat, more muscle, more everything. They've eaten more food, and the food they've eaten changes them; it makes them taste like their food, which can be a very good thing indeed. I am against eating baby animals on gastronomic principle alone. The flavor of all immature animals is uniformly bland. The real taste of sheep isn't to be found in lamb, but rather in mutton; no teensy little 4-lb. chicken is ever going to have the flavor of a fat old hen.

So why, then, do we persist in eating babies? One reason, though not the real one, has to do with texture. Baby animals don't taste great — really, they don't taste much like anything — but their flesh is tender and so satisfies a country where the greatest compliment any meat can receive is that "you can eat it with a spoon." Yes, baby animals are "like butter," but so what? Take an old tom turkey, or the shoulder of a 250-lb. hog, and cook it for many hours in a heavy pot, a slow oven or a sous vide bag, and it'll be "like butter" too.

No, the real reason we eat a lot of baby animals is much cruder than any misguided preference for tender meat. Here's the thing about raising meat: Americans don't like to pay a lot for it. The longer an animal lives, the longer its owner has to shelter it and feed it; so every day it's allowed to live makes it less profitable. That's why the ribs at Burger King are the size of dominoes, and the chicken at Popeyes is barely bigger than quail. It's not pure evil on the part of the producers; even small farms can't afford to keep many animals alive for many years. (See photos of animals that can think.)

Which is sad, both for the animals, and for us. I was in Italy last week, and, as you might expect, I ate a lot of good things (spaghetti, obviously; there was spaghetti flying at all four walls). But the thing that made the strongest impression on me was probably the single ugliest thing I ate during the whole week: a plate of braised wild boar in Montalcino. That boar tasted powerfully of pork. Not sage, not smoke, not soy or mustard or red-pepper vinegar. No, it tasted like pork. If you had a pork chop like that in Chicago or Atlanta, your first thought would be that it had gone bad. It was "gamey," a catch-all adjective that we use to describe meat tastes that aren't mellow and sweet.

But that's okay; grown-up people should like grownup tastes. In any case, the art of cooking is supplied with a lot of strong flavors to complement and support big, bold tastes. "I like tastes that know their own minds," wrote A.J. Liebling, one of the all-time great gastronomes, in 1959. "The reason that people who detest fish often tolerate sole is that sole doesn't taste very much like fish, and even this degree of resemblance disappears when it is submerged in [sauce]." Liebling thought such indifference to intrinsic flavor was a sign of weak-mindedness, and he thought that it also explained the popularity of such things as Golden Delicious apples, American cheese and vodka cocktails.

If you want to taste what meat really is, then don't eat lamb: eat mutton. You already know how much better a great steak is than a thin, wan piece of veal, so wouldn't it follow that that steak would taste even better another year down the road? Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten is still talking about a 10-year-old draft ox he ate a couple of years ago in Spain. Maybe I'll go there on my next trip.

Ozersky is a James Beard Award—winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History. He is currently at work on a biography of Colonel Sanders. Taste of America, Ozersky's food column for TIME.com, appears every Wednesday.

Read about what goes on in the mind of an animal.

See photos of 10 animals facing extinction.

Physics Nobel: Why Einstein Was Wrong About Being Wrong

The research that leads to a Nobel Prize in physics can sometimes be a little obscure. In 1990, for example, three scientists got the nod "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons." Got that? The next year, the prize went to a scientist "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter."

But sometimes, you just can't help saying, "Wow!" and maybe: "What took the Nobel folks so long?" That's what Adam Riess's friends kept asking him — and this morning at 5:30 a.m. the phone finally rang. "I knew that was the famous time," says the Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer. "The voice sounded Swedish, and I was pretty sure it wasn't Ikea." Sure enough, Riess and two other astrophysicists had just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for the astonishing discovery a little over a decade ago that the universe is expanding faster and faster as time goes on. The most likely reason: a mysterious cosmic force known as dark energy. (See photos chronicling the life of Albert Einstein.)

Riess and his collaborator Brian Schmidt, of the Australian National University, had no intention of discovering dark anything when they launched the High-z Supernova Search in the mid-1990s. Neither did Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, when he and his colleagues started the competing Supernova Cosmology Project. Both teams knew the universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. The question they wanted to answer: Is the gravity of 100 billion galaxies, all pulling on each other, slowing the expansion down? And if so, by how much?

To get the answer, the scientists looked to supernovas — exploding stars so bright they can be seen all the way across the universe. The farthest of these cosmic bombs detonated when the universe was still young. It's taken billions of years for their light to reach us, so that light is a snapshot of what the expansion looked like back then. The closer ones are a snapshot of more recent conditions. Once the astronomers found them, they clocked the supernovas' speed — and thus, the expansion speed of the universe at different eras — by measuring subtle features in the wavelength of their light.

What they found, to their astonishment, was that the universe wasn't slowing down at all. It was speeding up. "We spent at least a year struggling to understand what we were seeing," Perlmutter told TIME. In the end, improbable as it seemed, both teams concluded independently that there must be some unseen, unknown force pushing the cosmos apart. Their joint discovery was named "Breakthrough of the Year" for 1998 in the journal Science. (Read to see if Einstein was right about dark energy.)

What's even crazier is that just such a force was predicted, nearly a century ago, by Albert Einstein himself. When he put together the equations of general relativity back in 1916, Einstein applied them to the universe as a whole. To his consternation, they predicted that if the universe wasn't expanding, it should be collapsing. It seemed obvious that it wasn't expanding — but since it wasn't collapsing either, something must be propping it up. Einstein called the something the the "cosmological constant" and added it to his theory with some distaste, because the work had been so mathematically beautiful without it.

Then, a decade or so later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding after all. Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant with relief, declaring that its invention had been "my greatest blunder." He was talking about his failure to trust his elegant equations in the first place — but it's also true that Einstein would probably have bagged himself another Nobel for predicting the expanding universe.

The idea of a cosmological constant didn't go away entirely. "It was something theorists would pull out in desperation," says Riess, "when they couldn't make the age of the universe come out right." As University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner once put it: "The cosmological constant is an idea that's come and gone ... and come ... and gone ..." (Read about dark matter and how galaxies are born.)

But the accelerating universe brought the idea of some kind of such invisible force back with a vengeance. Even so, the Nobel committee took its time, and despite what Riess's friends say, he thinks the lag was perfectly justified. Even though the odds were against both teams being wrong somehow, it was impossible to rule that double error out either. Maybe supernovas were different in the past, for example, which made it look like the universe was accelerating. It was important for other groups to confirm the acceleration using different techniques. One particularly strong clue that Riess and the others were right: the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the universe actually did slow down early on, then sped up as the dark energy kicked in. With enough confirmations in hand, everyone could finally relax.

Everyone, that is, except the theorists. Just because dark energy is the leading explanation for the accelerating universe, it doesn't mean anyone actually understands what it is. Asked whether he thinks scientists are any closer to figuring that out, Riess answers bluntly, "I do not." But, he adds, "They're getting more creative about it, and maybe that will be the key." If they finally do crack the mystery, another Nobel is pretty much guaranteed.

See photos of the universe, to scale.

See photos of the Hubble Telescope's greatest hits.