Word: clouds
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...Going without sunscreen Those cloudy skies look innocuous, don?t they? That?s what they want you to think. Behind that thick gray cloud cover, the sun is blazing away, sending its rays straight through that seemingly impenetrable shield, right onto your nose/shoulders/hairline. And guys, don?t get all macho on us - despite your conviction that you are impervious to all danger, you?re going to get burned just as fast as your mom/wife/girlfriend. As one of our staffers says almost every Monday morning, when he appears in the office with a cringe-inducing sunburn: "That darn...
...since the 1920s that the galaxies were flying apart. But theorists had belatedly realized a key implication: the whole cosmos must at one point have been much smaller and hotter. About 300,000 years after the instant of the Big Bang, the entire visible universe would have been a cloud of hot, incredibly dense gas, not much bigger than the Milky Way is now, glowing white hot like a blast furnace or the surface of a star. Because this cosmic glow had no place to go, it must still be there, albeit so attenuated that it took the form...
That lumpiness, reasoned theorists, must have evolved from some original lumpiness in the primordial cloud of matter that gave rise to the background radiation. Slightly denser knots of matter within the cloud--forerunners of today's superclusters--should have been slightly hotter than average. So some scientists began looking for subtle hot spots...
...that the 100 billion or so galaxies we can now see through our telescopes will zip out of range, one by one. Tens of billions of years from now, the Milky Way will be the only galaxy we're directly aware of (other nearby galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda galaxy, will have drifted into, and merged with, the Milky...
...Reported by John Cloud...