Word: crunches
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...what happens at the other end of time. Will the galaxies continue to fly apart forever, their glow fading until the cosmos is cold and dark? Or will the expansion slow to a halt, reverse direction and send the stars crashing back together in a final, apocalyptic Big Crunch? Despite decades of observations with the most powerful telescopes at their disposal, astronomers simply haven't been able to decide...
...thanks to a series of remarkable discoveries--the most recent just two weeks ago--the question may now have been settled once and for all. Scientists who were betting on a Big Crunch liked to quote Robert Frost: "Some say the world will end in fire,/ some say in ice./ From what I've tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire." Those in the other camp preferred T.S. Eliot: "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper." The verdict seems to be in: T.S. Eliot wins...
...bigger, literally forever. Which is it? One way to find out is to weigh the cosmos--to add up all the stars and all the galaxies, calculate their gravity and compare that with the expansion rate of the universe. If the cosmos is moving at escape velocity, no Big Crunch...
Anyone who has paid more than $2 a gal. for gas or pondered an electricity bill lately might doubt that the U.S. energy crunch could be easing. Energy inflation in the past year has hit the economy like a slap in the face, and the sting has lingered. Collectively, we've spent $28.2 billion more on natural gas and electricity in the first quarter of this year than in the same period last year, money we could have used to buy other things that keep an economy going. But as more companies bring fuel supplies and power plants online...
...most politically charged issue may be the allocation of resources between the competing priorities of stopping the spread of the disease and treating those already afflicted. Crunch the numbers of the projected budget shortfalls, and some chilling facts begin to emerge. U.N. experts believe that as much as $5 billion a year will be needed by 2005 simply to counter the spread of HIV through safe-sex education, the provision of condoms and relatively cheap drugs proven to stop mother-to-child transmission of the virus. Treating those already infected would require a further $4.5 billion a year. Plainly...