Word: flashings
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...clunky old CD players, joined the White Earbud Brigade to fit in. Now that so many kids have iPod nanos, the self-styled outsiders who may have previously chosen Apple for niche appeal are looking for an alternative MP3 player. SanDisk made news recently by introducing the highest-capacity flash player - the Sansa e280, with 8GB of internal storage. It's small enough, powerful enough and different enough to be the un-iPod of choice...
...with a dramatic flourish. But far more important, it would give astrophysicists their first real glimpse into a crucial and mysterious era in the evolution of the cosmos. Known as the Dark Ages of the universe, it's the 200 million-year period (more or less) after the last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. What happened during the Dark Ages set the stage for the cosmos we see today, with its billions of magnificent galaxies and everything that they contain--the shimmering gas clouds, the fiery...
...first of those hints comes from the universe-wide flash of light that followed nearly half a million years after the Big Bang. Before that flash occurred, according to the widely accepted "standard model" of cosmology, our entire cosmos had swelled from a space smaller than an atom to something 100 billion miles across. It was then a seething maelstrom of matter so hot that subatomic particles trying to form into atoms would have been blasted apart instantly and so dense that light couldn't have traveled more than a short distance before being absorbed. If you could somehow live...
That being the case, a light beam traveling through expanding space is stretched as well, its wavelength getting longer as it goes. Long-wavelength light is red; stretch it out longer and it becomes infrared light and then microwaves and, finally, long-wavelength radio waves. The flash that came from the Big Bang started out as visible light; by now, 13.7 billion years later, it's still streaming through space, but it has been stretched so much that astronomers have to use microwave antennas to detect it. The earliest galaxies came after the Big Bang, so their light...
...Internet and quickly found a couple of companies that looked promising. The first, DNA Tribes in Arlington, Va., filled its website with glossy shots of ethnic types. The next, DNAPrint in Sarasota, Fla., offered a cool Flash movie of a rotating double helix. I was doubly sold. I ordered a test from each and within a couple of days was scraping the inside of my cheek with swabs and depositing my cells into prepaid envelopes ready to be sent off to the labs...