August 15, 2001

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A study was done on light pollution which has strong warnings about future humans being able to view stars. It turns out that 2/3 of the world doesn't have access to a truly dark sky, and less than 1% of the poople in the continental US or Western Europe have the luxury of being able to look up into the sky and have a totally un-lightpolluted view of the stars as our ancesters saw them. I'm not a hardcore astronomer, but I have always liked space and just gazing up at the stars on a dark summer's night, but it is really hard to see even the brightest stars in Tampa at times, and I can only imagine what it must be like for the sky to be completely dark. The closest I've been to that is on my grandparents' farm, where you can see the Milky Way just barely. Check out the International Dark-Sky Association for more info.

An international team of scientists may have discovered that the speed of light has not always constant after all. They're basing this assumption on some gas clouds 12 billion light years away that were not behaving like they should. There is still room for debate in this matter, and some speculate that perhaps some more mundane explination will come up. But if it is true, it could rock the phyics world and the laws it created. It would lead to credulance for the string theory (theory that there are more than 4 dimensions) and would force scientists to question other assupmtions about the laws of phyics. Gotta love modern science.

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