The Simpsons creator Matt Groening reveals Springfield, Oregon is his inspiration

Springfield, Oregon is 100 miles south of Groening's hometown of Portland, where he grew up in Evergreen Terrace – the same name as The Simpsons' family home.

"Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show "Father Knows Best" took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown," he told Smithsonian magazine.

"When I grew up, I realised it was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the US. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, 'This will be cool; everyone will think it's their Springfield'. And they do."

The cultural phenomenon which is The Simpsons has been on air for 22 years and, after over 500 episodes, is both the longest-running sitcom and cartoon in America.

Groening also spoke about how Homer, Marge, Lisa and Maggie are named after his own father, mother and two sisters.

He revealed that, while his father was the inspiration for the father in The Simpsons, the real life Homer did not eat doughnuts.

"My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals. I told it to my sister Lisa, and she in turn told it to my sister Maggie.

"My father recorded the telling of the story by Lisa to Maggie, and then he used it as the soundtrack to a movie. So the idea of dramatising the family – Lisa, Maggie, Matt – I think was the inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with The Simpsons.

Groening said he has long given fake answers when asked about the Simpsons' hometown, leaving open the possibility that his latest one is itself another fake.

"I don't want to ruin it for people, you know? Whenever people say it's Springfield, Ohio, or Springfield, Massachusetts, or Springfield, wherever, I always go, "Yup, that's right."

However, the city has already incorporated the Simpsons into its own town lore. The Springfield Museum features a couch similar to the animated one shown in the show's opening credits, and a plaque marking the movie's release.

"Yo to Springfield, Oregon – the real Springfield!" Groening wrote. "Your pal, Matt Groening proud Oregonian!"

The show has made a running joke of hiding the true Springfield's location. In one episode, daughter Lisa points to Springfield on a map, but the animated "camera view" is blocked by son Bart's head.

People in the real Springfield – the one in Oregon – took on the mantle of the show's hometown after Groening visited during a tour before the 2007 film The Simpsons Movie.

Back then, tiny Springfield, Vermont, beat out 13 other like-named cities, including the one in Oregon, to host the movie premiere. The cities submitted videos meant to connect themselves to the fictional Springfield.

When Springfield, Oregon, community-relations manager Niel Laudati was told about Groening's announcement, he said: "Oh OK, we knew that."

The Springfield depicted in "The Simpsons" isn't always a flattering portrait. The school is falling apart, there's a constant fire at the town dump, and Mayor Quimby is chronically, helplessly corrupt.

"We kind of got past it," Laudati said. "We don't dwell on the bad stuff. Obviously we don't have a nuclear power plant. We don't have a lot of stuff in the Simpsons.

Read more at The Telegraph

Celestial Paternity Test: Moon is Earth's Child

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but the moon is exclusively a child of Earth, according to a new "paternity test" carried out on Apollo lunar rock samples.

Historically, astronomers have long pondered where the moon came from. Analysis of the moon rocks brought back to Earth during the Apollo manned missions led to a radical hypothesis that was finally embraced in the mid-1980s.

The leading theory has been that a Mars-sized protoplanet barreled into Earth 4.4 billion years ago and the two bodies merged -- like a kid kneading yellow and blue Play-Doh together to make a green ball. The moon condensed quickly from the spillover ejecta. This same scenario has been applied to the birth of Pluto's moon Charon.

However, a comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites, indicates the moon's material came exclusively from Earth. Imagine, Mother Earth as a single parent!

The research, published by Junjun Zhang at the University of Chicago and co-authors, appears in the March 25 edition of Nature Geoscience.

If the moon was born out of a collision, the logic follows that the moon should have inherited half of its material from the Earth and the rest from the impactor. This is natural consequence, at least, in the world of biological reproduction, but should also apply to the basic physics of collisions.

It turns out that forms of titanium tended to remain in a solid or molten state rather than being vaporized in the moon's birth. This means it's unlikely titanium would become incorporated by the Earth and the moon in equal amounts. Titanium isotopes, forged in supernova explosions, also slightly vary in chemical signature and abundance across the solar system. They carry sort of an isotopic postage stamp that tells what parts of the solar system they came from.



The surprise is that the moon's titanium has the identical isotopic composition as Earth's, say the researchers. There is no forensic evidence for a third-party alien interloper that came from another part of the solar system.

The titanium analysis is consistent with previous work by other researchers that found identical oxygen isotopes in lunar and Earth samples.

These results threaten to send planetary scientists back to the drawing board in search of a plausible theory for the origin of the moon, but there are no satisfactory alternative scenarios for the moon's formation.

At first glance this would tend to resurrect an old idea that the moon spun off the Earth in a "mother-daughter" hypothesis. But it would take quite a wallop to spin something the mass of Earth fast enough to have a big lump of material fly off into space. We're not a ball of Play-Doh after all!

Another idea is that Earth collided with a "snowball planet" that didn't have any titanium. This would be circumstantial evidence for a lost population of gigantic flying ice cubes that no longer exist, as best as we can tell.

Read more at Discovery News

What Triggers a Mass Extinction? Habitat Loss and Tropical Cooling Were Once to Blame

The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction -- which occurred about 450 million years ago -- was related to climate change, exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not been known. Now, a team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a framework for weighing the factors that might have led to mass extinction and has used that framework to determine that the majority of extinctions were caused by habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans.

The work -- performed by scientists at Caltech and the University of Wisconsin, Madison -- is described in a paper currently online in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers combined information from two separate databases to overlay fossil occurrences on the sedimentary rock record of North America around the time of the extinction, an event that wiped out about 75 percent of marine species alive then. At that time, North America was an island continent geologists call Laurentia, located in the tropics.

Comparing the groups of species, or genera, that went extinct during the event with those that survived, the researchers were able to figure out the relative importance of several variables in dictating whether a genus went extinct during a 50-million-year interval around the mass extinction.

"What we did was essentially the same thing you'd do if confronted with a disease epidemic," says Seth Finnegan, postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and lead author of the study. "You ask who is affected and who is unaffected, and that can tell you a lot about what's causing the epidemic."

As it turns out, the strongest predictive factors of extinction on Laurentia were both the percentage of a genus's habitat that was lost when the sea level dropped and a genus's ability to tolerate broader ranges of temperatures. Groups that lost large portions of their habitat as ice sheets grew and sea levels fell, and those that had always been confined to warm tropical waters, were most likely to go extinct as a result of the rapid climate change.

"This is the first really attractive demonstration of how you can use multivariate approaches to try to understand extinctions, which reflect amazingly complex suites of processes," says Woodward Fischer, an assistant professor of geobiology at Caltech and principal investigator on the study. "As earth scientists, we love to debate different environmental and ecological factors in extinctions, but the truth is that all of these factors interact with one another in complicated ways, and you need a way of teasing these interactions apart. I'm sure this framework will be profitably applied to extinction events in other geologic intervals."

The analysis enabled the researchers to largely rule out a hypothesis, known as the record-bias hypothesis, which says that the extinction might be explained by a significant gap in the fossil record, also related to glaciation. After all, if sea levels fell and continents were no longer flooded, sedimentary rocks with fossils would not accumulate. Therefore, the last record of any species that went extinct during the gap would show up immediately before the gap, creating the appearance of a mass extinction.

Finnegan reasoned that this record-bias hypothesis would predict that the duration of a gap in the record should correlate with higher numbers of extinctions -- if a gap persisted longer, more groups should have gone extinct during that time, so it should appear that more species went extinct all at once than for shorter gaps. But in the case of the Late Ordovician, the researchers found that the duration of the gap did not matter, indicating that a mass extinction very likely did occur.

Read more at Science Daily

Eggs of Enigmatic Dinosaur in Patagonia Discovered

An Argentine-Swedish research team has reported a 70-million-year-old pocket of fossilized bones and unique eggs of an enigmatic birdlike dinosaur in Patagonia.

"What makes the discovery unique are the two eggs preserved near articulated bones of its hind limb. This is the first time the eggs are found in a close proximity to skeletal remains of an alvarezsaurid dinosaur," says Dr. Martin Kundrát, dinosaur expert from the group of Professor Per Erik Ahlberg at Uppsala University.

The first Argentine-Swedish Dinosaur expedition and collaboration; Fernando Novas, F. Agnolin and J. Powell from Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales and Martin Kundrát was performed in December 2010.

The dinosaur represents the latest survivor of its kind from Gondwana, the southern landmass in the Mesozoic Era. The creature belongs to one of the most mysterious groups of dinosaurs, the Alvarezsauridae, and it is one of the largest members, 2.6 m, of the family. It was first discovered by Dr. Powell, but has now been described and named Bonapartenykus ultimus in honor of Dr. José Bonaparte who 1991 discovered the first alvarezsaurid in Patagonia.

"This shows that basal alvarezsaurids persisted in South America until Latest Cretaceous times," says Martin Kundrát.

The two eggs found together with the bones during the expedition might have been inside the oviducts of the Bonapartenykus female when the animal perished. On the other hand numerous eggshell fragments later found show considerable calcite resorption of the inner eggshell layer, which suggest that at least some of the eggs were incubated and contained embryos at an advanced stage of their development.

Martin Kundrát analyzed the eggshells and found that it did not belong to any known category of the eggshell microstructure-based taxonomy. Hence, a new egg-family, the Arraigadoolithidae, was designated and named after the owner of the site where the specimen was discovered, Mr. Alberto Arraigada. Kundrát also made another discovery:

"During inspection of the shell samples using the electron scanning microscopy I observed unusual fossilized objects inside of the pneumatic canal of the eggshells. It turned out to be the first evidence of fungal contamination of dinosaur eggs," he says.

Read more at Science Daily

The Fastest Sprinter Could Run Faster

With his current world record of 9.58 seconds in the 100-meter dash and a top speed of more than 27 miles per hour, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt has already defied many expectations of how fast human legs can go.

Yet, without much effort, Bolt could run even faster, according to new calculations. With a few slight but still-legal boosts from tailwinds, altitude and a better reaction time at the start, argues Cambridge University mathematician John Barrow, Bolt could easily clock in at 9.45.

And while elite athletes will likely run even faster than that some day, no one can say for sure how fast people will eventually go -- or if we’ll ever see a sprinter finally reach the limits of the human body.

“There will be an ultimate limit, but just because there’s a limit mathematically, that doesn’t mean you’ll ever reach it,” said Barrow, author of Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the World of Sports. “You can draw a curve that’s always increasing, but never goes higher than the particular level where it’s bounded.”

Bolt surprised the running world when he broke the 100m record in the spring of 2008, partly because the top times had been stagnant for years. At 6 feet, 5 inches tall, Bolt also seemed too big to be a sprinter. By 2009, he had lowered the record from 9.74 to 9.58 -- a dramatic drop for such a short distance.

As speculation circulated about how fast Bolt might eventually go, Barrow started doing some basic calculations, focusing on three simple factors that are known to affect sprinting speed. He started with Bolt’s notoriously slow reaction time to the starting gun.

Under official rules, runners are called on false starts if they leave the starting blocks less than 0.1 seconds after the signal sounds. The best starters are consistently off and running after about 0.12 seconds. If Bolt could get his sluggish start time of 0.165 -- the second slowest in the final heat at the Beijing Olympics -- down to 0.12 and still run at his top speed, Barrow said, that alone would lower his record to 9.55.

With a maximum allowable tailwind of two meters (6.6 feet) per second on top of an improved start time, Barrow calculated with known relationships between wind, drag and running speed, the sprinter could lower his record to 9.5.

Finally, Barrow considered what would happen if Bolt ran at an altitude of 1,000 m (3,280 feet), the highest allowable elevation for running records to count. At that height, the density of air is low enough to reduce drag and facilitate another drop in speed. If he also started well and had a tailwind, altitude would give Bolt the ability to run a 9.47.

As for actual running technique, studies have shown that the most important factor driving sprinting performance is how hard runners can hit the ground in relation to their body weight, said Peter Weyand, a physiologist and biomechanist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Read more at Discovery News

LHC Slams Protons Together at Record Energy

After achieving record beam energies last month, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully carried out the first collisions in this new regime.

In this game of "the bigger the better," the LHC is now colliding protons at 8 Tera-electronvolts (TeV) -- a huge step toward peeling back the frontiers of high-energy physics, culminating in the increasingly likely confirmation of the Higgs boson.

In the April 5 announcement, CERN said, "the LHC shift crew declared 'stable beams' as two 4 TeV proton beams were brought into collision at the LHC's four interaction points ... The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine's discovery potential considerably."

For the last year, the LHC has been running at 3.5 TeV per beam, allowing physicists to familiarize themselves with the machine operating in this previously unattainable energy range. By slamming two counter-rotating beams of protons at 3.5 TeV apiece, collision energies of 7 TeV have been possible.

At 7 TeV, the LHC has revealed some tantalizing hints of the Higgs -- a much sought-after subatomic particle that is theorized to endow all matter in the Universe with mass.

By amping-up collision energies higher by 1 TeV, physicists hope to generate more Higgs particles (if they do indeed exist) so they produce a strong enough signal that will leave no ambiguity.

But it's not all just about the Higgs. By recreating the conditions of the Big Bang for the briefest of moments as protons collide, it is hoped that higher collision energies will help us glimpse particles hypothesized to exist beyond the Standard Model of physics. The "Standard Model" Higgs is the last piece of this puzzle, but there are many theories that it cannot account for -- such as why gravity doesn't "fit" with the Standard Model.

"(Supersymmetric particles) would be produced much more copiously at the higher energy. Supersymmetry is a theory in particle physics that goes beyond the current Standard Model, and could account for the dark matter of the Universe," the CERN statement continues.

"Standard Model Higgs particles, if they exist, will also be produced more copiously at 8 TeV than at 7 TeV, but background processes that mimic the Higgs signal will also increase. That means that the full year’s running will still be necessary to convert the tantalizing hints seen in 2011 into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether."

Read more at Discovery News

Search for Sun's Sibling Could Find Life's Cousin

The biggest challenge facing astronomers hunting for a bona fide "Earth-like" exoplanet is where do you look? In a galaxy stuffed with hundreds of billions of stars, it's difficult to narrow the search.

Naturally, a key motivational factor behind planet-hunting missions (like NASA's Kepler space telescope) is to hunt for small rocky worlds -- not too dissimilar to Earth -- that may play host to life as we know it.

So, Kepler astronomers have focused their search on sun-like stars in the hope of detecting Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting at a similar distance our planet orbits the sun -- a "sweet spot" (or "habitable zone") where the temperature may be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. In our experience, where there's liquid water, there's life.

But still, even though we look toward "sun-like" stars with the hope that they may host a system of worlds not too dissimilar to our solar system, astronomers are still taking a proverbial "shot in the dark."

Spreading Germs in the Stellar Creche

In an effort to find sun-like stars that are more sun-like than just their outward appearance, researchers from the University of Turku in Finland are carrying out a search for our sun's siblings.

When the sun was a baby, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was nourished in the same stellar nursery as thousands of other baby stars. After a billion years, the cluster of young stars went their own ways, dispersing throughout interstellar space.

But, like any family, these stars have a lot in common. And like any nursery here on Earth, they may have shared some germs and viruses during their formative years when they were in close proximity. But in this case, "cosmic chicken pox" may have formed the building blocks of life that eventually flourished on Earth. If there's life on Earth, might there be life on the planets that formed around our sun's siblings?

This might sound a little outlandish, but there is a hypothesis that may have acted as the stellar nursery "cosmic chicken pox transmission mechanism" for the building blocks of life.

Life's Transmission Mechanism

"The idea is if a planet has life, like Earth, and if you hit it with an asteroid, it will create debris, some of which will escape into space," astronomer Mauri Valtonen, of the University of Turku, told SPACE.com. "And if the debris is big enough, like 1 meter across, it can shield life inside from radiation, and that life can survive inside for millions of years until that debris lands somewhere. If it happens to land on a planet with suitable conditions, life can start there."

Valtonen is describing "panspermia" in its most basic form -- life, as bacteria or even just some strands of DNA, hopping from planet-to-planet after meteorite impacts.

Usually astronomers will point out that panspermia could be used to explain how life may be common on Earth and Mars (if it is discovered). Perhaps meteorites made from Earth or Mars rock carried life throughout the solar system and beyond?

But what if this mechanism spread the earliest form of biology billions of years ago through our sun's cosmic creche? Suddenly we have targets for missions hunting for true sun-like stars, bona fide Earth-like planets and (possibly) Earth Brand™ Life.

Read more at Discovery News

In Pre-1492 Amazon, Farmers Managed Without Fires

Farming without fire in tropical regions, like indigenous populations did in Pre-Columbian times, may be the key to both feeding people and managing land more sustainably.

For hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in Central America, indigenous people converted vast swaths of tropical savannas into agricultural fields with raised beds for growing crops -- all without the use of slash-and-burn or other fire-intensive techniques, which are common today and a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

But soon after 1492, there came a sharp surge in uncontrolled burns throughout the Amazon’s coastal landscapes, found a new study that dug into more than 2,000 years worth of soil. Those carbon-emitting burning practices, which continue today, contribute significantly to global warming.

The results -- which were exactly opposite of what scientists expected to find -- reveal an unexpected picture of pre-Columbian agricultural practices in an often overlooked and endangered landscape. In turn, the findings suggest that the secret to a sustainable future may lie in the past.

“In a time of climate change, we need an alternative way of managing these savannas that is fire-free, and this is a lesson we can learn from the past,” said José Iriarte, an archaeobotanist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “They were managing the savannas in what we can say today was a sustainable way.”

In forested regions of the Amazon, which have received the bulk of scientists’ attention, studies have shown that burning was common in pre-Columbian times. But the massive collapse of indigenous populations after European diseases arrived allowed the forest to take over, and burning quickly subsided.

Scientists have long assumed that the same pattern occurred in the coastal savannas of Central and South America, which make up 20 percent of lowland areas in the region. To find out for sure, Iriarte and colleagues visited coastal wetlands in French Guiana. There, previous archaeological studies have revealed extensive pre-Columbian agricultural systems, including raised fields, canals and ponds that took advantage of seasonal flooding to irrigate crops.

The researchers began by digging up cores of sediment dating back 2,150 years. It was the perfect environment for sampling because wetland soil is oxygen-deprived, allowing pollen and other identifiable plant materials to survive for centuries without threat from bacteria.

Between about 1,000 and 1,200 years ago, the researchers report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, plant remains documented the arrival of raised-field farmers in the area. At the same time, to everyone’s surprise, a near absence of charcoal in those early layers showed that there were very few fires during this time.

Read more at Discovery News

Copper Chains: Earth's Deep-Seated Hold On Copper Revealed

Earth is clingy when it comes to copper. A new Rice University study recently published in the journal Science finds that nature conspires at scales both large and small -- from the realms of tectonic plates down to molecular bonds -- to keep most of Earth's copper buried dozens of miles below ground.

"Everything throughout history shows us that Earth does not want to give up its copper to the continental crust," said Rice geochemist Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study. "Both the building blocks for continents and the continental crust itself, dating back as much as 3 billion years, are highly depleted in copper."

Finding copper is more than an academic exercise. With global demand for electronics growing rapidly, some studies have estimated the world's demand for copper could exceed supply in as little as six years. The new study could help, because it suggests where undiscovered caches of copper might lie.

But the copper clues were just a happy accident.

"We didn't go into this looking for copper," Lee said. "We were originally interested in how continents form and more specifically in the oxidation state of volcanoes."

Earth scientists have long debated whether an oxygen-rich atmosphere might be required for continent formation. The idea stems from the fact that Earth may not have had many continents for at least the first billion years of its existence and that Earth's continents may have begun forming around the time that oxygen became a significant component of the atmosphere.

In their search for answers, Lee and colleagues set out to examine Earth's arc magmas -- the molten building blocks for continents. Arc magmas get their start deep in the planet in areas called subduction zones, where one of Earth's tectonic plates slides beneath another. When plates subduct, two things happen. First, they bring oxidized crust and sediments from Earth's surface into the mantle. Second, the subducting plate drives a return flow of hot mantle upwards from Earth's deep interior. During this return flow, the hot mantle not only melts itself but may also cause melting of the recycled sediments. Arc magmas are thought to form under these conditions, so if oxygen were required for continental crust formation, it would mostly likely come from these recycled segments.

"If oxidized materials are necessary for generating such melts, we should see evidence of it all the way from where the arc magmas form to the point where the new continent-building material is released from arc volcanoes," Lee said.

Lee and colleagues examined xenoliths, rocks that formed deep inside Earth and were carried up to the surface in volcanic eruptions. Specifically, they studied garnet pyroxenite xenoliths thought to represent the first crystallized products of arc magmas from the deep roots of an arc some 50 kilometers below Earth's surface. Rather than finding evidence of oxidation, they found sulfides -- minerals that contain reduced forms of sulfur bonded to metals like copper, nickel and iron. If conditions were highly oxidizing, Lee said, these sulfide minerals would be destabilized and allow these elements, particularly copper, to bond with oxygen.

Because sulfides are also heavy and dense, they tend to sink and get left behind in the deep parts of arc systems, like a blob of dense material that stays at the bottom of a lava lamp while less dense material rises to the top.

"This explains why copper deposits, in general, are so rare," Lee said. "The Earth wants to hold it deep and not give it up."

Lee said deciding where to look for undiscovered copper deposits requires an understanding of the conditions needed to overcome the forces that conspire to keep it deep inside the planet.

"As a continental arc matures, the copper-rich sulfides are trapped deep and accumulate," he said. "But if the continental arc grows thicker over time, the accumulated copper-bearing sulfides are driven to deeper depths where the higher temperatures can re-melt these copper-rich dregs, releasing them to rejoin arc magmas."

These conditions were met in the Andes Mountains and in western North America. He said other potential sources of undiscovered copper include Siberia, northern China, Mongolia and parts of Australia.

Lee noted that a high school intern played a role in the research paper. Daphne Jin, now a freshman at the University of Chicago, made her contribution to the research as a high school intern from Clements High School in the Houston suburb of Sugarland.

"The paper really wouldn't have been as broad without Daphne's contribution," Lee said. "I originally struggled with an assignment for her because I didn't and still don't have large projects where a student can just fit in. I try to make sure every student has a chance to do something new, but often I just run out of ideas."

Lee eventually asked Jin to compile information from published studies about the average concentration of all the first-row of transition elements in the periodic table in various samples of continental crust and mantle collected the world over.

"She came back and showed me the results, and we could see that the average continental crust itself, which has been built over 3 billion years of Earth's history in Africa, Siberia, North America, South America, etc., was all depleted in copper," Lee said. "Up to that point we'd been looking at the building blocks of continents, but this showed us that the continents themselves followed the same pattern. It was all internally consistent."

Read more at Science Daily

Most Precise Measurement of Scale of the Universe

Physicists on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have announced the first results from their collaboration, revealing the most precise measurements ever made of the large-scale structure of the universe between five to seven billion years ago. They achieved this by observing the primordial sound waves that propagated through the cosmic medium a mere 30,000 years after the Big Bang.

And so far, the data supports the theory that our universe as flat, comprised of roughly a quarter cold dark matter, and four percent ordinary matter, with the rest made up of a mysterious force dubbed "dark energy."

A hundred years ago scientists believed the universe was steady and unchanging. Einstein invented the cosmological constant to expand the fabric of space-time after his own equations for general relativity wouldn't allow for the cosmos to remain static as expected in a steady state universe.

Soon after, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was actually expanding, consistent with Einstein's original general relativity theory. Einstein then removed his cosmological constant describing his failure to predict an expanding universe in theory before it was proven by observation, as his biggest blunder.

In 1998, astronomers studying distant exploding stars called a Type 1A supernovae discovered that not only was the universe expanding, but that the rate of expansion was accelerating due to some type of unknown force or dark energy. This bore a striking resemblance to Einstein's cosmological constant. Either that, or our theory of gravity is incomplete. Answering this question is one of the foremost challenges in 21st century cosmology.

This new measurement from BOSS is significant because that time frame -- five to seven billion years ago -- is the era when dark energy "turned on." The BOSS findings will help physicists figure out the exact nature of whatever is causing our universe to accelerate in its expansion.

But in order to do that, they must first gain a more complete understanding of the history of that expansion.

The discovery that led to the theory of dark energy relied on studying the red shifts of bright light from supernovae. BOSS, in contrast, looks at something called baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO).

This phenomenon is the result of pressure waves (sound, or acoustic waves) propagating through the early universe in its earliest hot phase, when everything was just one big primordial soup.

Those sound waves created pockets where the density differed in regular intervals or periods, a "wiggle" pattern indicative of oscillation, or vibration. Then the universe cooled sufficiently for ordinary matter and light to go their separate ways, the former condensing into hydrogen atoms. We can still see signs of those variations in temperature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), thereby giving scientists a basic scale for BAO.

BOSS is designed to measure those oscillations as a means of determining how far away the most distant galaxies really are, by looking at the angles of those peaks where galaxies are most densely clustered. Within the vast network of cosmic structure, those density peaks repeat with a good degree of regularity, making them an excellent "standard ruler" to measure the geometry of the universe.

Measuring the angle between pairs of galaxies will tell scientists how distant there are -- the narrower the angle, the greater the distance. And once you know the distance, you can deduce an object's age, thanks to the telltale redshift of light as it travels across the universe, stretching proportionally in such a way as to give physicists a peek at how the universe expanded since the light left its source.

Redshifts aren't uniform, however. This is where BOSS is most helpful, since it can statistically analyze the redshifts of literally hundreds of thousands of galaxies in its dataset. With that large a sample, the variations in redshifts can be taken into account, while still achieving a precise measurement of distance.

Here's what the University of Portsmouth's Will Percival told BBC News about BOSS's first results:

    "Because you can trace this pattern all the way through the Universe, it tells you a lot about its content. If it had a different content - it had more matter, or it had less matter, or it had been expanding at a different rate - then you'd see a different map of the galaxies. So, the fundamental observation is this map.

    "What we find is everything is very consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity, coupled with the cosmological constant that he put into his equations. He put it in originally to make the Universe static, and then took it out. But if we put constant in with the opposite sign, we can get acceleration. And if we do that, we find equations that are perfectly consistent with what we're seeing."

Eventually BOSS will have cataloged over a million galaxies. These are just the initial results, based on less than a quarter of the expected data that will be amassed by the time the survey ends in 2014, at which point the European Space Agency's Euclid mission will take over, launching in 2019.

Read more at Discovery News