Sometimes, the side-effects are just as interesting as the item being studied
A bunch of people have commented on an interesting study being done by scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center, which adds additional reinforcement to the Big Bang theory of how the universe was formed. They've measured waves in the infrared radiation that permeates the universe, and figured that, yes, as previously predicted, that these waves seem to indicate that the universe expanded from a marble-sized item to roughly the current size in about a trillionth of a second.
It's pretty neat that we can be sitting in the middle of all this and actually get some idea of how it all happened (and, really, the "G-d said so" people are completely missing the boat here. If there is a creator of all things, it's much more elegant that it should create everything in such a way that intelligent creatures can look at the world and determine how it was made. The "there must be a G-d because the universe allows us to exist" argument is painfully circular, but it's the only argument that tends to make me consider that there might actually be a divine presence responsible for it all) but the really neat thing about it, from my terribly geeky and warped by many years of space operas viewpoint, is that this means (again) that the speed of light is not constant, and that, assuming we can figure out the teeny difficulty of how to deconstantize it without either using more energy than is available in the universe or killing ourselves and destroying our planet/solar system/galaxy/universe, the world has, once again, gotten a lot smaller.
Boy, it would really suck if we discovered this just as the planet fell into runaway global warming.