Free Republic

Scientists working on Europe's Planck satellite say the first stars in the Universe lit up later than was previously thought. The team has made the most precise map of the "oldest light" in the cosmos. Earlier observations of this radiation had suggested that the first generation of stars burst into life about 420 million years after the Big Bang. The new Planck data now indicates they fired up around 560 million years after the Universe got going. "This difference of 140 million years might not seem that significant in the context of the 13.8-billion-year history of the cosmos, but proportionately...

<p>Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency’s sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.</p>