Sky Lights

For once, nature did not throw us a curveball. Last spring, two teams studying microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang reported that the overall shape of the universe is flat. In other words, parallel beams of light travel in straight lines and never meet, just like parallel lines in high school geometry class. That finding comes as a bit of a relief, considering that some odd cosmological models had predicted the universe could have the form of a doughnut or a saddle.