If you’d like some actual science from your ScienceBlogs, here’s the big news in the physical sciences today: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has released a bunch of new data on the latest observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the relic radiation from the Big Bang whose temperature fluctuations tell scientists something about the distribution of matter in the universe several billion years ago, very shortly after the Big Bang.
Detailed analysis of these data provides some of the tightest constraints on our current models of the early universe. Steinn Sigurdsson is your go-to guy for information about the release, including a nice WMAP for Dummies post. My quick impression of looking at the WMAP posts on various physics-type blogs is that there’s nothing terribly shocking, but there’s a lot of nice, chewy data to work with here.
Science marches on, even when there’s basketball to watch.