The Extinction Index and Other Measures of the Chronic Flow

French and Swiss astronomers have detected the farthest galaxy to date. Abell 1835 IRI916 started glowing 13.23 billion years ago, less than half a billion years after the Big Bang switch was flipped. Meanwhile, in Florida, vandals armed with slingshots and ball bearings shattered the top three panes of Our Lady of Clearwater, a former office building made into a shrine when a 30-foot likeness of the Virgin Mary was detected in its top windows in 1996. The Chamber of Commerce estimates that more than a half-million tourists had visited the site. Street vendors picked up the glass fragments and began selling them as “Our Lady’s Teardrops.”

The extinction rate is 0.7 percent over the past fifty years, according to a recent UN study. Your results may vary, but that rate exceeds what the study calls the “natural background extinction” rate by 1500 times.