Cool stuff from the astronomy geeks:

Dark matter mapped in 3-D detail
Invisible web serves as scaffolding for 'ordinary' matter, scientists say

SEATTLE - The most detailed 3-D map of the universe ever made, stretching back over billions of years, provides the best evidence yet that mysterious "dark matter" serves as the unseen scaffolding on which everything we can see is hung, astronomers reported Sunday.

The findings are based on years' worth of study, using data from space observatories as well as ground telescopes. But as impressive as those findings are, they still don't tell us exactly what dark matter is made of.

Astronomers from the Cosmic Evolution Survey, also known as COSMOS, revealed their results in a paper published online by the journal Nature and presented here at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Just collecting the data required nearly 1,000 hours of observations using the Hubble Space Telescope's best camera, representing 10 percent of the past two years' available observing time.

"It's the largest project that's ever been done by the space telescope," Nick Scoville of the California Institute of Technology, principal investigator for the international research team, told journalists. Additional observations were made by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and New Mexico -- involving more than 80 scientists in all.

Scientists can map the universe in 3D but my sister can't remember where she parked her car. When they can develop a way that she can go to the mall without getting lost THEN we'll have a practical application for this sort of thing. (In case you're wondering, yes, she lost her car in the mall this weekend.)