The surprising result of a recent scientific discovery made possible by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble located and imaged a distant supernova, 10 billion light-years from Earth, that appeared brighter than an object of that distance should. The consensus is that the only explanation is that the expansion of the universe slowed down under gravity's power after the Big Bang, then sped up. The force driving the accelerating expansion appears to come from Einstein's Cosmological Constant, which he used to propose a mechanism for a static universe. When he found out the Universe was expanding, he discarded the idea. Now, it seems he was right after all.
This made big news around 04 Apr 2001, and several news organizations with a web presence wrote articles about it. There's a fairly good one at the BBC News Online: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1260000/1260506.stm>