Is time slowing down?

IT CAN drag or it can race, but what if time stopped altogether? It now seems that time could disappear from our universe - and we may already have found evidence of its forthcoming demise.

When astronomers observed a decade ago that supernovae are apparently spreading apart faster as the universe ages, they assumed that something must be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But so far, nobody has been able to explain where the "dark energy" causing this acceleration comes from.

Now José Senovilla at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues have a radical answer - we are fooled into thinking that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, because time itself is slowing down.