Number 1

I am a complete sucker for articles on the universe and its inception.

Its one of the things that turns your attention towards the bigger picture. It tends to put our matters into a different relative perspective.

Reuters: Universe's first star born tiny, grew huge: study

The first object to brighten the dark, primordial universe after the Big Bang was the tiny seed of a star that rapidly grew into a behemoth 100 times more massive than the sun, scientists said on Thursday.

The first protostar was born about 300 million years after the Big Bang, the researchers said. Nuclear reactions inside the protostar made it the first object to cast starlight in what some astronomers call the "cosmic dark ages...

It was a relatively tiny object at first, 1 percent the mass of the sun. But within about 10,000 years -- "the blink of an eye," according to the researchers -- it grew into a giant full-fledged star at least 100 times the sun's mass.

Protostars for dummies - Space Art