Number 87 (Story #2), July 6, 1992 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A NEW MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND at frequencies of 10.45 and 14.9 GHz confirms the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) results and sets some new restrictions on theories describing the origin of the universe. At the ground-based Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife, Canary Islands, a British-Spanish team measured microwave radiation at intermediate angular resolutions (one measurement was on a 5.6 degree scale) covering a portion of the sky, as opposed to COBE, which measured the entire sky at angular scales between 7 and 180 degrees. The data of the Tenerife team set an upper limit for cosmic microwave temperature variations of 51 ľK on a 5-degree scale, consistent with COBE's detection of a temperature difference of 30 ľK on a 10 degree scale. The Tenerife results set constraints on models proposing variations in the density of dark matter and they reject inflationary models having a zero cosmological constant. In addition, the team did not detect the large fluctuations in temperature that cosmic strings or cosmic textures would generate. In the next year, the Tenerife team expects to increase the sensitivity of their measurements and also produce maps (instead of upper limits) of temperature fluctuations when it adds data from a third microwave frequency (33 GHz). (Nature, 25 June 1992.)