New York Times: The first stars in the universe were short-lived brutish monsters, and they changed the nature of the cosmos forever, blazing away a dark fog that had smothered space for 300 million years and beginning to enrich the cosmos with the stuff of life.

That is the news from a new computer simulation of the early years of the universe, performed by a group of astronomers led by Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan.