The Universe is 13.77 billion years old. Probably. Maybe a little less. We're not sure.

A pair of papers recently published show that the Universe is 13.772 billion (plus or minus 39 million) years old.

That's cool! It also agrees with some earlier measurements of the Universe made in a similar way. Also cool.

What's not cool is that this doesn't seem to alleviate a growing discrepancy in measurements made in different ways, which get an age a few hundred million years less. While that may not seem like a big deal, it's actually a really big problem. Both groups of methods should...