We show that there exists a finitely generated group of growth $\sim f$ for all functions $f:{ℝ}_{+}\to {ℝ}_{+}$ satisfying $f\left(2R\right)\le f{\left(R\right)}^2\le f\left({\eta }_{+}R\right)$ for all $R$ large enough and ${\eta }_{+}\approx 2.4675$ the positive root of $X^3-X^2-2X-4$. Set ${\alpha }_{-}=log2/log{\eta }_{+}\approx 0.7674$; then all functions that grow uniformly faster than $exp\left(R^{{\alpha }_{-}}\right)$ are realizable as the growth of a group.We also give a family of sum-contracting branched groups of growth $\sim exp\left(R^{\alpha }\right)$ for a dense set of $\alpha \in [{\alpha }_{-},1]$.

Hass, Rubinstein, and Scott showed that every closed aspherical (irreducible) 3-manifold whose fundamental group contains the fundamental group of a closed aspherical surface, is covered by Euclidean space. This theorem does not generalize to higher dimensions. However, we provide geometric tools with which variations of this theorem can be proved in all dimensions.