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a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style.

Vendors of discovery tools will make deals with providers that sell content to libraries, he says, so that content can be represented in the discovery tools’ indexes and made available for search. (Beyond products from Ebsco and ProQuest, other major tools in this genre, known as "web scale" or "index based" discovery, include Primo, from Ex Libris, and WorldCat Discovery Services, from OCLC.)

Another is that discovery software, by sluicing content together, could deluge users with less-appropriate resources

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

ielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising".

For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Einstein has been proven right – again.For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity, and once again Einstein’s genius held up to scrutiny.

The waves in question arose during the close approach of two black holes some 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular life began to spread on Earth. Traveling at the speed of light, the waves reached our planet in September -- precisely when a observatory built to detect them was emerging from a long hiatus.

A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident

wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?

Croatian has no word to capture the thrill of the unexpected discovery, so she was delighted when — after moving to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1980s — she learned the English word “serendipity.”

“Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,”

“If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.”

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything.

Our solar system is spread out by comparison. This cramped little system finds each planet’s orbit closer to their star, TRAPPIST-1, than Mercury is to ours. Of all the planets discovered, TRAPPIST-1f is the most likely to sustain life, NASA scientists say. Those closer planets may be too hot to contain liquid water, while those beyond may be too cold.

Another interesting consideration, this star, since it burns so slowly, will likely outlive ours by a trillion years. So if the Earth is vanquished and the situation is right, we may find a new Eden on TRAPPIST-1f.

I think most people’s ideas of science fiction are formed by Hollywood movies, so they think most science fiction is a special effects-driven story revolving around a battle between good and evil

I don’t think of that as a science fiction story. You can tell a good-versus-evil story in any time period and in any setting. Setting it in the future and adding robots to it doesn’t make it a science fiction story.

I think science fiction is fundamentally a post-industrial revolution form of storytelling. Some literary critics have noted that the good-versus-evil story follows a pattern where the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, the heroes fight and eventually defeat evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. Those critics have said that this is fundamentally a conservative storyline because it’s about maintaining the status quo. This is a common story pattern in crime fiction, too—there’s some disruption to the order, but eventually order is restored. Science fiction offers a different kind of story, a story where the world starts out as recognizable and familiar but is disrupted or changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end of the story, the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored. And so in this sense, this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is not that you should maintain the status quo, but that change is inevitable. The consequences of this new discovery or technology—whether they’re positive or negative—are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them.

Jawbone’s Discovery Fills Barren Evolutionary Perio

This was a time when the human genus, Homo, was getting underway. The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone of a Homo habilis predates by at least 400,000 years any previously known Homo fossils.

The reconstruction, suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between A. afarensis and H. habilis, yielded a remarkably primitive picture of a deep-rooted diversity of a species that emerged much earlier than the 2.3 million years ago suggested by some specimens. The teeth and jaws appeared to be more similar to A. afarensis than to subsequent Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, modern humans that emerged about 200,000 years ago.

This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.

One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about

The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that

On Wednesday, the scientists at NASA kind of freaked out. They announced the discovery of some seemingly Earth-like planets outside of our solar system, a group of rocky globes they're calling 'TRAPPIST-1.'

To be completely blunt, the most exiting thing for actual scientists is that these planets are close enough that we're actually going to be able to study them – particularly when the James Webb Space Telescope launches (October 2018.) When that launches, it will have a real shot at actually taking a look at the atmospheres of these planets – or if they have atmospheres at all. So it's like a promise of future excitement

The closer the system is to our solar system – the more the star is like the Sun and the planet is like the Earth, the more likely we are to understand what we're looking at. That's what makes it exciting.

seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.

One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.

At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.

A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

Instead of axions, the scientists may have detected a new, unexpected property of the slippery ghostly particles called neutrinos. Yet another equally likely explanation is that their detector has been contaminated by vanishingly tiny amounts of tritium, a rare radioactive form of hydrogen.

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.

"These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.

For more than a decade, both parties in Washington have mostly looked the other way when mass shootings occur. And they have mostly ignored the 34 victims who are murdered with guns every single day.

prohibit the manufacture and sale of the military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that have been used in too many mass shootings, including in Newtown. The previous ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. While President George W. Bush supported reinstating it, Congress never acted. The time has plainly come.

fix the broken background check system. Currently, nearly half of all gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check. Criminals, the mentally ill, minors and domestic abusers are all prohibited from purchasing guns, but they all can do so as easily as attending a gun show or going online.

The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers

"It's analogous to climbing Mt. Everest," said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."

Puzzle-solving science, according to Kuhn, can therefore trigger a scientific revolution as scientists struggle to explain these anomalies and develop a novel basic theory to incorporate them into the existing body of knowledge. After an extended period of upheaval, in which followers of the new theory storm the bastions of accepted dogma, the old paradigm is gradually replaced.

biology is heading towards a similar scientific revolution that may shatter one of its most central paradigms. The discovery of a few small proteins with anomalous behaviour is about to overcome a central tenet of molecular biology: that information flows unidirectionally from the gene to the protein to the phenotype. It started with the discovery that prions, a class of small proteins that can exist in different forms, cause a range of highly debilitating diseases. This sparked further research

Scientific revolutions are still rare in biology, given that the field, unlike astronomy or physics, is relatively young.

the evolutionary logic of relationships beyond rivalry

~98% of bacterial species don’t thrive outside mixed-species colonies.

Bacteria are not self-sufficient: They’ve co-evolved to depend on each other.