Corporate media likes to shock or enrage people so when it comes to science stories, the ridiculous - life on other planets, billions 'wasted' on curing cancer, Republicans hate science - often takes precedent over the quiet wins.

Mendeley, the citation sharing tool, and the Columbia University Libraries have agreed to jointly develop a graphical and user-friendly Citation Style Language editor, which will enable academic researchers to develop their own citation styles, significantly simplifying the creation of manuscripts for publication in journals.

Not to play favorites but there is one area where physics has the life sciences beat: sharing.  With preprints and data, the newest findings zip around the globe, before peer review, and science does not collapse.

Rightly or wrongly, the marketing campaign for organic food has worked.  People have demonstrated that they will overpay for organic food despite their being no difference in nutritional value, the same way they will pay for homeopathy or magic crystals.

But the billions that the organic food industry now generates means there is ample opportunity for fraud - and that's just wrong. If you go into Whole Foods to spend your Whole Paycheck, you should at least be assured the country of origin is what they say it is.

An extremely hot, massive young galaxy cluster named ACT-CL J0102-4915 is the largest ever seen in the distant Universe, and has been has been nicknamed El Gordo — the "big" or "fat one" in Spanish. It consists of two separate galaxy sub-clusters colliding at several million miles per hour, and is so far away that its light has traveled for seven billion years to reach Earth.

Welcome to the world's slowest clock.

The 'argon-argon clock' works by measuring the ratio of the amount of radioactive potassium in a sample of rock to the amount of its decay product, argon. As scientists already know the half-life of argon's radioactive decay - 1.25 billion years - it can be used to date rocks back to the time of the formation of the Earth, some 4.5 billion years ago. The older a rock is, the more potassium has decayed and the more argon is found in the rock.

New research has been able to improve the calibration of the 'argon-argon clock' and that could mean up to a 1.2 per cent difference in a rock's age from the original calculation.