A new estimate says that up to 80 percent of scientific data is lost within two decades.

The culprits? Old e-mail addresses and obsolete storage devices.

Platinum is used in catalytic converters to transform toxic fumes from a car's engine into more benign gases, to produce high octane gasoline, plastics and synthetic rubbers, and to fight the spread of cancerous tumors. But it's not cheap, which you know if you have ever shopped for an engagement ring knows. 

In a new study, researchers from Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering used computational methods to identify dozens of platinum-group alloys that were previously unknown to science but could prove beneficial in a wide range of applications. If one of the compounds identified in the new study is comparable in performance but easier on the wallet, it would be a boon to many industries worldwide as well as the environment. 

#2 ‘Implementing a Jabberwocky Gibberish Generator’.

In contrast to some computer-programme developers who create gibberish by jumbling word-orders (see Progress In Gibberish Computing #1 ) others take a different approach, and scramble the letters of English words (somewhat) to generate pronounceable nonsense words known as pseudowords or logatomes, similar to those found in ‘ Jabberwocky‘ by Lewis Carroll.

The oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant – a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period, with one of them in the process of making some new seeds for the next generation - has been found in a 100-million-year old piece of amber. 

The perfectly-preserved scene, in a now-extinct plant, appears identical to the reproduction process that "angiosperms," or flowering plants still use today.  The fossils were discovered from amber mines in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, known to most as Burma. The newly-described genus and species of flower was named Micropetasos burmensis.

Pine Island Glacier is one of the biggest routes for ice to flow from Antarctica into the sea and the floating ice shelf at the glacier's tip has been melting and thinning for the past four decades, causing the glacier to speed up and discharge more ice.

It's been a key factor in estimates for sea level rise in a warming world but it turns out that the ice shelf melting depends on the local wind direction, which is tied to tropical changes associated with El Nino.