I haven’t noticed too much really interesting “gee whiz” scientific discoveries in the popular media for some time now. You’re plugged in! What’s been discovered that’s neat and exciting!
Spill! What’s hot?
You may already know this and I don’t know what you mean by a long time but the announcement of Hobbit People was pretty recent and one of the coolest things ever.
I grrrrrrrrrrrrr every time someone refers to them as Hobbits.
How do you know that isn’t what they liked to call themselves?
Sure is.
Common cold can kill melanoma.
That is neat!
I check Science Daily… er… periodically for science discoveries in all fields. Not everything is ground breaking, but I usually find something of interest.
A week or so back there was a story on using (modified) HIV virus to cure cancer. 
All the past articles are searchable. I found this to be of great value when I did a research paper a while back.
EurekAlert! is a good site for press releases.
Dunno how recent it was actually filmed (2003-4 maybe) so this isn’t quite “new”… but the 3D Imax movie “Aliens of the Deep”, now playing, is worth seeing. I had read about the work they were doing when they did it, but to see some of the creatures right in front of you is something else entirely. Overall the movie was maybe a B- to me, but all of the sealife footage was priceless. Also some good points made about (the near-inevitability of) extra-terrestrial life.
Well, I just finished validating a new method for testing for the PML-RAR translocation, which is present in a large percentage of a certain type of leukemia. It’s not exactly a discovery, but it’s going to make life in our lab a hell of a lot easier.
from the story:
Met them , we’re the ones who probably killed the little people.
Did they sort that out to confirm the discovery as a new species? Last I heard a month or so ago some experts were saying they’d simply found a dwarf human of that group, not a new species.
Seriously? Wicked cool, man. impressed
I just got data from my first microarray experiment. Sadly that didn’t make the New York Times or anything.
According to a report in the January issue of Nature, scientists studying ferret brains found that the visual cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, is almost as busy when the ferret is in a darkened room as when it’s actually seeing something. While nobody knows exactly what this means yet, it suggests that animals brains devote significant energy to creating images that the animal never actually “sees”.
Get this ! Apparently overweight people are more lilkely to suffer foot pain!
You can get weekly updates from Nature in your in-box. Some of it’s premium content, but skimming the headlines they send you makes you feel very well-informed.
This http://www.newscientist.com/news.ns is a bit more technology than science, but it’s always got something new going on. As always, the first article you read just gives you Google-fodder to find the real info.
No cites right now, but there was a thread less than a month ago about a machine that could allegedly tell the future, though I think the consensus was that it would probably turn out to be bogus after more tests. Also, similar to what someone mentioned above, I think they found out that HIV could destroy tumors.