> In fact, all the “easy” versions of supersymmetry have been ruled out, and many of the more complicated ones, too. The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.”

> Archaeologists have confirmed that a papyrus scroll discovered at the Saqquara necropolis site near Cairo last year does indeed contain texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead—the first time a complete papyrus has been found in a century, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. The scroll has been dubbed the "Waziri papyrus." It is currently being translated into Arabic.

Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders. once they are separated from adjacent cells in their organoid, they can reach out toward new neighbors with characteristic biological cords called axons. “The last piece of the puzzle was to see if these cords had the ability to plug into, or shake hands with, other retinal cell types in order to communicate,” says Gamm, whose new results on successful connections between the cells was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the last half-century. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend. “The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis