On September 26th the group announced, in a paper posted to arXiv, an online database, that its participants had discovered two probable exoplanets, one a Jupiter-like gas giant, and the other, possibly, a smaller, rocky world about twice the diameter of Earth.

ECONOMIST: Amateur astronomers join the ranks of the planet hunters

Commerce's proposal includes transferring NTIS' paper, microfiche and digital collection and bibliographic database to the Library of Congress.

CNN: Reducing the public's access to tech info

Since 1976, Paul Kay of the University of California, Berkeley, another of the paper's authors, has compiled a database of information about how 110 different languages assign colour adjectives to 330 different hues.

ECONOMIST: Psychology

The paper estimates that each new profile added to the US DNA database - the Combined DNA Index System, or Codis - resulted in 0.57 fewer serious offences.

BBC: DNA and individual freedom v crime prevention

The scientists behind the Nature paper were able to do their analysis thanks to an unusual database maintained in Scotland: records from 1, 940 unrelated individuals whose intelligence was measured first at age 11 and then again at age 65, 70 or 79.

WSJ: Intelligence Changes Linked to Genes