Science News Roundup

Best of science news, straight to your RSS readers:

• A new algorithm for disc packing, which seems like a decent approach but also more than a bit heuristic. Without getting too derailed, I'm always amazed at how much theoretical computer science scoffs at the work necessary to solve real problems. This certainly seems more reasonable than strict, no-regret optimization.
• A new experiment finds that Dark Matter may be more complicated than previously thought. Pretty neat. Any article suggesting the existence of an as-yet-hypothetical "dark force" has to be an interesting read.
• Kepler launches successfully. I know lots of people were biting their nails about this one after the recent failure of the NASA OCO. Unfortunately, such failures are part of life with satellites. I'm glad to see that Kepler was successful and hopefully we'll see some excellent exoplanet data in the next couple years.