"Hidden in Plain Sight: Researchers Find Galaxy-Scale Bubbles Extending from the Milky Way"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fermi-bubbles

"An analysis of public data from a NASA satellite turns up massive, previously unseen galactic structures"
The article talks about how a group of astrophysicists located two bubbles of plasma the size of tens of thousands of light years, which are emitting high energy radiation. The researchers found these with a new telescope, which can gather data from not only x-rays, but now also gamma rays, which have higher frequencies.
This is very interesting, because the more advanced our technology gets, the more we discover, like for example these bubbles of plasma that were actually in plain sight from us. These bubbles of plasma could be a star forming right before out eyes.

"Hawking Was Right (Probably)"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hawking-was-right-probably

"In 1974 Stephen Hawking postulated that black holes should give off a trickle of particles, or radiation, from their outer boundaries...In the midst of all the celebrity, the original theory of Hawking radiation, as the black hole phenomenon is known, has almost been forgotten, at least by the general public. The faint emission has never been detected from a real black hole, and researchers have not been able to produce the effect in the lab. "

A group of scientists in Italy recently recreated the effect of a black hole using a piece of glass to re-create a black hole’s “event horizon” —the point of no return, in which even light gets absorbed. At the "event horizon" was where Hawking postulated was the radiation.
It's crazy to imagine that black holes emit radiation, because all my life I've thought that nothing would escape a black hole. However, somehow something apparently manages to escape the pull of the black hole.

"Distant Galaxies Confirm Dark Energy's Existence and Universe's Flatness"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geometric-test-universe
"Marinoni and Buzzi confirmed two tenets of the current cosmological model: that the universe is a flat space and that it is dominated by a dark energy, which makes up roughly two-thirds of the universe, that looks a lot like Albert Einstein's famed cosmological constant. (The rest comes primarily from dark matter, with ordinary matter—atoms and molecules—contributing just 4 percent or so to the total makeup of the universe.)"

It's crazy that most of the matter in the whole universe is not even tangible/detectable to humans, yet however produces a gravitational pull.
It would be hard to imagine the universe as flat, but if it is indeed flat, that would be mind-boggling. It would mean that the universe is bounded, it has an edge like in the flat earth theory, where you can "fall" off the edge. But the universe would be a 4 dimensional flat manifold.

If such vast discoveries are made every day, it just proves that we know almost nothing about the world, and the fact that we in our lifetime will probably not learn that much more is terribly sad.

Black Holes in Action :)