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OT: that headline is a really interesting sentence. There are two people, the biologist and the computer scientist, and the word discover is singular. Note that if it were one person who was both a biologist and computer scientist, we'd say "biologist and computer scientist discovers", with the plural form of discover.

I'm a native English speaker, and have no trouble understand the sentence. However, I kind of slacked off in elementary school and high school English classes so I can't actually explain WHY we use the singular 'discover' when the discovery is made by two people, and we use the plural 'discovers' when the discovery is made by one person.

I really should learn my native language sometime!



The 's' on the end of verbs has no relation to the plural 's'. It's simply how regular English verbs are inflected in the third-person singular.

The link provided by jacobolus should tell you all you need to know.





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