The most significant scientific breakthroughs of 2008 as judged by Time and Science magazines make for interesting reading. Here are the top 10 lists with links for further reading.
Time magazine’s Top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008
1. Large Hadron Collider
2. The North Pole of Mars
3. Craig Ventor creating life
4. China puts astronauts in orbit
5. New surveys put gorilla numbers in Congo at 125,000 – twice what was previously estimated
6. Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor finds 45 exoplanets, one only 4.2 times as big as Earth
7. The University of California’s invisibility cloak
8. Penn State biochemistry professor Stevan Schuster reconstructs 80% of the genome of the long extinct woolly mammoth
9. Survey shows that only 25% of the population of the U.S. qualify as “civic scientifically literate.”
10. The discovery in central Germany of the first nuclear family to be identified by archaeologists so far.
Science magazines top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2008
Details on the Science website.
1. Scientists reprogramming cells from one type to another in a series of experiments using human skin cells and mice cells.
2. Direct Views of Exoplanets
3. Discoveries of some of the genetic mistakes that can cause cancer
4. New Class of High-temperature Superconductors
5. Protein flopping and folding
6. Development of a new catalyst, comprised of phosphorous and cobalt, that can efficiently hydrolyze water on industrial scales.
7. Researchers from Germany create a specialised microscope to observe the formation and growth of a zebrafish embryo.
8. Discovery in experiments on mice that brown fat cells can be turned into muscle cells.
9. Researchers in Europe predicted the mass of a proton using only the theory behind the strong force.
10. New “sequencing by synthesis” technology from 454 Sequencingrevolutionises genome sequencing.