It has been an exciting time for scientific progress. Tom Chivers selects the highlights .
Physics
There has been one major story this year: the Large Hadron Collider. In March, it started colliding particle beams; last month, it smashed beams of lead ions together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, achieving a temperature of 10 trillion degrees C, equal to the first microsecond after the Big Bang. The results suggest the early universe behaved like a super-hot liquid. From February, it is hoped that experiments will reveal more about dark matter, the nature of quarks, the Strong Nuclear Force, and, of course, the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that is believed to give matter mass.
Elsewhere, physicists at the University of California induced quantum behaviour in a machine, making it exist in two quantum states at once. The experiment won Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year award for its potential to revolutionise quantum engineering by enabling similar objects to exist in two places simultaneously.
Health
For the first time in Britain, a trial of a treatment based on embryonic stem cells – heralded as the next leap forward for medicine – went ahead. Researchers at University College London, said it “marks the dawn of the Stem Cell Age”. In January, we learnt that a vaccine for leukaemia had been tested on humans. Trials at King’s College London are at an early stage, but the vaccine showed promising results in mice.
In February, hopes of “personalised” cancer treatments were raised by geneticists at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Treatment that is customised according to a person’s genetic fingerprint has been tested on patients with bowel and breast cancer. It is a step towards cancer “becoming a manageable, chronic disease”. The race is also on to be the first scientist to sequence a person’s entire genetic code for less than $1,000.
Alien life
It has been a big year for E.T. – or has it? In September, an astronomer claimed it was “100 per cent” definite that life existed on Gliese 581g, a small, rocky planet in just the right orbit for life. This month, rumours of a new form of life on our own planet swept the internet.
Unfortunately, neither turned out to be ground-breaking. Professor Steven Vogt of the University of California, who made the “100 per cent” claim, was overstating the case – in fact, we’re not sure that Gliese 581g exists. The alien-life-on-Earth rumours were false, too: the discovery was of a new kind of bacterium that can metabolise arsenic. Still, the more Earth-like planets we discover, the more likely it is that life exists elsewhere; and the arsenic bugs, found in Mono Lake, California, show how hardy life is.
Biology
The controversial biologist Craig Venter hit the headlines yet again, creating a synthetic life form in his laboratory. “Synthia” was created using the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. Venter and his team altered the DNA using a computer, taking out 100 genes and adding a “watermark”. They then put the genome into the nucleus of an M. genitalium bacterium, which reproduced, creating Mycoplasma laboratorium.
There was also pleasing news for Jurassic Park fans: a zoo in San Diego has been cloning dead animals. So far, they have only been using endangered species, but the technique would work perfectly well on extinct ones. Will we see velociraptors next? Probably not – but expect reports about cloning, genetic engineering and artificial life to become a part of our daily lives.
Science in the news
It has been a bad year for pseudoscience: the British Chiropractic Association’s libel case against Simon Singh, the author who called their treatments “bogus”, failed ignominiously in the Court of Appeal. A Government Evidence Check into homoeopathy found it had “no credible evidence of efficacy”, and the British Medical Association voted against its provision on the NHS. Also, Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the MMR scare, was struck off by the General Medical Council for unethical behaviour.
It hasn’t been all good news for science, though. Professor David Nutt, the Government’s chief adviser on drugs, was fired for claiming (and providing evidence) that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol.
Fortunately, fears that research funding would be savagely cut in the spending review proved unfounded, but researchers will still have to do more with less.
Environment
Away from the furore of sceptics crowing over “Climategate”, the bad news continued to pour in. A report published by the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London showed that one in five vertebrate species is under threat of extinction, while a United Nations study said that we are losing species faster than at any time since the death of the dinosaurs.
The acidification of the oceans has continued, threatening to destroy reef systems and cause food shortages as fish populations die out.
And, of course, the planet continued to get warmer: 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade on record, while 2010 has been one of the three hottest years, according to the World Meteorological Association.
Still, at least it has been nice and cold this winter.
Space
You may not realise, but this is a golden age for space exploration.
Ikaros, the first sail-powered spacecraft, was launched from Japan in May, en route to the Sun. The 20m sail, which is just 0.0075mm thick, is propelled by sunlight, which should allow Ikaros’s successors to travel at far greater speeds than conventional rockets. And, at the end of 2011, a Nasa mission to Mars will carry instruments to detect the presence of life, past or present.
Closer to home, satellites have been providing wonderful views of the cosmos. As the Hubble Space Telescope turned 20, Nasa released another incredible image – this time of the Carina Nebula, while a more recent telescope, Planck, captured the first image of the entire universe.
In February, we will bid a fond farewell to one of the icons of space travel – the Space Shuttle is to be retired after 30 years in service.
However, a few billion miles away, Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, is still going strong. It has become the first man-made object to reach the edge of the Solar System.
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