by Becky Crew, Cosmos Online
From overachieving neutrinos to Earth-like planets and test tube sperm: here are the top 10 science stories of 2011, as chosen by the editors at COSMOS. Plus, we reveal which stories were
particularly popular in the office.
10. HAS ARCHAEOPTERYX BEEN KNOCKED OFF ITS PERCH?
The discovery of an unknown species of bird-like dinosaur from China raised serious questions over the place of Archaeopteryx in the evolutionary tree. Was Archaeopteryx really the earliest and most primitive bird as we’ve always thought?
9. WORLD’S BIGGEST TELESCOPE – IT’S AUSTRALIA VS SOUTH AFRICA
All year, South Africa and Australia has been jostling to win the right to build the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, which will cost A$2 billion and will have 10,000 times the survey speed of current radio telescopes?.
8. GREENPEACE FALL FROM GRACE
To the dismay of the scientific community, tn the early hours of July 14, Greenpeace protestors gained illegal entry into an experimental CSIRO operated farm near Canberra and destroyed a crop of genetically modified wheat.
7. WATCH YOUR BACK, HARRY POTTER
We’re inching closer and closer to the dream of having wearable invisibility cloaks à la everybody’s favourite teenage wizard, with the development of a new cloaking device made from heated up carbon nanotubes that can replicate the ‘mirage effect’ seen in nature.
6. AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL GENOME SEQUENCED FOR THE FIRST TIME
The genome of an Aboriginal Australian was sequenced for the first time this year, which revealed the journey taken by early humans out of Africa before they spread across the globe.
5. MALES BEWARE: TEST TUBE SPERM CREATED IN LAB
Could this be the discovery that renders the male sex obsolete? Mature, functional sperm was created in a laboratory dish for the first time earlier this year – a feat that has eluded reproductive biologists for more than 50 years.
4. BIGGEST BLACK HOLES DISCOVERED
Two of the largest black holes known to exist have been discovered, and we know how much you enjoy how we speak about light years in relative terms, so they’re a mere 300 million light years away from Earth.
3. HIGGS BOSON TEASES US ONCE AGAIN
It was the announcement that had scientists and journalists piling into a tiny lecture room at CERN with the hopes that maybe the existence of the elusive, hypothetical Higgs boson had been confirmed. Not yet, said CERN, but they’ve come closer than ever to finding it.
2. WAS EINSTEIN WRONG?
The experiment took everyone by surprise – physicists reported that neutrinos can travel faster than light which, if true, would blast a hole in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Additional tests are being carried out before anything can be said for sure.
1. FIRST ‘HABITABLE’ PLANET FOUND
A rocky world called Gliese 581g orbiting a nearby star was said to be the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life, which is just as well, because in 2009, COSMOS teamed up with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign called Hello From Earth to send messages from the public to this very planet.
Courtesy of cosmosmagazine.com
