Feature
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2010 Science News of the Year: Earth
Credit: Alvaro Ybarra Zavala/Getty Images Inside the Haiti quake Some 230,000 Haitians died when a magnitude-7 earthquake struck just outside Port-au-Prince on the afternoon of January 12. Scientists from around the world scrambled to the scene (SN Online: 1/16/10) to assess which fault had ruptured and whether more people were at risk. Early ideas held […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Molecules
Credit: Happy Little Nomad/Wikimedia Commons Gimme an F Chlorophyll, the pigment that makes the world go ’round, has come in four known flavors for more than 60 years: chlorophylls a, b, c and d. Now scientists have discovered another version of the pigment that allows plants and other photosynthesizing organisms to harness sunlight for making […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Genes & Cells
Credit: © Joe McNally/reconstruction by Kennis and Kennis Gene sequencing for all, even Neandertals An unprecedented picture of life’s diversity is emerging as researchers publish the full genetic instruction books of a growing list of species — including one that has been extinct for more than 30,000 years. A project sequencing Neandertal DNA harvested from […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Humans
Credit: Y. Haile-Selassie et al/PNAS 2010 Extreme makeover for Lucy’s kind Recent fossil discoveries suggest that the early hominid species represented by the famous bones of Lucy, who lived 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia, may have been more like modern humans than previously thought. The skeleton of a 3.6-million-year-old male of the same species, […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Technology
Credit: Michael Morgenstern Lie detectors blend fact and fiction Devices that can discern honest statements from lies are much sought after, especially since a 2003 National Research Council report concluded that traditional polygraphs flag stress, not deception. But newer gadgets increasingly used by police departments and other agencies don’t tell fact from fiction either, researchers […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Body & Brain
Credit: © Bettmann/Corbis Gene therapy moves forward Despite their promise, technologies to correct defective genes have been plagued by safety problems leading to unintended — and sometimes fatal — outcomes. But scientists are inching toward safer, more effective gene therapies that may one day treat a range of diseases, from psychiatric disorders to autoimmune diseases […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Numbers
The Tao of traffic lights When a traffic light goes green can seem to hinge on whimsy rather than the number of vehicles waiting. Scientists propose speeding up traffic by making signals go with the flow (SN: 10/23/10, p. 8). Inspired by the movement of crowds through narrow spaces such as doorways, Swiss and German […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Environment
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory Gulf drilling disaster The biggest oil spill in U.S. history began April 20, when an explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform sent oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico at rates at times exceeding 65,000 barrels a day (SN Online: 9/23/10). By the time the well was […]
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2010 SCIENCE NEWS OF THE YEAR
A year ago, most geneticists had all but dismissed the notion that humans and Neandertals interbred. But with the cataloging of the full Neandertal genome, announced in May, we now know that people of European and Asian descent really have inherited a small percentage of their DNA from a rival species that went extinct about […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Matter & Energy
Approaching the island of stability Smashing together the elements calcium-48, with 20 protons, and berkelium-249, with 97, has produced superheavy atoms containing 117 protons, albeit for a tiny sliver of a second (SN: 4/24/10, p. 15). Temporarily known as ununseptium, the new element fills an empty spot in the periodic table between the previously discovered […]
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2010 Science News of the Year: Life
Credit: Javier García Warming changes how and where animals live New concerns have emerged about how climate warming might challenge animals and change the way they go about their lives. For example, a coalition of lizard specialists suggests that by midcentury a third of lizard populations won’t have enough time for foraging or other vital […]
