Now that 2010 is over, we at GND have decided to present to you our list of top five science news stories of 2010. You may be wondering why we choose science news stories. That is simply because at GND we like to look to the bright scientific future to be hopeful and not dwell on the past filled with murder, rape, and war. You may also be asking yourselves, then why are you looking back on stories of 2010? And my answer is, because the future hasn’t happened yet and I can’t write about stories that haven’t unfolded. Well at least not until a certain someone lets me borrow their futon time machine. With all that said here are our top five science news stories of 2010 in descending order.
Every 200,000 years or so, the earth’s poles trade places. Typically it takes several thousand years. But when geologists Scott Bogue of Occidental College and Jonathan Glen of the U.S. Geological Survey examined 15-million-year-old Nevada lava, they found evidence that the planet’s magnetic field shifted several thousand timesfaster than normal at least once.
When lava cools, it locks away a record of the earth’s magnetic field. Examining lavas that cooled in two consecutive years, Bogue and Glen found the field swung 53 degrees from east to north, about 1 degree a week. They thought they had erred, but more detailed tests confirmed the pattern, which they announced in September. The only other evidence for rapid field change comes from Oregon lava analyzed in 1985.
This is gonna really suck for the compass industry.
One in every 10,000 chickens is born gynandromorphic: half male and half female. Legend has it that such birds were once tried as the spirit-partners of witches. Now developmental biologist Michael Clinton has an explanation that is a bit more scientific, if nearly as bizarre. We expected to find that the birds had abnormal cells, says Clinton, who works at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. Instead he found healthy male and female cells. These cells keep their identity even when injected into an embryo of the opposite sex, indicating that their gender is innate.
The discovery that each cell in a chicken can be inherently male or female is a huge departure from biological dogma, which holds that hormones control sex characteristics in vertebrates. Gender-imprinted cells may exist in us, too. Male and female cells might respond slightly differently to hormonal signals, which may partially explain differences in male and female behavior and susceptibility to some diseases, Clinton says.
This is a really strange life goal. ‘I’m going to prove that there are cross dressing chickens.’
Artificial organs keep us alive, artificial arms build our cars—and soon artificial skin may allow robots or prosthetics to respond to our every touch.
This past year, two independent groups made notable advances in that direction. At the University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineer Ali Javey and his team attached a grid of nanowire transistors to a polyimide film placed atop a layer of rubber. The resulting electronic skin recognizes pokes and prods as changes in electric resistance. Meanwhile, at Stanford University, materials scientist Zhenan Bao and collaborators cut pyramid-shaped holes in an elastic polymer to produce variations in capacitance, the ability to hold an electric charge. In tests, the material could “feel” objects as light as a butterfly.
Beyond robots and artificial limbs, synthetic skin might be used someday in extremely responsive touch screens or in car devices that alert drivers if their hands slip off the wheel. “It would be nice if the machines we interact with could interact with human beings intelligently,” Bao says.
Now if you press your iphone to hard it will say Ouuuuccccchhhhhh!!!!!!!
No one could accuse human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter of lacking chutzpah. In May 2010 he made good on another of his audacious goals, creating an artificial living cell by synthesizing the entire genome of a bacterium and transplanting it into another.
At a news conference, Venter hailed the new organism as “the first self-replicating species…on the planet whose parent is a computer”…
I guess test tube baby isn’t the worst thing kids will be called in the future, move over and make room for the floppy disk baby!
Since its invention, Rubik’s Cube has taunted mathematicians trying to figure the maximum number of moves necessary to solve it from any of its 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible starting positions. Someone dubbed the effort a search for “God’s number,” ignoring the theological consensus that Einstein’s maxim “God does not play dice” is likely to apply to yo-yos, Slinkies, Rubik’s Cubes, and the whole range of handheld human amusements.
Whatever you call it, the search has ended. In 2010 a team of whizzes laid bare the uplifting truth: As hopelessly scrambled as one’s cube may appear, one is never more than 20 moves from rendering each of its six faces a solid color. “We were secretly hoping in our tests that there would be one that required 21,” team member Morley Davidson, a mathematician at Kent State University, told the BBC. But it was not to be.
I wonder if they figured out if it takes any more then 20 moves if you peel the stickers off and place them back in the right order.
Alright there are our top five science news stories of 2010 according to GND. We hope that we brought stories to your attention that you may not have heard about. If you feel that there was something we left out, please feel free to let us know.
- News stories pulled from discovermagazine.com – images pulled from other sources
- comments below each story brought to you by the Captain.
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