1. The Horniest Dinosaur That Ever Lived
Settle down, we're talking real horns — 15 of them to be exact, decorating the giant head of the 5,500-lb. (2,500-kg) Kosmoceratops, a beast that lived 76 million years ago in what is now Utah. Its fossilized remains were discovered by a University of Utah expedition in 2007, but the dino was formally described and named only in September of 2010. The bones shed light not only on the fanciful kinds of beasts that lived so long ago, but on the unfamiliar place North America was. Though the Kosmoceratops lived in Utah, it was a coastal dweller, making its home along the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a great body of water that divided the continent in two.
2. Big News About a Small Particle
Guess what? There appears to have been an asymmetry in the behavior of neutral B-mesons during a collision at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator! Not excited? Try this: If there hadn't been, you probably wouldn't exist. Conventional particle physics dictates that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created during the Big Bang, but that's impossible, since matter and antimatter mutually annihilate. The only way anything could be left over to start a universe would be if the scales had been tipped slightly in favor of matter, a sensible theory, but one that had never been glimpsed in action — until this year. In particle collisions at Fermilab, scientists discovered that the number of muons (a kind of heavy electron) created exceeded anti-muons by about 1%. That's not much, but long ago it was apparently just enough to kick start the cosmos. On such margins are universes made.
3. Our (Sort of) Watery Moon
The lunar surface is nothing if not predictable. You've got dust, you've got rocks, you've got bigger rocks. One thing you definitely don't have is water — which has always made the idea of homesteading the place a challenge. As it turns out, however, the moon is a lot wetter than we ever knew. NASA's LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission made that discovery when it crash-landed a spent rocket booster near the moon's south pole and then directed the LCROSS satellite itself to analyze the plume that was blasted up. It was no news that there was water vapor in the plume — the lunar poles are home to at least traces of permafrost — the surprise was how much: about 50% more than astronomers anticipated, making the moon roughly twice as wet as the Sahara Desert. O.K., that's not exactly beachfront property, but it could be enough to allow future settlers to manufacture their own water supply on-site, which would be easier and cheaper than hauling it from Earth.
4. The Robot Sleuth and the Mexican Tunnel
The pyramids of Mexico's Teotihuacan have always been one of North America's archaeological treasures. But those and other remains of the ancient city have always been a mystery too. A door into Teotihuacan's shrouded past cracked open a little this year when an archaeological bot equipped with a camera was sent on a subterranean trek and found a 12-ft. wide corridor with a perfectly preserved arched roof that was built — and sealed — nearly two millennia ago. Archeologists are hopeful that it may be connected to the tomb of a high priest, a find that could reveal volumes about how the people who constructed the Mesoamerican metropolis once lived.
5. Getting Old? Blame This Gene
the way they do and we, um, don't? One reason could be a little DNA sequence clustered near a human gene called TERC. The TERC gene is already known to produce an enzyme called telomerase, which helps regulate the length of telomeres — caps at the end of chromosomes similar to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces. Every time a cell divides, telomeres shorten, leading to a chromosomal fraying associated with aging. In a British study published in the journal Genetics, scientists found that people with one copy of the gene had slightly shorter telomeres similar to those of people three or four years older who didn't carry the gene; in other words, they were aging three or four years faster. In another study in Nature, researchers at Harvard Medical School were able to switch on a telomerase gene in prematurely aged mice, and reverse the aging process; the mice's organs regnerated, their shrunken brains increased in size, and their fertility was restored. Manipulating the gene for telomerase could, in theory, slow aging or at least the development of age-related diseases in humans. But there's reason for caution: Rapidly dividing, semi-immortal cells are also known as cancer cells, meaning that the search for eternal youth could yield an entirely different — less pleasant — outcome.
6. Planet Population Explodes
In the same year the U.S. conducted its decennial census, astronomers continued their ongoing nose count of known planets outside our solar system — and they found a lot of new celestial citizens. There's HIP 13044b, a world circling a distant star that was once not even part of the Milky Way, but was instead snagged by it gravitationally. There are up to seven new planets orbiting a star called HD 10180, about 127 light years from Earth. Most exciting was the discovery of Gliese 581g, the first extrasolar planet discovered that orbits its sun in the so-called Goldilocks zone, a distance at which conditions are neither too cold nor too hot for life. Alas, this Goldilocks may indeed be a fairy tale, as follow-up studies have now cast doubt on whether the planet exists at all. But few scientists doubt that more worlds like are out there — or that they'll be discovered soon.
7. The Ultimate Magician's Cape
When scientists speak seriously about something like a space-time cloak, they're either a) extremely smart or b) a tiny bit crazy. Prof. Martin McCall of Imperial College in London is not crazy. The British physicist published a paper in the journal Optics describing the theoretical possibility of something he calls "metamaterials," fabric or other forms of matter that could be molecularly engineered to scramble the usual flow of electromagnetic energy. Light passing through it would emerge unevenly, creating gaps in time and space. O.K., that's hard to follow, but his only half-joking description of a safecracker entering a room, robbing a safe and leaving while a surveillance camera reveals nothing amiss isn't. One tiny glitch in the plan: given the speed at which light travels, invisibility for even a few minutes would require a cloak about 100 million meters (320 million ft) long.
8. Meet the Ancestors
You never knew the woman and boy who were entombed in an avalanche of sediment in South Africa's Malapa cave some 2 million years ago, but spare them a thought since they might have been kin. Described in the journal Science in April, the fossils could fill an important spot in the evolutionary arc of humans, since there's little skeletal evidence of what was going on at that particular moment in our history. Paleontologists disagree about the significance of the new species, dubbed Australopithecus sediba — and some believe it was an evolutionary dead end that has little to do with us. But its intriguing mix of ancient and comparatively modern skeletal features at least suggests that it was a direct ancestor of Homo erectus, which in turn is a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, a group that includes you, your plumber and everyone in your car pool.
9. A New Element — Maybe
Lead, iron and uranium are nothing compared to ununseptium, the temporary name for element 117, an extremely heavy combination of berkelium and calcium isotopes created in a particle accelerator in Dubna, Russia. The new element existed for only the tiniest fraction of a second before vanishing again — and it must be independently created elsewhere before it earns a permanent spot on the periodic table of the elements — but the fact that it remained stable for even the fleeting instant it did is promising. The heavier artificial elements get, the less stable they become, until they reach a point at which the curve turns back up and they begin to last longer and longer. Ununseptium is on the upward part of that arc suggesting that what physicists call "islands of stability" may exist, at which the heaviest elements of all could last for months or years. The periodic table, it seems, has yet to be fully set.
10. The Drinking Cat
Proof that all news — including science news — is local comes from the breathless announcement out of MIT, Princeton and Virginia Tech that scientists there have at last cracked the mystery of how a cat can drink milk without getting its chin and whiskers wet. Painstakingly analyzing high-speed videos, the investigators determined that while the predictably crude dog forms its tongue into a sort of ladle to scoop up liquids, the cat goes about things more daintily, curling its tongue down and under and touching the surface of the liquid lightly. When it laps — which it does at a speed of about four times per second — a complex interplay of gravity, inertia and fluid dynamics moves about 0.1 ml of liquid into its mouth per lap with no slosh or spillage. The practical applications for this? None at all. Does that matter? Not a bit.
Top 10 Scientific Discoveries according to TIME (Source: Time Magazine)
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