Thursday, December 17, 2009

Time Magazine's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries


Here's the list of Time Magazine's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries. Given all the hype about The Darwinius Affair last May it's amazing that the discovery of this fossil didn't make the list.

There were several other huge scientific breakthroughs that failed to make the list: proof that Darwin was wrong, the overthrow of evolutionary theory, exposing the fraud of climate change, and the publication of Unscientific America.

There are some real scientific stories that were ignored by Time magazine: the creation of artificial stem cells (continuing), the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Nobel Prizes for telomeres and ribosome structure, and rapid human genome sequencing.

1. Our Oldest Ancestor, "Ardi"
2. The Human Epigenome, Decoded
3. Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness
4. A Robot Performs Science
5. Breeding Tuna on Land
6. Water on the Moon
7. The Fundamental Lemma, Solved
8. Teleportation!
9. The Large Hadron Collider, Revived
10. A New Planet (or Brown Dwarf?) Discovered

It looks like a bad year for science if this is the best of the best.

In case you've forgotten, here's the top 10 list from last year [2008].

1. Large Hadron Collider
2. The North Pole — of Mars
3. Creating Life
4. China Soars into Space
5. More Gorillas in the Mist
6. Brave New Worlds
7. The Power of Invisibility
8. Cenozoic Park?
9. Can You Spell Science?
10. First Family


7 comments:

  1. Great! My vote for "The Fundamental Lemma"(which is conjectural identity between p-adic integrals)

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  2. They forgot to include our new radial tree visualization software in their list.

    That's Time for you...

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  3. *weird look*

    We dont have the human epigenome 'decoded'. We know slightly more than 'jack shit', but its far, far from 'decoded'.

    *weird look*

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  4. 4. A Robot Performs Science
    Usually we call these 'grad students' and 'postdocs' rather than 'robots'. Still, that they actually managed to perform some science is indeed some welcome news.

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  5. When was the epigenome "decoded"????

    If that's the case, I am hopelessly behind the current research in my own area and I don't think I could have missed that

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  6. 5. Breeding Tuna on Land - a remarkable achievement if true

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  7. I vote for teleportation, and if you disagree with me I'll be there in just a sec to smack you upside the head.

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