Summary of the year 2008 in science was marked by the particle accelerator

The Large Hadron Collider, the Phoenix mission and the creation of an artificial bacterium - among the important scientific news of 2008. NASA also adds Michael Phelps' swimsuit

1. The Large Hadron Collider

Time magazine chose bThe Large Hadron Collider – The particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva for the big scientific discovery of the year, even though it has been shut down after only running for two weeks in an experimental phase. True, it did not destroy the earth, but this fear brought surfers in droves to the site of the scientist in the days surrounding the start of the accelerator's activity.

The surfers of the science site were also particularly interested in the accelerator, as you can see, news related to it occupy the first five places in the number of hits, among the ten most read news on the site in 2008.

In September, the big accelerator was started for the first time, despite concerns that arose in the public due to arguments from people who do not have that much knowledge in the field that it would create a black hole that would suck the entire planet into it. No observer with any knowledge of physics thought this would happen, but the scientists wanted it to work as designed, and it didn't either. A helium leak from one of the cooling pipes caused the accelerator to be shut down less than two weeks after it was started for repairs and now it is hoped that it will be able to be operated starting in June 2009.

2. Phoenix

In second place on Time's list and in a respectable place on several other lists, including the NASA list, part of which is presented below, the Spacecraft Operation Phoenix which was launched on August 4, 2007 and landed on Mars on May 25. This is the first time that a spacecraft has landed in one of the polar regions of Mars, where a large concentration of water and possibly a sign of life should be found.

The Phoenix spacecraft found nothing during its several months of operation that changed the image of Mars as a dead world, but it strengthened the image of the planet as a place where life may have once existed. The spaceship was not designed to survive for too long anyway and in November the cold and darkness forever overwhelmed it.

3. Creation of artificial life

Craig Venter, the man who was behind the decoding of the human genome at the beginning of the decade, worked this year on DNA production of an artificial bacterium. Venter stitched together 582 thousand base pairs needed to invent the genetic information of an entire bacterium. The second step Hunter now wants to take is to program the DNA into a living bacterium to see if it takes command of the organism. He is convinced that this will succeed. And as any programmer can tell you, if you know how to write the code, you can make it do almost anything.

4. The Chinese manned space mission Shenzhou 7

This year, China made its third manned flight, Shenzhen 7 Hers was attended by three astronauts who also performed a successful spacewalk. In addition, China launched an unmanned spacecraft to the moon, changes 1, and it plans to land humans on the moon in 2020.

5. New gorillas

Western lowland gorillas are recovering. A new survey has shown that there are more members of this species than previously thought. The forests and swamps of the northern Republic of the Congo are now considered home to 125 gorillas, double the previous estimates.

But there is no good news without bad news. The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the neighboring country, has also spread to the Virunga National Park, and they are threatening a population of 350 mountain gorillas - about half of the world's population of this species. More on Gorillas.

6. First direct photographs of planets outside the solar system

Since the discovery of the first planets outside the solar system, their population has been growing and diversifying. If at first we were able to discover only the largest and those too close to their sun to allow life, then this time reports of smaller planets are also starting to arrive.

Swiss astronomer Michael Muir discovered 45 small worlds, one of which is only 4.2 times larger than Earth. While all are also in warmer orbits, Major's instruments are sensitive enough to detect such planets even in cooler orbits where life can survive. In November, two teams of astronomers from the USA and Canada discovered four planets sitting quietly waiting to be photographed, thus providing the first photograph of other worlds in visible and ultraviolet light.

The grief too Watch For the first time in visible light on a planet orbiting another sun. The Hubble Space Telescope took the first visible light image of a planet orbiting another sun. It is estimated that this is a star whose mass is no more than three Jupiter masses. This planet, known as Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, which lies 25 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Pisces.

7. The cloak of the seer and the unseen

Scientists at Berkeley have developed invisibility cloak. They used nanowires grown inside a porous aluminum tube. In doing so, they created a sheet 10 times thinner than a piece of paper. They proved that a bone can be wrapped in this cloth and the light surrounds the bone and effectively makes it invisible.

8. Decoding the mammoth genome

In November, Prof. Stephen Shuster of Penn State announced that he was able to recover 80% of the genome of woolly mammoth long extinct, using clumps of hair. The decoding encompassed 3 million DNA sequences, during which the researchers made sure to separate genes that came from bacteria and other creatures that were infected with the fur. The chances that we will see a park of woolly mammoths in the foreseeable future are still not high.

9. Ignorance in the sciences

25% of Americans in the US can be considered scientifically literate. That means only one out of four Americans can understand what is written in the science column of the New York Times. It is therefore no wonder that important issues such as global warming and stem cells did not interest the voters at all. Meanwhile in Beijing they achieved a new record in scientific tests. The relative weakness of the USA in the field of science did not go unnoticed by Obama who mentioned her several times in the election campaign.

10. The first family

In the state of Saxony-Anhalt in the east of Germany, the oldest nuclear family was discovered. Archaeologists have uncovered the bodies of family members who died 4,600 years ago, in the Stone Age, who appear to have been killed together in a raid. This conclusion stems from defensive wounds that were on their bodies, including a point where a stone thrown at one of the females hit her fourth vertebra. Among the remains that were discovered - the bones of an elderly man, an elderly woman and two boys, one aged around 8-9 and the other between 4-5. Analysis of DNA segments showed that it was one family. Apparently this is not the oldest family that existed but certainly the oldest that has been discovered.

The most viewed articles on the science website in 2008

1. Now it's final: the large particle accelerator is safe to use
2. The end of the world will not come in 2012
3. Everything you wanted to know about the new particle accelerator in Geneva
4. Will Sarn's Large Particle Accelerator Change the Face of Physics?
5. Is Earth about to be swallowed by a black hole?
6. The celestial trinity - Venus, Jupiter and the Moon came closer
7. The mysterious case of two balls that fell from space in Brazil and Australia
8. Is our universe controlled by artificial intelligence?
9. A new and simple technique for raising people's IQ
10. There is no mystery to the Bermuda Triangle