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National Geographic- Top Scientific Discoveries of the decade....

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National Geographic- Top Scientific Discoveries of the decade....

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As the 2010s come to an end, we can look back on an era rife with discovery. In the past 10 years, scientists around the world made remarkable progress toward understanding the human body, our planet, and the cosmos that surrounds us. What's more, science in the 2010s became more global and collaborative than ever before. These days, major breakthroughs are likelier to come from groups of 3,000 scientists than groups of three.

So much has happened, thanks to so many, that National Geographic's writers and editors decided not to whittle down the last decade into just a handful of discoveries. Instead, we've put our heads together to identify 20 trends and milestones that we found especially noteworthy, and that we think will set the stage for more amazing finds in the decade to come.

Detecting the first gravitational waves

In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed that when objects with enough mass accelerate, they can sometimes create waves that move through the fabric of space and time like ripples on a pond's surface. Though Einstein later doubted their existence, these spacetime wrinkles-called gravitational waves-are a key prediction of relativity, and the search for them captivated researchers for decades. Though compelling hints of the waves first emerged in the 1970s, nobody directly detected them until 2015, when the U.S.-based observatory LIGO felt the aftershock of a distant collision between two black holes. The discovery, announced in 2016, opened up a new way to "hear" the cosmos.

In 2017, LIGO and the European observatory Virgo felt another set of tremors, this time made when two ultra-dense objects called neutron stars collided. Telescopes around the world saw the related explosion, making the event the first ever observed in both light and gravitational waves. The landmark data have given scientists an unprecedented look at how gravity works and how elements such as gold and silver form.

Shaking up the human family tree

The decade has seen numerous advances in understanding our complex origin story, including new dates on known fossils, spectacularly complete fossil skulls, and the addition of multiple new branches. In 2010, National Geographic explorer-at-large Lee Berger unveiled a distant ancestor named Australopithecus sediba. Five years later, he announced that South Africa's Cradle of Humankind cave system contained fossils of a new species: Homo naledi, a hominin whose "mosaic" anatomy resembles that of both modern humans and far more ancient cousins. A follow-up study also showed that H. naledi is surprisingly young, living at least between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago.

Other remarkable discoveries piled up in Asia. In 2010, a team announced that DNA pulled from an ancient Siberian pinky bone was unlike any modern human's, the first evidence of a shadowy lineage now called the Denisovans. In 2018, a site in China yielded 2.1-million-year-old stone tools, confirming that toolmakers spread into Asia hundreds of thousands of years earlier than once thought. In 2019, researchers in the Philippines announced fossils of Homo luzonensis, a new type of hominin similar to Homo floresiensis, the "hobbit" of Flores. And newfound stone tools on Sulawesi predate modern humans' arrival, which suggests the presence of a third, unidentified island hominin in Southeast Asia.

Revolutionizing the study of ancient DNA

As DNA sequencing technologies have improved exponentially, the past decade has seen huge leaps in understanding how our genetic past shapes modern humans. In 2010, researchers published the first near-complete genome from an ancient Homo sapiens, kicking off a revolutionary decade in the study of our ancestors' DNA. Since then, more than 3,000 ancient genomes have been sequenced, including the DNA of Naia, a girl who died in what is now Mexico 13,000 years ago. Her remains are among the oldest intact human skeletons ever found in the Americas. Also in 2010, researchers announced the first draft of a Neanderthal genome, providing the first solid genetic evidence that one to four percent of all modern non-Africans' DNA comes from these close relatives.

Revealing thousands of new exoplanets

Human knowledge of planets orbiting distant stars took a giant leap forward in the 2010s, in no small part thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. From 2009 to 2018, Kepler alone found more than 2,700 confirmed exoplanets, more than half the current total. Among Kepler's greatest hits: the first confirmed rocky exoplanet. Its successor TESS, launched in 2018, is starting its survey of the night sky and has already bagged 34 confirmed exoplanets.

Ground-based surveys were also in on the action. In 2017, researchers announced the discovery of TRAPPIST-1, a star system just 39 light-years away that hosts a whopping seven Earth-size planets, the most found around any star other than the sun. The year before, the Pale Red Dot project announced the discovery of Proxima b, an Earth-size planet that's orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the sun at a mere 4.25 light-years away.

Entering the Crispr era

The 2010s marked huge advances in our ability to precisely edit DNA, in large part thanks to the identification of the Crispr-Cas9 system. Some bacteria naturally use Crispr-Cas9 as an immune system, since it lets them store snippets of viral DNA, recognize any future matching virus, and then cut the virus's DNA to ribbons. In 2012, researchers proposed that Crispr-Cas9 could be used as a powerful genetic editing tool, since it precisely cuts DNA in ways that scientists can easily customize. Within months, other teams confirmed that the technique worked on human DNA. Ever since, labs all over the world have raced to identify similar systems, to modify Crispr-Cas9 to make it even more precise, and to experiment with its applications in agriculture and medicine.

While Crispr-Cas9's possible benefits are huge, the ethical quandaries it poses are also staggering. To the horror of the global medical community, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced in 2018 the birth of two girls whose genomes he had edited with Crispr, the first humans born with heritable edits to their DNA. The announcement sparked calls for a global moratorium on heritable "germline" edits in humans.

Seeing the cosmos as never before

The 2010s brought with them several major observations that are revolutionizing our study of the universe. In 2013, the European Space Agency launched Gaia, a spacecraft that is collecting distance measurements for more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, as well as velocity data for more than 150 million stars. The dataset helped scientists make a 3D movie of our home galaxy, yielding an unprecedented look at how galaxies form and change over time.

Unveiling ancient art

Making interstellar firsts

Future historians might look back on the 2010s as the interstellar decade: For the first time, our spacecraft punctured the veil between the sun and interstellar space, and we got our first visits from objects that formed around distant stars.

Opening doors to ancient civilizations

Archaeologists made many extraordinary discoveries in the 2010s. In 2013, British researchers finally found the body of King Richard III-beneath what's now a parking lot. In 2014, researchers announced that Peru's Castillo de Huarmey temple complex still had an untouched royal tomb. In 2016, archaeologists revealed the first Philistine cemetery, offering an unprecedented window into the lives of the Hebrew Bible's most notorious, enigmatic people. The following year, researchers announced that Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates back more than 1,700 years to Rome's first Christian emperor, appearing to confirm that it's built on the site identified by Rome as the burial place of Christ. And in 2018, teams working in Peru announced the largest mass child sacrifice site ever uncovered, while other scientists scouring Guatemala detected more than 60,000 newly identified ancient Maya buildings with airborne lasers.

Big archaeological discoveries also surfaced from deep underwater. In 2014, a Canadian team finally found the H.M.S. Erebus, an ill-fated Arctic research vessel that sank in 1846. Two years later, another expedition located its sister ship, the H.M.S. Terror. In 2017, an effort led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen found the long-lost U.S.S. Indianapolis, which sank in 1945 and became one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. naval history. The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project has found more than 60 historic shipwrecks at the bottom of the Black Sea-including a pristine 2,400-year-old vessel discovered in 2018. And in 2019, Alabama officials announced the discovery of the long-lost Clotilda, the last ship that ferried enslaved Africans to the United States.

Breaking new ground in the solar system

In July 2015, NASA's New Horizons probe made good on a decades-long quest to visit the icy world Pluto, sending back the first-ever images of the dwarf planet's shockingly varied surface. And on New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons pulled off the most distant flyby ever attempted when it snapped the first pictures of the icy body Arrokoth, a primordial leftover from the solar system's infancy.

Changing the course of disease

In response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, public health officials and the pharmaceutical company Merck fast-tracked rVSV-ZEBOV, an experimental Ebola vaccine. After a highly successful field trial in 2015, European officials approved the vaccine in 2019-a milestone in the fight against the deadly disease. Several landmark studies also opened new avenues to preventing the spread of HIV. A 2011 trial showed that preventatively taking antiretroviral drugs greatly reduced the spread of HIV among heterosexual couples, a finding confirmed in follow-up studies that included same-sex couples.

Pushing reproductive limits

In 2016, clinicians announced the birth of a "three-parent baby" grown from the father's sperm, the mother's cell nucleus, and a third donor's egg that had its nucleus removed. The therapy- which remains ethically controversial-aims to correct for disorders in the mother's mitochondria. One 2018 study made precursors of human sperm or eggsout of reprogrammed skin and blood cells, while another showed that gene editing could let two same-sex mice conceive pups. And in 2018, Chinese scientists announced the birth of two cloned macaques, the first time that a primate had ever been cloned like Dolly the sheep. Though researchers avow that the technique won't be used on humans, it's possible that it could work with other primates, including us.

Tracking down the Higgs boson

How does matter get mass? In the 1960s and 1970s, physicists including Peter Higgs and François Englert proposed a solution in the form of a novel energy field that permeates the universe, now called the Higgs field. This theorized field also came with its associated fundamental particle, what's now called the Higgs boson. In July 2012, a decades-long search ended when two teams at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the detection of the Higgs boson. The discovery filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the spectacularly successful-albeit incomplete-theory that describes three of the four fundamental forces in physics and all known elementary particles.

Rewriting paleontology textbooks

This decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of prehistoric life, as scientists have found stunning new fossils while expanding their analytical toolkits. In 2010, researchers supported by the National Geographic Society published the first full-body color reconstruction for a dinosaur, based on the discovery of fossilized pigments. In the years since, the palette has widened, as paleontologists have found dino-camouflage, feathers that ranged from black to blue to iridescent rainbow, and reddish skin on one of the best-ever fossils of an armored dinosaur. And in a remarkable feat of chemical sleuthing, researchers analyzed preserved fatty molecules and proved in 2018 that Dickinsonia, a primitive creature that lived more than 540 million years ago, was an animal.

In 2014, paleontologists also revealed new fossils of the predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus that suggested it was a semiaquatic predator-the first known among dino-kind. A year later, a team in China unveiled the stunning fossil of Yi qi, a truly weird feathered dinosaur with membraned wings like a bat's. Also in the last decade, scientists' interest in Myanmar's 99-million-year-old amber has surged, revealing a feathered dinosaur tail, a primitive baby bird, and all sorts of invertebrates trapped in the fossilized tree resin.

Finding life's building blocks on other worlds

Ringing climate alarms louder than ever

Discovering-and rediscovering-species

Modern biologists are identifying new species at a blistering pace, naming 18,000 new species a year on average. In the past decade, scientists described several charismatic mammal species for the first time, such as the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey, the Vangunu giant rat, and the olinguito, the first newfound carnivore in the Western Hemisphere since the late 1970s. The ranks of other animals groups also swelled, as scientists described newfound fish with "hands," tiny frogs smaller than a dime, a giant Florida salamander, and many others. In addition, some animals, such as Vietnam's saola and China's Ili pika, were spotted once again after having gone missing for years.

Kicking off a new spaceflight era

The 2010s were a pivotal transition period for spaceflight, as access to low-Earth orbit and beyond became a more global-and commercial-enterprise. In 2011, China launched its first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, into orbit. In 2014, India's Mars Orbiter Mission arrived at the red planet, making India the first country ever to successfully arrive at Mars on its first try. In 2019, Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL attempted the first privately funded lunar landing, and China's Chang'e-4 mission performed the first soft landing on the lunar farside. The global astronaut corps also grew more diverse: Tim Peake became the first professional British astronaut, Aidyn Aimbetov became the first post-Soviet Kazakh cosmonaut, and the United Arab Emirates and Denmark sent their first astronauts to space. What's more, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch performed the first all-female spacewalk.

In the U.S., after the last space shuttle mission launched in 2011, private companies angled to fill the void. In 2012, SpaceX launched the first commercial resupply mission to the ISS, and in 2015, Blue Origin and SpaceX became the first companies to successfully launch reusable rockets to space and then vertically land them back on Earth, a milestone for cheaper launches to low-Earth orbit.

Seeing animals' unexpected sides

The past decade has revealed unusual traits and behaviors across the animal kingdom. In 2015, National Geographic explorer David Gruber found that hawksbill sea turtles fluoresce green and red- the first biofluorescence ever recorded in a reptile. In 2016, researchers showed that the Greenland shark can live at least 272 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate yet known. Our understanding of animal tool use also improved: One 2019 study showed for the first time that Visayan warty pigs use tools, and several studies showed that Brazil's capuchins have been using tools for at least 3,000 years, the oldest such non-human record found outside Africa. In an extremely rare 2018 sighting, biologists in Kenya scientifically documented a black leopard in Africa for the first time since 1909.

Redefining the units of science

To understand the natural world, scientists must measure it-but how do we define our units? Over the decades, scientists have gradually redefined classic units in terms of universal constants, such as using the speed of light to help define the length of a meter. But the scientific unit of mass, the kilogram, remained pegged to "Le Grand K," a metallic cylinder stored at a facility in France. If that ingot's mass varied for whatever reason, scientists would have to recalibrate their instruments. No more: In 2019, scientists agreed to adopt a new kilogram definition based on a fundamental factor in physics called Planck's constant and the improved definitions for the units of electrical current, temperature, and the number of particles in a given substance. For the first time ever, all our scientific units now stem from universal constants-ensuring a more accurate era of measurement.

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These are the top 20 scientific discoveries of the decade

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As the 2010s come to an end, we can look back on an era rife with discovery. In the past 10 years, scientists around the world made remarkable progress toward understanding the human body, our planet, and the cosmos that surrounds us. What's more, science in the 2010s became more global and collaborative than ever before.

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Atoms- they make up ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!

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Atoms- they make up ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!

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No matter what science you are taking, you will need to be familiar with this little part of matter...

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Historical Science... Your Human Genome!

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Historical Science... Your Human Genome!

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Francis Collins: Building on the human genome sequence

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Since the time of Charles Darwin, scientists have marveled at sea turtles' impressive ability to make their way -- often over thousands of kilometers -- through the open ocean and back to the very places where they themselves hatched years before. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on July 16 have evidence that the turtles pull off these impressive feats of navigation with only a crude map to guide them on their way, sometimes going far off course before correcting their direction.

"By satellite tracking turtles travelling to small, isolated oceanic islands, we show that turtles do not arrive at their targets with pinpoint accuracy," says Graeme Hays of Australia's Deakin University. "While their navigation is not perfect, we showed that turtles can make course corrections in the open ocean when they are heading off-route. These findings support the suggestion, from previous laboratory work, that turtles use a crude true navigation system in the open ocean, possibly using the earth's geomagnetic field."

Despite much study of sea turtle navigation, many details were lacking. Hays' team realized that was in part because most sea turtles return to spots along the mainland coast, which are also the easiest places to find.

For the new study, his team had attached satellite tags to nesting green turtles (Chelonia mydas) out of an interest in learning about the extent of the turtles' movements and to identify key areas for conservation. In the process, they realized that, by serendipity, many of the tracked turtles travelled to foraging sites on isolated islands or submerged banks. It allowed them to explore in more detail how turtles make their way to such small and harder-to-find islands.

In total, the researchers recorded the tracks of 33 green sea turtles migrating across the open ocean from their nesting beaches on the island of Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean) to their foraging grounds across the western Indian Ocean, many of which were isolated island targets. Using individual-based models that incorporated ocean currents, they then compared actual migration tracks against candidate navigational models to show that 28 of the 33 turtles didn't re-orient themselves daily or at fine-scales.

As a result, the turtles sometimes travelled well out of their way -- several hundred kilometers off the direct routes to their goal -- before correcting their direction, often in the open ocean. Frequently, they report, turtles did not reach their small island destinations with pinpoint accuracy. Instead, they often overshot and or spent time searching for the target in the final stages of migration.

"We were surprised that turtles had such difficulties in finding their way to small targets," Hays says. "Often they swam well off course and sometimes they spent many weeks searching for isolated islands.

"We were also surprised at the distance that some turtles migrated. Six tracked turtles travelled more than 4,000 kilometers to the east African coast, from Mozambique in the south, to as far north as Somalia. So, these turtles complete round-trip migrations of more than 8,000 kilometers to and from their nesting beaches in the Chagos Archipelago."

The findings lend support to the notion that migrating sea turtles use a true navigation system in the open ocean. They also provide some of the best evidence to date that migrating sea turtles have an ability to re-orient themselves in deep waters in the open ocean, the researchers say. This implies that they have and rely on a map sense. But the results also show that their map lacks fine details, allowing them to operate only at a crude level.

As a result of this imperfect navigation system, the turtles reach their destination only imperfectly. In the process, the turtles spend extra energy and time searching for small islands.

The findings also have implications for the turtles' conservation, Hays says. Turtles travel broadly across the open ocean once nesting season has finished. As a result, he says, "conservation measures need to apply across these spatial scales and across many countries."

The researchers say that they hope the next generation of tag technology will allow them to directly measure the compass heading of migrating turtles as well as their location. "Then we can directly assess how ocean currents carry turtles off-course and gain further insight into the mechanisms that allow turtles to complete such prodigious feats of navigation," Hays says.

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marine biology; sea life; frogs and reptiles; endangered animals; geography; oceanography; global warming; environmental awareness

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Sea turtles' impressive navigation feats rely on surprisingly crude 'map'

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Since the time of Charles Darwin, scientists have marvelled at sea turtles' impressive ability to make their way -- often over thousands of kilometers -- through the open ocean and back to the very places where they themselves hatched years before.

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Recent Science... Mammal brains are VERY alike!

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Recent Science... Mammal brains are VERY alike!

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Researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Prof. Yaniv Assaf of the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Sagol School of Neuroscience and Prof. Yossi Yovel of the School of Zoology, the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, conducted a first-of-its-kind study designed to investigate brain connectivity in 130 mammalian species. The intriguing results, contradicting widespread conjectures, revealed that brain connectivity levels are equal in all mammals, including humans.

"We discovered that brain connectivity -- namely the efficiency of information transfer through the neural network -- does not depend on either the size or structure of any specific brain," says Prof. Assaf. "In other words, the brains of all mammals, from tiny mice through humans to large bulls and dolphins, exhibit equal connectivity, and information travels with the same efficiency within them. We also found that the brain preserves this balance via a special compensation mechanism: when connectivity between the hemispheres is high, connectivity within each hemisphere is relatively low, and vice versa."

Participants included researchers from the Kimron Veterinary Institute in Beit Dagan, the School of Computer Science at TAU and the Technion's Faculty of Medicine. The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience on June 8.

"Brain connectivity is a central feature, critical to the functioning of the brain," Prof. Assaf explains. "Many scientists have assumed that connectivity in the human brain is significantly higher compared to other animals, as a possible explanation for the superior functioning of the 'human animal.'" On the other hand, according to Prof. Yovel, "We know that key features are conserved throughout the evolutionary process. Thus, for example, all mammals have four limbs. In this project we wished to explore the possibility that brain connectivity may be a key feature of this kind -- maintained in all mammals regardless of their size or brain structure. To this end we used advanced research tools."

The project began with advanced diffusion MRI scans of the brains of about 130 mammals, each representing a different species. (All of the brains were removed from dead animals, and no animals were euthanized for the purposes of this study.) The brains, obtained from the Kimron Veterinary Institute, represented a very wide range of mammals -- from tiny bats weighing 10 grams to dolphins whose weight can reach hundreds of kilograms. Since the brains of about 100 of these mammals had never been MRI-scanned before, the project generated a novel and globally unique database. The brains of 32 living humans were also scanned in the same way. The unique technology, which detects the white matter in the brain, enabled the researchers to reconstruct the neural network: the neurons and their axons (nerve fibers) through which information is transferred, and the synapses (junctions) where they meet.

The next challenge was comparing the scans of different types of animals, whose brains vary greatly in size and/or structure. For this purpose the researchers employed tools from Network Theory, a branch of mathematics that enabled them to create and apply a uniform gauge of brain conductivity: the number of synopses a message must cross to get from one location to another in the neural network.

"A mammal's brain consists of two hemispheres connected to each other by a set of neural fibers (axons) that transfer information," Prof. Assaf explains. "For every brain we scanned, we measured four connectivity gages: connectivity in each hemisphere (intrahemispheric connections), connectivity between the two hemispheres (interhemispheric), and overall connectivity. We discovered that overall brain connectivity remains the same for all mammals, large or small, including humans. In other words, information travels from one location to another through the same number of synapses. It must be said, however, that different brains use different strategies to preserve this equal measure of overall connectivity: some exhibit strong interhemispheric connectivity and weaker connectivity within the hemispheres, while others display the opposite."

Prof. Yovel describes another interesting discovery. "We found that variations in connectivity compensation characterize not only different species but also different individuals within the same species," he says. "In other words, the brains of some rats, bats, or humans exhibit higher interhemispheric connectivity at the expense of connectivity within the hemispheres, and the other way around -- compared to others of the same species. It would be fascinating to hypothesize how different types of brain connectivity may affect various cognitive functions or human capabilities such as sports, music or math. Such questions will be addressed in our future research."

"Our study revealed a universal law: Conservation of Brain Connectivity," Prof. Assaf concludes. "This law denotes that the efficiency of information transfer in the brain's neural network is equal in all mammals, including humans. We also discovered a compensation mechanism which balances the connectivity in every mammalian brain. This mechanism ensures that high connectivity in a specific area of the brain, possibly manifested through some special talent (e.g. sports or music) is always countered by relatively low connectivity in another part of the brain. In future projects we will investigate how the brain compensates for the enhanced connectivity associated with specific capabilities and learning processes."

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brain-computer interfaces; intelligence; brain injury; neuroscience; mice; animal learning and intelligence; biology; wild animals

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MRI scans of the brains of 130 mammals, including humans, indicate equal connectivity

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Researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Prof. Yaniv Assaf of the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Sagol School of Neuroscience and Prof. Yossi Yovel of the School of Zoology, the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, conducted a first-of-its-kind study designed to investigate brain connectivity in 130 mammalian species.