Last week, editors of the science journal, Science came up with a list of what they considered the ten most important scientific breakthroughs of the year, 2014.
In this article, we reproduce their choices, which include groundbreaking advances in medicine, robotics, synthetic biology, and paleontology, among others.

Rosina
Top on the list is Rosetta and its lander module, known as Philae, made major headlines in November when Philae touched down on the surface of the speeding comet. Even though the landing was rougher than expected-Philae bounced off the surface of 67P and came to rest on its side, quite a distance from its target. Nonetheless, it was, however, the first-ever soft landing on a comet. And the data from these two space probes are already shedding new light on the formation and evolution of such comets.

Launched in March, 2004, by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Rosetta spacecraft is now orbiting 67P, sometimes getting as close as 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) to the comet’s surface. Its on-board camera can discriminate between objects on the comet that are just centimeters apart while an array of spectrometers, known as the Rosetta Orbiter Sensor for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA), can sample gases from 67P’s coma, or the thin halo of an atmosphere that surrounds the comet.

ROSINA has already detected water, methane, and hydrogen as well as some rarer species, including formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, in 67P’s coma. Such findings might help researchers figure out whether certain comets could have have helped to jump-start life on the early Earth by delivering water and organic molecules.


The Dinosaur-Bird Transition: This year, a series of papers that compared the fossils of early birds and dinosaurs to modern birds revealed how certain dinosaur lineages developed small, lightweight body plans, allowing them to evolve into many types of birds and survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction about 66 million years ago.
Young Blood Fixes Old:Researchers demonstrated that blood from a young mouse–or even just a factor known as GDF11 from young mouse blood–can rejuvenate the muscles and brains of older mice. The findings have led to a clinical trial in which Alzheimer’s patients are receiving plasma from young donors.


Getting Robots to Cooperate: New software and interactive robots that, for example, instruct swarms of termite-inspired bots to build a simple structure or prompt a thousand quarter-sized machines to form squares, letters, and other two-dimensional shapes are proving that robots can work together without any human supervision after all.


Neuromorphic Chips: Mimicking the architecture of a human brain, computer engineers at IBM and elsewhere rolled out the first large-scale “neuromorphic” chips this year, which are designed to process information in ways that are more akin to living brains.


Beta Cells: Two groups pioneered two different methods for growing cells that closely resemble beta cells–the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas–in the laboratory this year, giving researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study diabetes.


Indonesian Cave Art: Researchers realized that hand stencils and animal paintings in a cave in Indonesia, once thought to be 10,000 years old, were actually between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. The discoveries suggest that humans in Asia were producing symbolic art as early as the first European cave painters.


Manipulating Memory: Using optogenetics–a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light–researchers showed that they could manipulate specific memories in mice. Deleting existing memories and implanting false ones, they went so far as to switch the emotional content of a mouse memory from good to bad, and vice versa.


CubeSats: Although they’ve been blasted into space for more than a decade now, cheap satellites with sides that are just 10 centimeters squared, called CubeSats, really took off in 2014. Once considered educational tools for college students, these miniature satellites have started to do some real science, according to researchers.


Expanding the Genetic Alphabet: Researchers have engineered E. coli that harbors two additional nucleic acids–X and Y–in addition to the normal G, T, C, and A that make up the standard building blocks of DNA. Such synthetic bacteria can’t reproduce outside the laboratory, but they may be used to create designer proteins with “unnatural” amino acids.


Source: http://www.edificationinfo.com/top-10-science-breakthroughs-of-2014/

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