Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2004

TarrVetus writes "Science Magazine's The Top Ten Science Breakthroughs of 2004 have been announced. The winner: The NASA Rovers and their evidence of water on Mars. The runner up was the Hobbit species found in Indonesia. Other breakthroughs include cloned human embryos and the first discovered pulsar pair."

Comments

How many get debunked later?

[JossiRossi]

Just as a generic curiosity. I wonder how many winners of the past eventually turned out to be false or incorreect? Cause the Hobbits are still debated (although it's not some big controversy). Just to put "breakthroughs" in perspective, because some breakthroughs just lead to empty mineshafts, not gold.

Re:Hobbits?

[wronski]

"If I remember correctly, the finding of the new Hobbit species was discredited as a "dwarf" mutant of a long-discovered human ancestor. Was this discrediting discredited itself?"

Most paleontologist believe this is a new species. The bones (they aren't even fossilised!) were found by an Australian/Indonesian team that was originaly lookng for evidence of the people who first colonized Australia. Apparently a bigshot Indonesian paleontologist got pissed of by being left out (some scientific bigshots expect to get their names papers without having to actually do any work), and then...

One of Indonesia's leading palaeontologists, Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, has grabbed the hobbit remains and locked them away in his safe, refusing to let other scientists study them.

In addition, he rejected the widespread view that the hobbits are a separate human species, claiming they are a pygmy form of modern humans who suffered microcephaly, a disorder that produces a small brain.

The Australian scientists who dug up the bones of the hobbits, officially dubbed Homo floresiensis, have pleaded with Professor Jacob to return the bones as they may contain vital DNA clues as to their exact ancestry. The seven skeletons were found last year in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores by an Australian and Indonesian team.

Mars Water = Hype?

[smug_lisp_weenie]

Ok, so the rover found that there were some funny-looking spherules in a crater on Mars. Maybe those spherules could be created if there had been water a long time ago... So it might be possible that a long time ago there might have been some puddles of water on Mars... This means that it might be possible that there is liquid water around on other planets outside of earth... Water is considered an important ingredient of life, although there is no reason to know that you couldn't have life without water, and even if water is needed, you need many, many more things to be just so for life to form besides a bit of water... Is it just me, or isn't this pretty damn underwhelming compared to the progress we've had in other sciences in the last decade? (human genome, internet, stem cells, etc.)

Why do I always get the feeling that the scientists who get to decide that "major" advances such as Mars water have a personal interest in generating PR for their field?

I agree that research in space is pretty neat and all and is worth doing, but couldn't we all agree that the discoveries recently at NASA have been pretty disappointing, even if they are valuable for some esoteric research fields?

...and how come when the whole "life on Mars" thing happened a few years back, the NASA researchers were all parading in front of TV cameras when they found some interesting "formations" on a mars rock found in a meteor, but then when those formation were found to be somewhat suspect, they were all mum about it... so all that the public saw about doubts of their hyped findings was a small article in the back of Scientific American? Are the NASA researchers really doing good science here?

...just to be clear, I'll gladly admit my ignorance- I hope someone can give some clear answers to my questions and can tell me if there is really something exciting enough about these spherules in some Mars crater...

---
Conrad Barski

Re:is water really necessary for life?

[m50d]

Water does a few important things - it's liquid across a wide temperature range, and allows lots of reactions to take place in it - and one very rare one, it's denser when liquid than solid. We're not sure if that last is essential to life, but it might be, in which case there are no alternatives to water. And even if it isn't, there are still very few substances that would be liquid all year round on a planet, something that we're pretty sure life needs.