Slashdot Mirror
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."
Largest man-created crater on the surface of Mars? That's got to count for something!
I consider that a pretty awesome feat as i assume many others do
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.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
Your ignorance is interesting.
It's not illegal. You just won't get federal funding.
Prohibition on Federal Funding for Cloning of Human Beings
In case your interested.
For discovering that all previous science and history is false and the world is in fact a giant ant farm created 6000 years ago by a cloud dwelling egomaniac
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If you have a scientific breakthrough, please wait till the next year to announce it, otherwise you won't make it the top 10 list.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
We have the first actual picture of a planet orbiting another star... not inferential data, not radio info, but optical (not sure about wavelength, but that's irrelevant).
And it's not even on the list? The still questionable "discovery" of a wet Martian past makes the top of the list, but a deffinitive leap of scientific discovery (ie a fuzzy and blurred but very real picture of an extrasolar planet) doesn't even receive mention on the list (even if the article was kind enough to mention it)?
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
BBC have more bandwidth than God. Slashdot is more likely to get BBCed than BBC is to get slashdotted. =)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I don't happen to believe in the soul as it appears in most religions, but I fail to see how a successful cloning experiment completely disproves the idea that helps countless millions cope with their lives. Statements like these hurt the image of the scientific community in the eyes of the public, i.e. the people the science is supposedly trying to improve the lives of.
If he had really disproven the soul or God (which is impossible to to the vague nature of their descriptions) then he should by all means spread this proof, but since he hasn't, then he should just STFU.
He is making scientific conclusions based on his faith that the soul is not real. That's just stupid.
_____
Thank you.
In the United Nations a measure was considered to address human cloning. That measure was not taken up and has been postponed until next year. The following countries wanted to take up the issue and are assumed to be against human cloning: Against: Albania, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chile, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (the Federated States of), Nauru, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Spain, Suriname, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, United States of America, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela and Zambia.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression. Maybe what bothers me most is the term "junk" DNA, which I've never actually heard another scientist use. It's a fictitious concept perpetuated by science writers so that they can feign surprise every time someone can attribute a function to a non-coding piece of DNA (and claim that the scientific community was surprised as well).
All that aside, I'm sure there are big breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of non-coding regions, and it probably deserves to be mentioned. However, one important point to make is that in spite of all this, there ARE parts of the genome that are unquestionably useless evolutionary vestiges. This is not necessarily mysterious, but it is interesting (for example, providing what is in my mind the most convincing evidence of evolution).
But Professor Higgins also sees philosophical implications in the work... Science is about trying to understand where we come from, what our purpose is.
;)
Religion is about trying to understand what our purpose is. Anyone claiming science is for said purpose has merely made a religion for themselves out of science. Science is the accumulation of information using the scientific method. Repeat after me, science is in no way meant to be a search for our purpose as humans. Class dismissed.
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...
The second sentence doesn't imply the first. It's as if you said: "There is no music. There are only density waves in the air."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
... seems to blow all that other crap away, even if the news was released in december. evidence of water once being on mars is big... but hardly surprising enough to rank at #1.
Finally, the final nail in the coffin of God! This'll shut those Christians up for sure.
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
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.
I am trolling
- Medicines for the World's Poor. "Public-private partnerships" emerged as a force in 2004, according to Science magazine, affecting the way medicines are developed and delivered to emerging nations.
Sounds like applied science to me.Personally though if I were Science I wouldn't give SpaceShipOne a prize this year, since getting someone into space isn't technically by itself a new development in even applied science. I'd give it to them in a year or two-- once they manage to successfully begin operating their spaceliner business, since that IS going to be a dramatic change in how science is applied...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts