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Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009
Wired has posted their favorite scientific breakthroughs of the past year. The feats include things like the confirmation of element 114, a cancer-detecting breathalyzer, the power of jellyfish and more. What other discoveries should have made the list and what might we look forward to in 2010? "Also this year, researchers at the University of Washington cured two adult monkeys of colorblindness by giving them injections of a gene that produces pigments necessary for color vision. After the treatment, the animals scored higher on a computerized color blindness test. In the coming years, gene therapy will be tested as a remedy for all sorts of inherited diseases, cancer, viral infections and even high cholesterol."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16585-gallery-the-next-generation-of-mirrors.html
Who'd have guessed that element 114 would turn out to be a cancer-detecting breathalyzer?
Obviously the most important breakthrough of the decade.
I like the way spam was eliminated.
Depending on your perspective this was a breakthrough, perhaps financially, perhaps scientifically, perhaps ecologically, etc...
The answer to the question, why do mirrors reverse left/right and not up/down is simple: they do neither. A few seconds of ray tracing show that they reverse front to back.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
So, that makes you 9 inches tall?
With all due respect to the achievements heralded in the Wired article, the scientific paper that most blew me away in 2009 was Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions by Powner et.al. in the 14 May 2009 issue of Nature. The authors demonstrated an efficient synthesis of a phosphorylated ribonucleotide under mild conditions using only a small number of simple molecules likely to have been present in the "pre-biotic soup" of early Earth. The reaction is so facile that it would be surprising if it didn't occur given the presence of these molecules (cyanimide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde, and inorganic phosphate). Because the products are activated ribonucleotides, they would have readily polymerized into something like RNA and quite probably the first self-replicating molecule.
To me this was one of the biggest "missing links" in the story of how life might have arisen from simple organic molecules, and that scenario now seems like a slam-dunk. The rest, as they say, is history...
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant.
This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
No, he's just really bad at press-ups.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... as a driver who started driving utility vehicles shortly after getting his licence, I can attest to the fact that the side mirrors are invaluable for reversing a loaded ute (or car/truck for that matter) into tight spaces. Perhaps the intention is not to distort the field-of-view when they are used for this purpose?
The direction it reverses is based on how you turn around to see the image. George Gamow explained this. Rotate a book around the vertical axis (yaw) and the text is correct top-to-bottom but reversed right-to-left. Rotate it around the horizontal axis (pitch) and the text is correct left-to-right but reversed bottom-to-top. This applies to how the observer turns around to see his/her image as well -- either by rotating around on your feet or by flipping over and standing on your head.
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant. This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
(Disclaimer: I try to not be an asshole, but I couldn't resist. Moderators: try to keep your knees from jerking. There's no -1, "tl;dr but that other guy's dying and you're a vain, self-centered, mentally ill, delusional pervert.")
I'd be really happy if the medical community would follow up on studies that show the biological basis for transsexualism (such as brain imaging, which was mildly successful at predicting whether a person would be a transsexual or not). I have transsexualism, which, if treated before/at puberty costs approximately $10,000 for a genital surgery (mostly cosmetic, but required by law to get the documents correct) and $1 per day in artificial hormones. I met a fellow geek at a sci-fi/anime convention in Detriot a while back with a similar condition. She didn't even know that brain sex could be measured using existing brain imaging techniques.
I just wanted to point out that it's interesting that insurance will pay $120,000 per year to keep you alive and well, but insurance is completely unwilling to part with one of your monthly payments to give me a normal life as the gender my brain is wired for, thus curing me completely. But no, I'm not dying (although psychologists who believe that transsexualism is a mental illness to be cured with electroshock cost me my family, since I wasn't going to agree to have my brain fried just to prove myself right. My only present neurological issue is being a woman [which i understand is something that affects 50%-51% of the population]; I'd hate to get a few actual neurological problems that would affect my software development work such as long term/short term memory problems that electroshock can cause.)
Now, if there were some real science instead of pseudoscience in the treatment of transsexualism, I could have been diagnosed before puberty, I'd look and sound exactly like a normal girl, to the point where I probably wouldn't even care about "transgender issues" more than remembering to take a pill every morning and get a yearly checkup at an endocrinologist. (Of course, having an almost completely normal female body sans menstruation, there probably wouldn't be transgender issues to worry about as long as one steers clear of feminists and other bigots.)
C'est la vie. Didn't mean to say I've got it worse, quite the opposite really. I've got it pretty good for a transsexual, even. I probably won't be one of the 50% of transsexuals who turns to suicide.
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My wife's college roomie was a complete dual-gender hermaphrodite, and while in college, went through the surgery to go straight female. She has major endocrine problems and is legally blind.
I agree fully re: your science vs pseudoscience remark. I think one of the biggest failings of the USA has been our being dominated by Puritan thought. It's amazing how backwards we are compared to some countries, yet we try to spread our way of life to others.
My condition falls in to the category of potentially fatal, probably not directly fatal. I had pneumonia four times this year from February to June, it took my wife demanding that a specific test be run for me to get diagnosed. It's common for people with my condition, CVID (Common Variable Immune Deficiency), to go six years before diagnosis. That was on top of two operations for carpal tunnel. I was fortunate in that I never had to be hospitalized for my pneumonias.
If I didn't get my Vivaglobin, I'd probably be an almost total shut-in. As it is, my immunologist has released me to return to school. It did cost me my full-time job: we decided it was best for my health to go to part-time telecommuting and avoid all of the people who go in to work sick, also to reduce my stress level and to try and improve my mental health.
The thing that makes my treatment so expensive is that it takes 1,000 blood donations to make one treatment, and I need it weekly. And it's quite possible that I'm about to get screwed: some health insurance companies have been changing the tier that primary immunodeficiency falls in to, making the patient pay 10-30% of the costs. We have no idea what will happen if that takes place, probably see how low we can go in treatment dosage and still maintain my health.
Health problems suck. Good luck to you, V.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
The article is asking which other discoveries are worth considering, and you both are turning the discussion into a wish-list of what we would like to be discovered.
All very worthy, since I agree all medical conditions should be treated, but completely irrelevant to the original article (so the Moderators should let their knees jerk freely).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Adding genes to fix color blindness really caught my attention. If that can be done, it should be possible to turn anyone into a tetrachromat or better.
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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/discoveries-gallery/all/1
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'd put this at top 10 of a decade, much less a year. Someplace or other http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/01/01/0945239 carried a story about the first real advance in neural/machine interface technology in years.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B