Top Science Stories

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 Top Science Stories
A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the blogger of Amazing Facts.
July 25, 2014 |By Deepak Kumar
1. Moon Shot to the Head: Global Initiatives Target the Brain
Big Science in 2013 embraced not a search, but a quest to elicit the fundamental workings of mind and brain. Large-scale endeavors worldwide embarked on extended sojourns to decode the signals coursing along the 100 trillion connections that tie together 86 billion neurons of the human brain.
Hacking the 1.36-kilogram organ that resides underneath the skull may take decades, perhaps centuries. Still, one giant leap for neuroscience—or at least one small step—came as the Obama administration announced that its second-term showpiece science project would target the brain.
Earlier this year Pres. Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro technologies, or BRAIN, initiative. It intends to develop tools that can provide a recording of thousands or even millions of neurons. The goal: gaining an understanding of how physiology—brain cell activity—translates into mental functions. It would reveal the secret of how your neurons file away for later recall a just-learned phone number or perhaps recognize the bloom of a red rose.
A still-more ambitious undertaking had its formal start the second week in October under the aegis of the European Commission. The Human Brain Project targets a full computer simulation of the body’s master controller within 10 years—incorporating the findings from an array of projects, ranging from analyses of cognition in mice and men to building faster supercomputers. Other brain initiatives in China, Israel and Australia are underway. A remarkable consensus seems to be emerging that the yawning gap between mind and brain cannot be bridged without the sustained enterprise of the best and brightest from every corner of the globe. —Gary Stix
2. Drones Fly Toward Wide Commercial Use, Raising New Concerns
Drones—or at least talk of them—were everywhere in 2013. The unmanned aerial vehicles, which have already changed how the U.S. wages war, have the potential to revolutionize law enforcement, wildlife monitoring, news gathering and, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced, package delivery.
Drone plans are taking shape across numerous industries as the U.S. awaits new guidelines from the Federal Aviation Administration, due in 2015, on the domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles. In the absence of regulatory language, entrepreneurs and technophiles such as Bezos have dreamed up ambitious plans (too ambitious, perhaps) for drone use, just as others have sounded the alarm about the potential for drones to malfunction catastrophically or even fall prey to hackers. Meanwhile, privacy advocates worry that widespread drone use will infringe on civil liberties that have long been taken for granted. In an April editorial Scientific American cautioned that unmanned aerial vehicles “pose an immense threat to privacy” if misused by law enforcement agencies, private eyes or even nosy citizens.
And then, of course, there are the drones that kill. In December a drone strike reportedly targeted a wedding convoy in Yemen, killing more than a dozen people. As the powerful, potentially dangerous technology adapts to more and more civilian uses, Scientific, “we must stay informed to make sure that drones are deployed for beneficial rather than insidious ends.”—John Matson
3. Gene Therapy Achieves Major Success
Have blood cancers met their match? Certainly, the enthusiasm greeting gene-therapy results presented in early December at a conference seemed to indicate so. The new weapon against leukemia, however, is not perfect; still, it marks a significant achievement.
In a study begun in 2010 on adults and children suffering from chronic and acute forms of leukemia, researchers extracted the patients’ T cells—the immune system’s targeted torpedoes against invaders. The researchers then genetically modified the T cells to recognize a protein that only exists on cancerous cells and to rapidly proliferate on meeting them. Injected back into the patients, the engineered cells could then seek out and destroy those cells.
Preliminary analyses suggest that positive responses can occur up to two thirds of the time. In a study of 27 patients with acute leukemia, 24 showed complete remission one month after treatment, although six have since relapsed. In another study of 15 patients, six showed complete remission and another six showed a partial response.
Other scientists at the conference also reported positive results with gene therapy on other conditions, including SCID-X1, or “bubble boy” disease. Treatment restored the immune systems of eight of nine boys.
In addition to the reported successes, none of the studies uncovered serious side effects of gene therapy, which in past clinical trials led to a few deaths—most notably that of Jesse Gelsinger in 1999, which set the field back many years. The latest results suggest that gene therapy has turned an important corner and is on the verge of becoming a viable treatment option for life-threatening conditions. Look for an overview article scheduled for the March 2014 Scientific American. —Philip Yam
4. Confirmed: Fracking and Related Operations Cause Earthquakes
The boom in oil and natural gas in the U.S. has an unwanted by-product: contaminated. The nation's fossil-fuel wells produce at least nine billion liters of the stuff every day, and disposing of all that wastewater has become oil and gas companies’ biggest headache—not least because the most common current disposal method is causing earthquakes.
Such wastewater is typically dumped back down a disposal well and forgotten. But an uptick in earthquakes in normally seismically quiescent parts of the country, such as Oklahoma and Ohio, has turned attention to whether that water is promoting temblors. And studies published this year of the unusually powerful earthquakes near Prague, Okla., show that wastewater disposal is indeed to blame.
This is not a huge surprise. Experiments in Colorado in the 1960s proved that injecting water underground could spawn earthquakes. But even pumping water underground at high pressure—the practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—can set the ground rumbling. The question is: Now that we know, what, if anything, should be done about it? —David Biello
5. The First Neutrinos from Outside the Solar System
For the first time this year astronomers caught neutrinos originating in distant galaxies, an advance that heralds the start of a new era in astronomy—the era of seeing with particles, not just light.
Scientists have been studying neutrinos for decades, but almost all of the neutrinos here on Earth come from nearby sources—either our own sun or from high-energy cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere. This year astronomers using the IceCube detector at the South Pole reported the discovery of 28 neutrinos that were so energetic they could not have possibly originated in these local sources. (Researchers named the two most powerful neutrinos “Ernie” and “Bert” after the beloved Sesame Street characters.)
As for what spawned these ultra powerful neutrinos, speculation abounds—the particles didn’t all arrive in a single spurt and appear to come from random directions on the sky. Once scientists can correlate the location of a neutrino burst to an optical counterpart—possibly coming from an energetic, short-lived object like a supernova—the era of neutrino astrophysics will begin in earnest. —Michael Moyer
More:
» Antarctic Neutrino Observatory Detects Unexplained High-Energy Particles
» High-Energy Neutrinos Herald a New Dawn for Particle Astronomy
» Neutrino Experiments Light the Way to New Physics