2013: A breakthrough year for science

UNSEATING 2012 from its throne as one of the most remarkable years for science in the 21st century would require a truly brilliant discovery or breakthrough.

After all, 2012 was the year of the Higgs boson, the so-called ‘God particle’ that gives everything in the universe mass. When the scientists at CERN proclaimed its discovery, it immediately ranked as one of the most important insights into nature’s secrets, right up there with the revelations by Newton and Einstein.

However, though 2013 did not involve a final piece in the Standard Model of physics jigsaw, it was still a great year for science...

- Space travel got its newest poster boy since John Glenn and its biggest icon since Neil Armstrong when Canadian Chris Hadfield began to woo the world with tweets from orbit.

During his five-month stay as commander of the International Space Station he clocked up more than 1 million followers on Twitter and was described by Forbes magazine as “perhaps the most social media savvy astronaut ever to leave Earth”.

He took images of nighttime Dublin and tweeted: “Tá Éire fíorálainn! Land of green hills & dark beer. With capital Dublin glowing in the Irish night.”

However, his recording of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ mixed science and music to make space trendy and fascinating. Even Mr Bowie was a fan of the video: “Hallo Spaceboy...” the Thin White Duke tweeted.

- There was less good news from space on Feb 15 when a meteor exploded about 30km above Chelyabinsk, in Russia.

The blast shattered glass, injuring about 1,500 people. Nasa estimated the space rock was about 15m-20m in diameter. The event renewed concerns about the threat of near-Earth objects (NEOs) and the need for funding to help find and track deadly debris from the birth of the solar system.

- Sept 12, 2013 is a date that will forever be etched in the history of space travel. On that date, Nasa announced that the first manmade object had reached interstellar space.

Voyager 1 had been zipping through the solar system since it launched from Earth 36 years earlier, but it took all that time — despite travelling at an impressive 17km per second — to leave the sun’s neighbourhood and enter a region called the heliopause.

- Back on terra firma, news that a carnivorous mammal had been discovered sparked great excitement in August — and it helped that the creature was cute too.

The olinguito weighs about 1kg and lives high in the Andean forests, but the discovery of such a large animal proves that there still remains so much for us to find on our own planet.

- From finding creatures in the wild to unearthing extinct giants, the oldest known tyrannosaur turned up in Utah in November.

Given the name Lythronax, meaning ‘king of gore’, this meat-eating dinosaur could have given everybody’s favourite dinosaur T rex a run for his money, if it hadn’t ruled the Earth around 15 million years earlier than the ‘king of the terrible lizards’.

- We have seen and heard reports concerning face transplants in previous years, but in September the amazing image of a man with two noses highlighted just how advanced the science is. A young man called Xiaolian, from the Fujian province of China, damaged his nose in a traffic accident. Surgeons couldn’t fix it so they grew a new one on his forehead before transplanting it.

- The frightening power of nature — and our powerlessness in the face of it — was once again on show in Asia as Typhoon Haiyan devastated the region, killing more than 6,000 people and pushing international rescue and relief efforts to the brink. It also raised more awareness of the weird weather wreaked by climate change.

- In December, China successfully landed its first rover on the surface of the Moon. The Chang’e 3 is the third phase of China’s five-phase mission to explore Earth’s natural satellite.