Sandy-gram

[#1]

I’m a junkie for top 10 lists. And there’s no better time of year to recap stuff of all shapes, sizes and themes than New Year’s. I won’t bore you with the top 10 resolutions. Hey, I’ve got nine of them on my list….but, Time magazine does a cool round-up of “Top 10s”…from quotes to commercials, movies and news stories. One of my favorites? Top ten scientific discoveries for 2010. Coming in at number 10: How does a cat lap without getting its whiskers and chin wet. Science now knows!

10. The Lapping Cat

We breathlessly wait for science to provide us an understanding of how cats can lap milk without getting wet. Whenever we poor humans lap milk from bowl mayhem ensues in the form of dribble that ends up all over our face and clothes. Even our best friend the dog can’t seem to avoid the mess.  MIT, Princeton and Virginia Tech announced that scientists have cracked this mystery.

Painstakingly analyzing high-speed videos, they determined that cats daintily curl its tongue down and under and touch the surface of the liquid lightly. When it laps—which it does at a speed of about four times per second—a complex interplay of gravity, inertia and fluid dynamics moves about 0.1 ml of liquid into its mouth per lap with no slosh or spillage. Another great mystery solved. 

9. A New Element? Maybe.

The temporary name for ununseptium is element 117. It’s an extremely heavy combination of berkelium and calsium isotopes created in a particle accelerator in Debna, Russia. It existed for only the tiniest faction of a second before vanishing, so it must be recreated independently elsewhere before it earns a permanent spot on the famed periodic table.

8. Meet the Ancestors

The woman and boy who were entombed in an avalanche of sediment in South Africa's Malapa cave some 2 million years ago would have never dreamed that they could fill an important spot in the evolutionary arc of humans.  Described in the journal Science in April as a critical find, some Paleontologists disagree about the significance of the new species, dubbed Australopithecus sediba. But its intriguing mix of ancient and comparatively modern skeletal features at least suggests that it was a direct ancestor of Homo erectus, which in turn is a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, a group that includes you, your family…and virtually everyone else in the world.

7. Move over Harry Potter

British physicist Prof. Martin McCall of Imperial College published a paper in the journal Optics describing the theoretical possibility of something he calls "metamaterials," fabric or other forms of matter that could be molecularly engineered to scramble the usual flow of electromagnetic energy (a form of space-time cloak for us layman). Light passing through it would emerge unevenly, creating gaps in time and space.  His only half-joking description illustrates a safecracker entering a room, robbing a safe and leaving while a surveillance camera reveals nothing amiss. One tiny glitch in the plan: given the speed at which light travels, invisibility for even a few minutes would require a cloak about 100 million meters (320 million ft) long.

6. Now showing at a Galaxy near You

Astronomers have continued their ongoing nose count of known planets outside our solar system — and they found a lot of new celestial citizens. There's HIP 13044b, a world circling a distant star that was once not even part of the Milky Way, but was instead snagged by it gravitationally. There are up to seven new planets orbiting a star called HD 10180, about 127 light years from Earth. Most exciting was the discovery of Gliese 581g, the first extrasolar planet discovered that orbits its sun in the so-called Goldilocks zone, a distance at which conditions are neither too cold nor too hot for life. Alas, follow-up studies have now cast doubt on whether the planet exists at all. But few scientists’ doubt that more like worlds are out there — or that they'll be discovered soon.

5. Old Genes

Why do some people seem to age more gracefully than others? One reason could be a little DNA sequence clustered near a human gene called TERC. The TERC gene is already known to produce an enzyme called telomerase. Every time a cell divides, telomeres shorten, leading to a chromosomal fraying associated with aging. In a British study published in the journal Genetics, scientists found that people with one copy of the gene had slightly shorter telomeres similar to those of people three or four years older who didn't carry the gene; in other words, they were aging three or four years faster. In another study, researchers at Harvard Medical School were able to switch on a telomerase gene in prematurely aged mice, and reverse the aging process; the mice's organs regenerated, their shrunken brains increased in size, and their fertility was restored. But there's reason for caution: Rapidly dividing, semi-immortal cells are also known as cancer cells, meaning that the search for eternal youth could yield an entirely different — less pleasant — outcome.

4. Where’s Geraldo when you need him?

The pyramids of Mexico's Teotihuacan have always been one of North America's archaeological treasures. But those and other remains of the ancient city have always been a mystery too. A door into Teotihuacan's shrouded past cracked open a little this year when an archaeological bot equipped with a camera was sent on a subterranean trek and found a 12-ft. wide corridor with a perfectly preserved arched roof that was built — and sealed — nearly two millennia ago. Archeologists are hopeful that it may be connected to the tomb of a high priest, a find that could reveal volumes about how the people who constructed the Mesoamerican metropolis once lived.

3. Don’t bring your Bikini to the Moon…just yet.

We’ve all heard of moon rocks, but water? It turns out that the moon is a lot wetter than we ever knew. NASA's LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission made that discovery when it crash-landed a spent rocket booster near the moon's South Pole and then directed the satellite to analyze the plume that was blasted up. It wasn’t news that there was water vapor in the plume. We knew the lunar poles were home to at least traces of permafrost. The big surprise was how much: about 50% more than astronomers anticipated, making the moon roughly twice as wet as the Sahara Desert. While it may not be great for snorkeling, it could be enough to allow future settlers to manufacture their own water supply on-site, which would be easier and cheaper than hauling it from Earth.

 

2. Big News about a Small Particle

Conventional particle physics dictates that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created during the Big Bang, but that's impossible, since matter and antimatter mutually annihilate. The only way anything could be left over to start a universe would be if the scales had been tipped slightly in favor of matter, a sensible theory, but one that had never been glimpsed in action—until this year. In particle collisions at Fermilab, scientists discovered that the number of muons (a kind of heavy electron) created exceeded anti-muons by about 1%. That's not much, but long ago it was apparently just enough to kick start the cosmos.

And the number one scientific discovery for 2010…

 

1. Horn o’ Plenty

The horniest dinosaur that ever lived, 15 horns to be exact, decorated the giant head of the 5,500-lb. (2,500-kg) Kosmoceratops, a beast that lived 76 million years ago in what is now Utah. Its fossilized remains were discovered by a University of Utah expedition in 2007, but the dino was formally described and named only in September of 2010. The bones shed light not only on the fanciful kinds of beasts that lived so long ago, but on the unfamiliar place North America was. Though the Kosmoceratops lived in Utah, it was a coastal dweller, making its home along the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a great body of water that divided the continent in two.

Original list compiled by Jeffrey Kluger. Read more top 10 lists at Time Magazine online.

[#2]

Wow, fascinating article! It was really intriguing to read about the scientific ideas and discoveries that are so out of the realm of my daily life. How did I miss those? I'll have to get better about expanding my horizons!