Wired's Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007

Every year since it's inception, Wired Magazine compiles a list of the year's top 10 scientific achievements. Here is this year's list without the commentary but with links to the AboveTopSecret.com discussion thread (or at least those that I could find):

1. Researchers Turn Skin Cells to Stem Cells
   
2. Chimpanzees Make Spears for Hunting
   
3. Mummified Dinosaur Excavated and Scanned
   
4. Enzymes Convert Any Blood Type to O
   
5. Laboratory Mice Cured of Rett Syndrome
   
6. Soft Tissue from T. Rex Leg Bone Analyzed
   
7. Engineers Create Transparent Material as Strong as Steel
   
8. Planet Discovered That Could Harbor Life
   
9. Scientists Clone Rhesus Monkey to Produce Stem Cells
   
10. Transistors Get Way Smaller

The full article on Wired can be found here. It contains other links (to the actual paper) as well as a brief summary of what it's about.

If there is thread on ATS for the items on the above list that I have missed, please don't hesitate to post the link here.

So, which scientific breakthrough has you gaping in awe? For me it would be number two on the list, but number four is pretty spiffy as well.

reply to post by Beachcoma


Awesome post! Sometimes I miss out on these kinds of threads since they aren't has high-profile as reptiles or UFO's and so drop down the board too quickly. I can't wait to go through them. Thanks!

reply to post by kosmicjack


Yup. Number one on the list has got only 4 replies (two of them by the thread starter) while number eight has got 10 pages of replies (even though they've been discovering extrasolar planets for ages now).

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, the membership here are mostly interested in Aliens and UFOs.

So the chimpanzee thing is really freaking me out. Note to self: Be nice to monkeys and make sure they are fed.

T-Rex..."tastes just like chicken". I guess that shouldn't be a surprise, what doesn't?

To your point, I was shocked to see the lack of participation in most of those threads.

Originally posted by Beachcoma
Every year since it's inception, Wired Magazine compiles a list of the year's top 10 scientific achievements. Here is this year's list without the commentary but with links to the AboveTopSecret.com discussion thread (or at least those that I could find):

1. Researchers Turn Skin Cells to Stem Cells
   
2. Chimpanzees Make Spears for Hunting
   
3. Mummified Dinosaur Excavated and Scanned
   
4. Enzymes Convert Any Blood Type to O
   
5. Laboratory Mice Cured of Rett Syndrome
   
6. Soft Tissue from T. Rex Leg Bone Analyzed
   
7. Engineers Create Transparent Material as Strong as Steel
   
8. Planet Discovered That Could Harbor Life
   
9. Scientists Clone Rhesus Monkey to Produce Stem Cells
   
10. Transistors Get Way Smaller

So, which scientific breakthrough has you gaping in awe? For me it would be number two on the list, but number four is pretty spiffy as well.

The interesting thing is that the *promoting* of these news stories has happened this year. For a number of the items, this is actually old news.

The mummified dino was big news in paleontology awhile back -- the scan is newly presented on the Internet, but was conference and news thread news awhile ago. And this isn't the first soft tissue they've found from T-rex (or other dinos), either.

The chimp spearmaking was fascinating but raised a lot of questions (and we've seen examples of wars and toolmaking in chimp culture.) I think the stem cell research is the one that I like best. They've been working on this for awhile, and it's satisfying to see public announcements of the progress.

But I have to admit that my sentimental favorites are all the news stories about the new "tricks" that the Japanese are teaching robots. They're pushing a lot of machine and social boundaries and there's some interesting new directions (and social questions) in the making.

I was surprised to see Intel's 45nm technology make the list. Moore's Law "the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years." hasn't been broken yet.

Transistors have been getting smaller at roughly the same rate for quite a while now. The Hafnium breakthrough did allow it to continue, but at every "node change" (130nm to 90nm to 65nm...etc), the next one is currently impossible. Meaning, when 90nm was acheived, it was impossible to make anything 65nm... yet, 18mo - 2yrs later it happens.

It is amazing that they manage to acheive the impossible every two years or so, but they have been doing it for so long it just surprises me to see it make the list.