Most Important Science Stories of 2006
Humans controlled computers with the power of thought, built an invisibility cloak, cracked the mystery of a 3,000-year-old computer, discovered a new element, unearthed a missing link and kicked Pluto out of the planet club--and those are just the highlights.
By
The Editors
It's hard to imagine a world without seafood, but
regional fishing stocks have collapsed before, so what's to stop global fishing stocks from doing the same?
It's long been known that
water flowed across the surface of Mars in the past, but scientists were shocked to discover that liquid
water exists on
Mars today. Whether or not that means life has ever existed on Mars is still up for debate--but if
Mars's oceans were as acidic as scientists currently believe, all signs point to no.
As if that weren't enough,
extremophiles were also discovered in an ultraheated environment as acidic as vinegar,
caught in the act of repairing chromosomes after massive doses of radiation, and
found use as models of extraterrestrial life for NASA.
There's been more than a little debate about
whether or not dark matter actually exists, but the collision of two clusters--known as the Bullet cluster--revealed the existence of the mythical stuff via a measure of its
gravitational lensing.
The attempt to test a "superantibody" on human volunteers highlighted the pitfalls of human testing, even after extensive animal tests.
In a late-breaking end-of-year development, it appears that eliminating hormone therapy has led to a 7 percent drop in the rate of breast
cancer, after decades of increases. Researchers
debated for years whether hormone therapy would have a measurable effect on rates of breast cancer--if this finding holds, we can consider that debate settled.
Mere months after making headlines for proposing a technologically feasible way of rendering objects invisible, a research team demonstrated a rudimentary example of an invisibility cloak. Harry Potter's invisibility cloak it ain't--this one is constructed from
metamaterials, and only works in the microwave range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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