The Rosetta space mission and its dramatic landing on a comet 300 million miles from Earth tops this year’s list of breakthrough achievements selected by the prestigious American journal Science.
Marking the high point of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, the Philae probe bounced onto the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last month.
Data from both the mothership orbiter and Philae are already starting to shed new light on the formation and evolution of comets.
Science news editor Tim Appenzeller said: “Philae’s landing was an amazing feat and got the world’s attention.
“But the whole Rosetta mission is the breakthrough. It’s giving scientists a ringside seat as a comet warms up, breathes and evolves.”
Rosetta has already detected water, methane and hydrogen in the gas surrounding the comet.
The journal’s list of nine other 2014 breakthroughs was as follows, in no particular order.
• The ‘Dinosaur-bird transition’: A series of papers that compared the fossils of early birds and dinosaurs to modern birds revealed how certain dinosaur lineages developed small, lightweight body plans. This allowed them to evolve into many types of birds and survive the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
• Young blood fixes old: Scientists demonstrated that blood from a young mouse can rejuvenate the muscles and brains of older mice. The findings have led to a clinical trial in which Alz-heimer’s patients are receiving plasma from young donors.
• Getting robots to cooperate: New software and interactive robots that, for example, instruct termite-inspired robots to build a simple structure or prompt a thousand quarter-sized machines to form squares, letters and other two-dimensional shapes are proving that robots can work together without human supervision.
• Neuromorphic chips: Mimicking the architecture of a human brain, computer engineers rolled out the first large-scale ‘neuromorphic’ chips designed to process information in ways that are more akin to living brains.
• Beta cells: Two groups pioneered two different methods for growing cells that closely resemble beta cells − the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas − in the laboratory, giving researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study diabetes.
• Indonesian cave art: Researchers realised that hand stencils and animal paintings in a cave in Indonesia, once thought to be 10,000 years old, were actually between 35,000 and 40,000 years old.
The discovery suggested that humans in Asia were producing symbolic art as early as the first European cave painters.
• Manipulating memory: Using optogenetics − a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light − scientists showed they could manipulate specific memories in mice.
Deleting existing memories and implanting false ones, they went so far as to switch the emotional content of a mouse memory from good to bad, and vice-versa.
• CubeSats: Although they’ve been in space for more than a decade now, cheap satellites with sides just 10 centimetres square, called CubeSats, really took off in 2014. Once considered educational tools for college students, these miniatures have now started to do some real science.
• Expanding the genetic alphabet: Researchers have engineered an E. coli bug that harbours two additional ‘letters’ − X and Y − in addition to the normal G, T, C and A that make up DNA. Such synthetic bacteria they may be used to create designer proteins with ‘unnatural’ amino acids.