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Feature
Top 10 stories of 2018: Climate change, gene-edited babies, hidden craters and more
In 2018, we saw just how much power science has to make a real impact.
Science News’ top stories of the year include a literal impact — the hidden contours of what appears to be a massive crater created when a meteorite slammed into Greenland long ago. That discovery ranks among our Top 10 partly because it’s just cool, but also because it raises the tantalizing prospect of solving a...
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Year in Review
Half a degree stole the climate spotlight in 2018
The grim reality of climate change grabbed center stage in 2018.
This is the year we learned that the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming won’t be enough to forestall significant impacts of climate change. And a new field of research explicitly attributed some extreme weather events to human-caused climate change. This one-two punch made it clear that climate change isn’t just...
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Year in Review
News of the first gene-edited babies ignited a firestorm
A Chinese scientist surprised the world in late November by claiming he had created the first gene-edited babies, who at the time of the announcement were a few weeks old. Scientists and ethicists quickly responded with outrage.
In an interview with the Associated Press and in a video posted November 25, Jiankui He announced that twin girls with a gene altered to reduce the risk of...
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Year in Review
Neutrino discovery launched a new type of astronomy
Mysterious particles called neutrinos constantly barrel down on Earth from space. No one has known where, exactly, the highest-energy neutrinos come from. This year, scientists finally put a finger on one likely source: a brilliant cosmic beacon called a blazar. The discovery could kick-start a new field of astronomy that combines information gleaned from neutrinos and light.
It...
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Year in Review
Greenland crater renewed the debate over an ancient climate mystery
For three years, a team of scientists kept a big secret: They had discovered a giant crater-shaped depression buried beneath about a kilometer of ice in northwestern Greenland. In November, the researchers revealed their find to the world.
They hadn’t set out to find a crater. But in 2015, glaciologists studying ice-penetrating radar images of Greenland’s ice sheet, part of an...
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Year in Review
Humans wiped out mosquitoes (in one small lab test)
For the first time, humans have built a set of pushy, destructive genes that infiltrated small populations of mosquitoes and drove them to extinction.
But before dancing sleeveless in the streets, let’s be clear. This extermination occurred in a lab in mosquito populations with less of the crazy genetic diversity that an extinction scheme would face in the wild. The new gene drive,...
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Year in Review
Drinking studies muddied the waters around the safety of alcohol use
For people who enjoy an occasional cocktail, 2018 was a sobering year. Headlines delivered the news with stone-cold certainty: Alcohol — in any amount — is bad for your health. “The safest level of drinking is none,” a group of scientists concluded.
That finding, along with another one reported this year, seemed to contradict the reassuring notion that an occasional drink might be...
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Year in Review
A buried lake on Mars excited and baffled scientists
Headlines touting the discovery of water on Mars — again! — are a long-standing punchline among planetary scientists. But a discovery this year was something very different.
Unlike previous claims of water-bearing rocks or ephemeral streaks of brine, researchers reported in the Aug. 3 Science that they had found a wide lake of standing liquid near the Red Planet’s south pole, buried...
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Year in Review
Zapping the spinal cord helped paralyzed people learn to move again
The spinal cord can make a comeback.
Intensive rehabilitation paired with electric stimulation of the spinal cord allowed six paralyzed people to walk or take steps years after their injuries, three small studies published this year showed.
“There’s a capacity here of human spinal circuitry to be able to regain significant motor control and function,” says Susan Harkema, a...
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Year in Review
Human smarts got a surprisingly early start
Archaeological discoveries reported this year broadened the scope of what scientists know about Stone Age ingenuity. These finds move the roots of innovative behavior ever closer to the origins of the human genus, Homo.
Example No. 1 came from Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin, where fickle rainfall apparently led to a wave of ancient tool and trading advances (SN: 4/14/18, p. 8). Frequent...