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Year in review: 2. Zika virus devastates Brazil and spreads fear across Americas
Brazilian mother cradles her baby girl under a bruised purple sky. The baby’s face is scrunched up, mouth open wide — like any other crying child. But her head is smaller than normal, as if her skull has collapsed above her eyebrows.
A week earlier, not far away, a doctor wrapped a measuring tape around the forehead of a 1-month-old boy, held in the arms of his grandmother. This baby too has a shrunken head, a birth defect whose name — microcephaly — has now become seared into the public consciousness.
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Year in review: 4. ‘Three-parent baby’ technique raises hope and concern
A “three-parent baby” was born in April, the world’s first reported birth from a controversial technique designed to prevent mitochondrial diseases from passing from mother to child.
“As far as we can tell, the baby is normal and free of disease,” says Andrew R. La Barbera, chief scientific officer of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “This demonstrates that, in point of fact, the procedure works.”
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Year in review: 6. How humans populated the globe
No paper or digital trails document ancient humans’ journey out of Africa to points around the globe. Fortunately, those intrepid travelers left a DNA trail. Genetic studies released in 2016 put a new molecular spin on humans’ long-ago migrations. These investigations also underscore the long trek ahead for scientists trying to reconstruct Stone Age road trips.
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Year in review: 8. Alzheimer’s drug may clarify disease’s origins
A quarter century after scientists proposed an idea that profoundly influenced the arc of Alzheimer’s research, they might finally find out whether they are correct. A new antibody drug called aducanumab appears to sweep the brain clean of sticky amyloid-beta protein. The drug may or may not become a breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment — it’s too soon to say — but either way it will probably answer a key question: Have researchers been aiming at the right target?
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Year in review: 10. AlphaGo scores a win for artificial intelligence
In a hotel ballroom in Seoul, South Korea, early in 2016, a centuries-old strategy game offered a glimpse into the fantastic future of computing.
The computer program AlphaGo bested a world champion player at the Chinese board game Go, four games to one (SN Online: 3/15/16). The victory shocked Go players and computer gurus alike. “It happened much faster than people expected,” says Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “A year before the match, people were saying that it would take another 10 years for us to reach this point.”
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Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.
Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?
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A new JunoCam image highlights a massive rotating storm in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere
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NASA Aborts Hurricane Satellite Constellation Launch Over Pump Glitch
The Orbital ATK L-1011 carrier plane, the Stargazer, is seen in midflight during its first attempt to launch NASA's CYGNSS hurricane satellite mission aboard a Pegasus XL rocket
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This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Mojave" site, where its drill collected the mission's second taste of Mount Sharp.
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'Star in a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy
For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth.
Incorporated into terrestrial power plants, this "star in a jar" technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever. And according to new reports out of Europe this week, we just took another big step toward making it happen.
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Giraffes are heading towards a "silent extinction", as populations plummet
The tallest animal in the world has been brought tragically low, with new research revealing that the global giraffe population has plummeted by up to 40 percent over the last 30 years.
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This propulsion expert says there's a good chance NASA's EM Drive results are flawed
It’s one of the most intriguing stories of the year: NASA’s version of the 'impossible' EM Drive appears to produce thrust, violating Newton’s third law and hence our current understanding of the physics that govern the Universe.
But just because NASA’s space drive test passed peer-review last month, doesn’t mean it actually works, says Brice Cassenti, an expert in advanced propulsion systems at the University of Connecticut. In fact, due to the array of errors that could have affected the experiment, he says the only way we can actually know the truth is to test the EM Drive in space.
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Year in review: 3. A planet lurks around the star next door
Worlds in the Alpha Centauri system — the trio of stars closest to our sun — have been a staple of science fiction for decades. From Star Trek to Avatar, writers have dreamed up exotic landscapes (and inhabitants) for interstellar explorers to encounter. Now a planet around one of those stars is no longer fiction.
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Year in review: 5. Sea ice loss will shake up ecosystems
In a better world, it would be the big news of the year just to report that Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.14 million square kilometers this summer, well below the 1981–2010 average of 6.22 million square kilometers (SN Online: 9/19/16). But in this world of changing climate, extreme summer ice loss has become almost expected. More novel in 2016 were glimpses of the complex biological consequences of melting at the poles and the opening of Arctic passageways, talked about for at least a decade and now well under way.
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Year in review: 7. ‘Minimal genome’ makes its debut
One of biology’s biggest achievements of 2016 was intentionally as small as possible: building a bacterium with only 473 genes. That pint-size genetic blueprint, the smallest for any known free-living cell, is a milestone in a decades-long effort to create an organism containing just the bare essentials necessary to exist and reproduce. Such “minimal genome” cells might eventually serve as templates for lab-made organisms that pump out medicines, make innovative chemicals for industry and agriculture, or churn out other molecules not yet imagined. The project also identified genes crucial for the microbe’s survival yet largely unfamiliar to science, highlighting major gaps in researchers’ grasp of life’s playbook.
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Year in review: 9. Ozone hole officially on the mend
In a rare bright spot for global environmental news, atmospheric scientists reported in 2016 that the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica is beginning to heal. Their data nail the case that the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty drawn up in 1987 to limit the use of ozone-destroying chemicals, is working.
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Top 10 science stories of 2016
Gravitational waves, Zika, Proxima b and more
The next 10 posts will feature 2016's top science stories.
Stay tuned for the first one.
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The sun, as seen from different celestial bodies
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This is what monkeys would sound like if they could produce human-like speech
Monkeys and apes can't learn new vocalisations such as human speech sounds, and now scientists think they know why.
Thanks to detailed X-rays of macaque monkeys, we now know that their vocal tracts are flexible enough to produce a wide range of sounds making up thousands of distinct words. That means the reason they can't speak is likely related to how their brains work, rather than any physical limits on their vocal anatomy.
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Listen to the computer generated macaque monkey speech
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Super-you: Your body is a nation of trillions
Last night, while you were sleeping, legions of eight-legged creatures had an orgy between your eyebrows. No, you haven’t suddenly been invaded by sex tourists. Demodex mites, close relatives of ticks and spiders, are permanent and mostly harmless residents of the human face.
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Why haven't we found aliens (infographic)
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NASA's working on a nano-starship that travels at 1/5 the speed of light
April, a team of scientists including Stephen Hawking announced a mind-boggling new project to explore interstellar space, using lasers to propel a nano-spacecraft the size of a postage stamp to our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
If they could get their little 'StarChip' spacecraft to travel at 20 percent the speed of light, it could arrive in just 20 years. But how would the electronics on such a tiny, vulnerable spacecraft survive for 20 years in the hostility of space?
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TIL Ore trains in Sweden traveling down to the coast generate five times the amount of electricity they use, powering nearby towns and the return trip for other trains.
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Caesarean births could be having an effect on human evolution
Caesarean section (or C-section) deliveries can save lives when babies are too large to be born naturally - or if there are other health complications - but they also appear to be affecting how humans are evolving, scientists report.
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