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Science News

Top Science Stories of 2004 85

Posted by michael from the out-with-the-old dept.
borkbot writes "New Scientist has several round-ups of 2004. They include one for technology , space and biology . There's also an interesting peice about the most popular stories of the year."
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Top Science Stories of 2004 More

Top Science Stories of 2004

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  • I can't believe it (Score:4, Funny)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:14PM (#11228889)
    the number one story should be the robot skeleton they found buried under the ice in Alaska, I mean that changes the entire course of world history. It was even posted HERE [slashdot.org].

    umm waitaminute, I fell for that the last time.

  • Missing Options (Score:3, Funny)

    by SlayerofGods ( 682938 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:14PM (#11228892)
    I think a slashdot poll is in order so people have a proper place to complain about missing options ;)

    • Re:Missing Options (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      I think a slashdot poll is in order so people have a proper place to complain about missing options ;)

      Behold, a new List: The top 10 discoveries excluded from top 10 lists. Hmmm, there seems something recursive about that.

  • Top Ten (Score:2, Funny)

    by SoSueMe ( 263478 )
    Top ten things I hate about the end of the year:
    • 1.Top Ten Lists
    • 2.Top Ten Lists
    • 3.Top Ten Lists
    • 4.Top Ten Lists
    • 5.Top Ten Lists
    • 6.Top Ten Lists
    • 7.Top Ten Lists
    • 8.Top Ten Lists
    • 9.Top Ten Lists
    • 10.Top Ten Lists

  • OMFG (Score:3, Funny)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:18PM (#11228918)
    my dreams come true, A lightning gun [newscientist.com] in real life. Now all I need is the Quad and I'm set. ooh ooh, even better, the Beserker Rune [telefragged.com].
    • As we used to say in the old days, "all I want for Christmas is quad damage and a chain gun."

      Of course, if you've got the pent, I'll take that too.

  • What's your favorite? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TFGeditor ( 737839 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:20PM (#11228929) Homepage
    Mine is the "Sweeping stun guns to target crowds." Phasers on stun!

  • "There's also an interesting peice (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...about the most popular stories of the year."

    Such as the one about spelling reform, which I unfortunately missed.

  • Nature (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jfonseca ( 203760 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:24PM (#11228954)
    Well the biggest story this year has to do with Nature. Which I guess it's what science is all about.

    Speaking of which : here are some of the places you can help with donations. [google.com]

    • Re:Nature (Score:3, Interesting)

      by St. Arbirix ( 218306 )
      You must have missed item 10 in there list. A virus that thwarts the onset of AIDS in HIV carriers. The number of people to die in the tsunami was chump change compared to AIDS deaths.
    • i have got a webpage too with helplines if any body care here: http://www.deydas.com/f/msgs/tsunami_earthquake_do nate.html

  • Mars rovers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rufey ( 683902 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:25PM (#11228959)
    I found it surprising that the Mars rovers and the discoveries they have made didn't make it onto the list.

    I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.

    • By "list" I mean the "most popular" story list.
      • By "list" I mean the "most popular" story list.

        If multiple news sources come out with the same story, then maybe no single article ranks high enough to count in the top. That is one of the potential drawbacks of using article popularity alone. I assume they are counting individual articles, otherwise the boundaries of what a "story" is may get fuzzy. For example, is a story about Spirit's lack of comparable water evidence (early in the mission) part of the same story, or a different one?
    • The Mars rovers were the highlight of science this year for me.
      • The Mars rovers were the highlight of science this year for me.

        Just think how grim it all looked soon after the Spirit flash problem became apparent. It made the Opportunity landing team all the more nervious knowing that Opportunity may be the last shot (Spirit problem surfaced before Opp landed) and that it may have had the same flaw as Spirit. The cheif talked as if it was probably a major hardware failure. The press also hyped the doom and gloom.

    • From the article;
      "Now, we can reveal the top 10 stories of the 2004, as judged by you the readers.

      The most clicked-on stories included ..."

    • Discoveries? (Score:1, Troll)

      by glrotate ( 300695 )
      There might have been water millions of years ago is a great discovery?
    • RTFA: They came up with it by counting clicks on the website.

    • interplanetary war (Score:4, Funny)

      by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Friday December 31, 2004 @03:39PM (#11229857) Journal
      I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.

      Obviously, it's all a plot to draw attention away from the interplanetary war started by NASA with all those missles, err, probes, that we slammed intto Mars.

      hawk

  • Given that everybody loves the lightning gun... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by human bean ( 222811 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:28PM (#11228983)
    I forsee an upswing in conductive clothing with insulated liners, and ground connections.

  • Variable Speed of light (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    6. Speed of light may have changed recently

    This story revealed that the speed of light, a sacrosanct universal physical constant, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

    I can never understand it when they say the speed of light changes. As I understand it, the meter is currently defined as the distance taken by a certain number of oscillations of a certain frequency of light, i.e. the distance light travels in a certa
    • The meter is an arbitrary measurement of distance. We set the meter equal to something else, the distance light travels in x amount of time. If the speed of light changes, that means that yes the meter has changed, but the actual distance itself hasn't, just what we use to measure it.
    • The article states that measurments in ALPHA (the fine structure constant [newscientist.com]) may have changed over time, and the easiest explanation for this is that c has changed.

      Recall that the Fine Structure constant is the inverse proportional of a woman's bodytype most closely approaching the area under the curves represented by Pamela Anderson's shape to the amount of clothing she has on.

      Wait wtf were we talking about?

  • Top Ten (Score:1, Funny)

    by dazedagain ( 829634 )
    In a hastily called press conference U.S. President George W. Bush, today announced a "nationwide mobilization of America's scientific and commercial resources" to create renewable and sustainable replacements for fossil fuels. When asked how the deficit-ridden government would pay for such an effort Bush replied that America's military would be rapidly drawn down to the level necessary to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States. "After all," joked the President, "we already have all of the

  • Where's Bob the Angry Flower? (Score:3, Funny)

    by /dev/trash ( 182850 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @01:40PM (#11229041) Homepage Journal
    It's PIEce, like a piece of PIE.

  • Black hole paradox (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think cracking the black hole paradox should top the list. The reason is, this one will have a lot to do with how we try to understand and explore the universe in very long run. I am talking in the Assimovian context - like 10k years from now.

    But it's easy to consider sweeping stun guns more important. I wonder how many 'individuals' be part of a 'mob'

    -Anon C.

  • Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joepa ( 199570 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @02:12PM (#11229203)
    From 2004: The year in biology and medecine [newscientist.com]

    Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks [newscientist.com] because of women's pickiness.

    The article itself states "As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became [sic] may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals..." and it goes on to say that the "changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force."

    Unless I'm missing something here, the reasoning in the target article seems to be backwards. It could be that the author of the article in question is something along the lines of a Platonist about beauty (having a belief that there is an objective "form" of beauty that ancestral females had in mind when they were picking their mates). But, aside from that perspective, which is currently unpopular both philosophically and scientifically, I think that the reasoning usually goes more like this: we judge certain faces to be attractive (beautiful or handsome or whatever) because the people who have those features inherited them from ancestors who had greater reproductive success.

    Although the details of this sort of reasoning may be somewhat debatable (e.g., why aren't the majority of people then considered to be beautiful or handsome instead of just your average Joe or Jane -- because of some technicalities having to do with the normal distribution of any given trait in the population and the fact that the people who happen to have all or most attractive features would be the statistically lucky ones at one tail of the distribution), it does make sense prima facie, as is evidenced by the use of a similar line of reasoning in the article on female attractiveness and fertility [newscientist.com] that is referenced in the same paragraph of the year in review.

    I don't have access to the journal article that is referenced (in Biology Letters), so if someone is familiar with the particular article or the general debate in question, or if I'm missing some subtlety that makes things different in the male case, could you point it out to me?

  • What about library science? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tiltowait ( 306189 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @03:35PM (#11229831) Homepage Journal
    Seriously. LISNews.com is featuring a rundown of the top library stories of 2004 [lisnews.com]. Much of Slashdot's news crosses over with library science, just as much of IT relates with what librarians do nowadays. So please take a look to see what we're been up to. Librarians need more tech-savvy people familiar with the challenges we're facing.
  • But it also discovered a few more to puzzle over, such as an unexplained clumping of material within the rings, revealed by unique close-up images.

    Am I the only one who saw the obvious in the picture they provided. It's extremely apparent that that "odd clumping" merely marks the beginning of a track much like the record that went into space with Voyager. There's only one thing to do: drag a needle across the surface of it so we can hear what they have to say.
  • New Scientist has recently switched its display format such that it cannot be displayed in Netscape 4.79. This is in contrast to sites such as the NY Times or /. that believe getting the information out is more important that some fancy display format. Why is Netscape 4.79 still a reasonable brower? Its smaller, its faster, and it is less likely to be targeted for security holes than IE, Mozilla or Firefox.
  • Last week there was a special program on the Science Channel (I think) highlighting the top 100 recent developments, with commentary by a panel of editors from Discover magazine. Maybe the print version was better, if there was one, but I was surprised by the fluffiness of the commentary and how uninformed the panel seem to be. These New Scientist articles are much more interesting.

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