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Science Technology

Top Ten Advances in 2004 167

Posted by CmdrTaco from the blinded-me-with-science dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Research News has released it's top ten picks for advances of 2004. Something for everyone here including notable advances in biotechnology, communications, computing, engineering, energy, security, nanotechnology, applied physics and the Internet."
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Top Ten Advances in 2004 More

Top Ten Advances in 2004

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  • Ha! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:39PM (#11221893)
    They forgot Poland!

  • Where the heck (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sergeant Beavis ( 558225 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:40PM (#11221916) Homepage
    Is Space Ship One?

    • Re:Where the heck (Score:5, Insightful)

      by F34nor ( 321515 ) * on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:52PM (#11222014)
      Space Ship One did is 50 years out of date. Nothing new just a shift from public to private sector. Plus its a rip off of a luftwaffe design.

      • Really? (Score:3, Informative)

        by scheme ( 19778 )
        Space Ship One did is 50 years out of date. Nothing new just a shift from public to private sector. Plus its a rip off of a luftwaffe design.

        Although I agree that Space Ship One isn't a technological advance, I didn't realize the luftwaffe had a suborbital vehicle that was launched from a plane. Not to mention the craft's use of different wing configurations to orient itself on descent and as control surfaces later on in descent.

        • Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)

          by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:31PM (#11222310)
          It does look a good bit like an ME-163 [wikipedia.org], although the 163 was ground launched.

          With Isp in the neighborhood of 200, though (see the "hot engine"), an air launched 163 would have been quite similar to SS1.

          • Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)

            by scheme ( 19778 )

            It does look a good bit like an ME-163, although the 163 was ground launched.

            Spaceship One's [melbpc.org.au] wings are totally different. Spaceship One has squarish wings with the a slightly swept back leading edge and vertical and horizontal control elements and no tail. The ME-163 [wikipedia.org] has wings swept back at a higher angle and a tail. The only real similiarity is the shape of the fuselage. Your comparison is like saying a mac g4 and a p3 system are similar because they both have 256MB of RAM.

            • Dieter Wulf's article [theatlantic.com] in The Atlantic Magazine shows a picture (not on the web) of a Wunderwaffen or Nazi "miracle weapon" that looks exactly like the White Knight Space Ship One combo. Not to knock Burt Rutan or anything, but it goes to show the German war machine did some serious thought. What's interesting is that they current thoery on the plane was to fly it into US buildings.
            • Liza Minelli looks a good bit like Judy Garland, but Liza's a gimpy old woman and Judy Garland is dead.

    • Re:Where the heck (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bc90021 ( 43730 ) * <bc90021 AT bc90021 DOT net> on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:52PM (#11222018) Homepage
      There's a difference between a thing that hasn't been done before (ie, sending an encryption key via quantum entanglement), and something that's been done before but was then done by private enterprise.

      That is, Space Flight, while new to the private sector, is not new in general.
    • Sure, SpaceShipOne accomplished what was accomplished in the 60's but to do it at the fraction of the cost from private funding and support, if you ask me, that should be considered a technology breakthrough of 2004.
      • getting something high and back to be the tech breakthrough? what it was an impressive showoff of what tech has allowed to be done at much reduced cost than 50 years ago.

        but technological breakthrough of the year? probably no. for one, ss1 had zero impact on the lives of normal people like you and me.

        were it a real spaceship, rather than 'just' a rocket boosted glider that managed to go quite long ways up for no particular gain, i'd say it would have been a breakthrough...

        hell, even ati's or nvidia's car
        • but technological breakthrough of the year? probably no. for one, ss1 had zero impact on the lives of normal people like you and me.

          It hasn't done anything for the average person, yet. This is just a beginning. Everything has got to start somewhere.

          Take the transistor, for instance. The transistor didn't affect people's lives at first either, but look at where it's taken us in the past 50 years. Not so insignificant anymore.
          • And now, we can hardly go anywhere without needing to holler, "Turn that damned thing down!" :)

            hawk
          • uh. that's a bad analogy.
            the transistor had it's uses from day 1, you could see it, you knew it would do big things. ss1... it has only one use, to make one hell of an expensive joyride, technological advance of the year it is not. ss1 is like re-inventing the transistor with college budget, 50 years late. ss1 is like showing that you can develope a microchip with amateur resources.

            everything DID start somewhere, with the SPACE flights to __orbit__ and this place called the __MOON__ decades ago, which are

  • sigh.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by exhilaration ( 587191 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:41PM (#11221922)
    It's all cool stuff but nothing truly revolutionary. Where's my flying car? My transporter? I think that in 50 or a 100 years, life will be pretty much the same, except stuff will be smaller, quieter, and maybe cheaper.

    • Re:sigh.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Fade_to_Blah ( 555601 )
      I consider a possible future cure for cancer through biotechnology pretty revolutionary....alot more than a flying car.
    • So you want every aspect of a flying car, across several disciplines to be completed in conjunction with each other so the flying car application is ready, all within the arbitrary 12 month period which makes up a year.

      Good luck.

      I think it's more likely to see little bits of things with no specific application happen over the course of several years, then for someone to do nothing other than combine it to make the particular flying car you want.

    • Re:sigh.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by rainman_bc ( 735332 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:09PM (#11222140)
      Let's hope we have enough oil to last 50 to 100 years... If things are the same we'll see economic chaos before then.

      Read up on Hubert's peak... Scary shit.... Don't mean to act like Chicken Little and claim the scy is falling, but still...

    • Re:sigh.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by antoy ( 665494 )
      That's probably what people thought before the Industrial Revolution. And where's that olde patent-office quote about us running out of inventions (or something) when you need it :)

      If you want to look forward to something, there's nanotechnology and genetics for now. The advances there will most definitely be revolutionary, just not the way people imagined.
    • The 60s called. They want their pie-in-the-sky utopian vision of the future back.
    • Nothing will ever get cheaper, Other People will just get richer.

    • Re:sigh.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Shihar ( 153932 )
      I don't think that people appreciate how fast the world is changing. The thing is that we are just so damn good at adapting these days that we tend to notice how quickly things change. I recall just five years ago cellphones were still relativly rare and most people didn't own one. Today, almost everyone I know owns one - and that is just a minor technology in the grand scheme of things.

      If you want to talk about big worlder altering changes, then look at e-mail, the internet, and the PC. Those technolo

    • Re:sigh.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shokk ( 187512 )
      I for one *never* want flying cars until such time that we are rid of people who feel like drinking and/or drugging themselves into a stupor and then trying to pilot regular ground-based cars. We have enough trouble with drunk drivers crashing, I don't want to think about someone crashing a fully fueled flying car from a thousand feet up into a supermarket either mistakenly or purposely. We have a lot of maturing to do before we're worthy of that kind of technology.

      And by the way, where the hell are you

  • Hey! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by albn ( 835144 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:42PM (#11221930) Journal
    China's implimentation of IPV6 was pretty cool...

  • eye-dee-ten-tee (Score:4, Funny)

    by zmilo ( 815667 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:44PM (#11221953)
    However much they make computers better, they still haven't solved the classic PEBKAC problem...
    • I like the old email that was floating around about the corel worker who told the user to pack up their computer and return it to the store they bought it from because they were too stupid to own a computer.

      That'll solve the PEBKAC problem once and for all. Targeting towards the lowest common denominator means we'll alienate the mean.

  • Strange picks... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by ZSpade ( 812879 )
    Stem cells, and spaceship one didn't even make the list!? If this were in a standard Newspaper, I'd say it'd belong in the opinion section.
    • What Space Ship One did is 50 years out of date. Nothing new, just a shift from public to private sector. Plus its a rip off of a luftwaffe design for a two part transatalantic bomber.
    • stem cells were discoverd in the year past?

      going to edge of what's considered space and falling back to earth is also fresh then?(what's amazing about ss1 is that they got it funded by some rich guys - the prize didn't really cover the costs. the achievement itself isn't that spectacular, but getting the money and executing it is - which hardly is what i'd consider to be an advance through breakthrough science). and good luck for them getting all the investments back! even with all the space tourism talk i

  • Quantum Teleportation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chembryl ( 596546 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:45PM (#11221961)
    I can't think of anything better than this:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3576594. stm [bbc.co.uk]

  • Most important discovery of last 200 years.

  • A year is much too short (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nodehopper ( 839304 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:53PM (#11222026) Homepage
    The really big advances can't be put into a list spanning a year. Propably the biggest acheivement is the mapping of the Genome, which took years and is still being added to and made more complete. Not to mention the foundation of scientific advances that the project built itself on. I am sure there are a few "Eureka!" moments in science, but really this can't be looked at with an "MTV" short attention span perspective. It makes an end of year list but that is realy all that it is.

  • Missing Category: Ethics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Marge N. Lacoste ( 801569 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:54PM (#11222033)
    1945 was a great year for technology-- not so great for ethics. Just ask Oppenheimer.

    There are real ethical issues that don't get discussed in the popular press; these are just in the biotech field:

    Placebos in clinical trials
    Genetic mapping and privacy
    Patents on gene sequences/organisms
    Cloning

    The genie does not go back in the bottle. Let's get it right the first time.

    • The others I understand, but what is the ethical issue regarding placebos in clinical trials?
      • Suppose you were testing a new drug for some life-threatening/disabling disease. Suppose also that there are alternative treatments available. Should your control group go without any treatment at all?
        • I think you're a little misinformed--in today's world, it's already settled that not giving the "best treatment available" to the control group is unethical.

          For example, in AIDS trials you'll find none of them use placebos except when no treatment exists (such as vaccine/prophylactic trials) or in certain combination trials where one drug of several may be a placebo (though even that's rare these days).

          There may be some exceptions for non-health threatening treatments, like painkillers, but you'll note th
        • Generally when new drugs meant to treat life-threatening are tested in clinical trials, the procedure is to test against the accepted treatment if one exists rather than against a true placebo. For example, a new cancer drug would be matched against a more traditional course of therapy. This has the advantage not only of ensuring that both the experimental and control groups get treated, but also provides a head-to-head test of the new drug and the old drug. No one is doing a Tuskegee Experiment-type tri
      • The argument is that you should not be fooling people into thinking that they are getting a drug when they are not. Alternately some people argue that if you have a (potentially) beneficial drug you should give it to as many people as possible and that placebos are withholding that drug. However, this latter argument falls to the: we don't know that the new drug is harmless/worthwhile, that is why we are testing argument.
        • I guess what I don't understand is what the issue is today. Certainly there are potential ethical issues surrounding any sort of clinical trial you could think up, but I don't think there are any issues with the way things are done currently.

          Yes, it would be unethical if people were not informed about the possibility of a placebo, but everyone IS informed. In the case of a life-threatening disease where a proven treatment is already available, it would be unethical to use a placebo for a control group si
      • My problem with placebos is following: The placebo effect is "always on" when people get real medication. Now people will doubt whatever they are given is real or only placebo, making the placebos ineffective plus reducing the effect of the normal drugs.
        Placebos ONLY work "under the desk", when they are openly discussed its too late...
        • Now people will doubt whatever they are given is real or only placebo, making the placebos ineffective plus reducing the effect of the normal drugs.

          Your control group is there to be an accurate point of comparison, not to get cured with placebos. The point is that no one in the study knows which group they are in, the experimental group thinking they might be placebo is just as important as the control group thinking they may be getting the drug. You aren't trying to compare the effects of the drug to th

          • Thats clear...
            What the parent is talking about is NOT the usage of placebos for double-blind studies, but as a real medication "in the wild" thats being discussed....
            • a real medication "in the wild" thats being discussed....

              Hm, never heard of that, but doesn't seem like much of an ethics question - we already have an FDA and regulations for dealing with false medical claims, don't we?

              • Well, thing is there ARE some crackheads who are starting an "ethnics" discussion that it is unjust to keep to good results of placebos from the general public and allow their use... so they want to change those regulations...
    • The issue with placebos in clinical trials is hardly new. It's been a source for ethical and philosophical debate for decades.

      Truth is, many trials are cut short if the drug being tested is shown to be highly effective, with that drug then being offered to the entire test group.

      And, in all tests, the subjects must give a fully informed consent, which means they *know* they might only be getting the placebo.

      Are there issues? Yup, sure are. It's a subject that will continue to be debated for as long as we
    • Placebos in clinical trials

      Er...actually, where a drug is a substitute for an existing treatment, the control arm of the study usually receives the traditional drug--not sugar pills. The idea is to determine whether a new drug is more or less effective than existing treatments--or, perhaps, if it will help a different population of patients.

      Where there is no treatment, the control group may well receive sugar pills and sterile saline--but there's no guarantee that the group receiving the experimental d

  • China's Pebble Bed Reactor Plan (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kobun ( 668169 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:59PM (#11222064)
    I'd put in for China's plan to expand their energy generation. It would be awesome to see Pebble Bed reactors get some decent coverage mainstream to their stability and safety. If china leads here, I can only hope we play follow the leader. Rolling blackouts, caused by deadly waves of stupid, are just embarrassing. wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

  • Premature (Score:5, Funny)

    by SlayerofGods ( 682938 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @04:59PM (#11222065)
    Hey! I've still got 1 more day to invent cold fusion.
  • Computing - can't see SCO there :-(

  • Speaking Silently? (Score:4, Funny)

    by scooteratl ( 842447 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:01PM (#11222082)
    "And scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center developed speech recognition technology that allows users to speak silently. The scheme uses throat nerve activity rather than acoustics to glean information about what a person is saying. "

    It'd be better if the device could make people -think- before speaking (silently or otherwise). Lincoln noted "Better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt".

    Now doubt can be removed without opening of a mouth!!

    <SILENT>hehehehehe - the fools!!</SILENT>
    • Now doubt can be removed without opening of a mouth!!

      Nah, that's not new tech. It's demonstrated every day here on /., except by those whose lips move when they read the preview of their postings. Ok, I guess maybe it is new tech after all.

  • "its" versus "it's" (Score:3, Funny)

    by NaruVonWilkins ( 844204 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:01PM (#11222087)
    When making "it" possessive, the correct form is "its." When joining "it" and "is," the correct form is "it's." This is a common error, but it's an eyesore.

  • half life 2 (Score:3, Funny)

    by dj42 ( 765300 ) * on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:02PM (#11222096) Journal
    I think that's the most important advance of 2004. What else could I get high and waste hours doing... either give me excellent computer games, or give me a flying car. One way or the other, I'll be disoriented, slightly confused, but satisified.
  • Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstopper!

  • Top invention of the year (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:13PM (#11222174) Homepage Journal
    The Get the Facts [microsoft.com] campaign from Microsoft. Maybe is not an advance that help humanity, but is a clear demostration to how far into the insanity realm could be reached just playing with numbers.

  • The bleeding edge (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bfizzle ( 836992 )
    I'm probably the only person who thinks this is a really good list. They focused on new technologies being developed in Universities and not what we have already done. The Mars rover isn't anything new. We have had the technology to do it for years. All of these advances will not be seen for years to come.

  • I'd pick MPAA and RIAA improvements to P2P (Score:5, Funny)

    by faramir_fr ( 831190 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:15PM (#11222193) Homepage
    MPAA and RIAA makes the P2P community evolve at a geometric rate... enjoy EXEEM folks.
  • Where are the Lego logic gates [slashdot.org]? That's a major advance to miniaturizing these giant computers of ours! Anyways, the extra energy from CO waste gas seems interesting and important, although from skimming I couldn't figure out what would be the chemical product of extracting the extra energy. Does anyone know?
    • I never saw the original Lego story, but that is the coolest shit I've seen all day. Most people don't realize that the AND, OR, and NOT gate pretty much make up everything that's sitting in front of them inside their computer.

      It's amazing to think how such simple components can be used to create such complex devices.

  • Great Advances of 2004 (Score:4, Funny)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @05:18PM (#11222215) Journal
    The balance on my credit card :-(
  • Must be a new year. Time for the reporters to get lazy and do nothing but top 10 lists instead of covering real news stories.

    Oh well, it's not like they cover real news during the rest of the year either.
  • 9 unordered categories, multiple entries per category, this is not a "Top Ten List"
    (OK I love to Nit-Pick)

  • It's NOT dead, Jim... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kaemaril ( 266849 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @07:18PM (#11223252)

    An array of small pressure sensors on a flexible sheet from University of Tokyo researchers promises to lead to smart rugs and robot skin.

    I bet Bill Shatner's salivating at that one :)

  • Aerosol cheese is passed over. Once again there is no justice.
  • Claiming energy from Carbon Monoxide
    http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/0922 0 4/Fuel_cel l_converts_waste_to_power_092204.html

    Can this be a replacement for the Oxidization Catalyst in our catalytic converters?

    This seems (IMNSHO) very exciting from an environmental standpoint, and will be moreso if it can be done without precious metals, though the O Catalyst is made with platinum already. Also, the reclaimed energy can be used to heat the Reduction Catalist, if only minimally.

    If these can't be adapted fo

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