I love science. I've heard people say they don't because it takes the mystery out of life. I disagree. With every little secret we unlock, myriad new mysteries are revealed. That is why our knowledge is always accelerating and expanding, much like the universe itself.
Last week I counted down numbers 12 to 7 of the science stories I found most intriguing, exciting, inspiring and/or frustrating during 2012. Here is my Top 6.
6. Dino-birds
Feathered dinosaurs are nothing new. When I was studying geology at Carleton University between 1988 and 1992, the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs was still controversial. One of the earliest bits of evidence was the dinosaur-like bird archaeopteryx, fossils of which showed clearly defined feathers.
By the mid-1990s, the first fossils of non-avian dinosaurs with feathers started to emerge. Today 20 genera of feather-bearing dinosaurs have been catalogued and every school child-except for perhaps the home-schooled progeny of young-Earth creationists-knows that dinosaurs were ancestors of modern birds.
Almost all the feathered dinos so far have been found in China. That changed in a big way in 2012 when paleontologists from the University of Calgary unveiled one juvenile and two adult Ornithomimus, a 75-million year old dinosaur with feathers and wings. Not only is this story exciting because they lived in proto-Canada, but they had wings.
The wings did not develop until later in their lives and could not be used for flying suggesting the structure did not initially evolve for flight, but perhaps for another purpose such as reproductive behaviours or egg brooding.
This is completely consistent with evolution and another nail in the coffin of evolution-deniers who point to wings as something that must arise whole and complete rather than in incremental stages.
5. Quantum leap
It has been postulated mathematically since 1964 when Peter Higgs proposed a mechanism by which subatomic particles gain mass. By the mid-1970s when the Standard Model of Particle Physics was finalized with the experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks, the Higgs Boson became the holy grail of quantum mechanics research.
Finding the Higgs Boson led, at least in part, to the construction in Switzerland of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most expensive and complex scientific research centre in history.
In July, LHC scientists announced they had found what appeared to be the Higgs Boson. Scientists, though, are a tentative bunch and would not definitively say it was the Higgs Boson calling it a "Higgs-like particle."
That may be changing though. "The way things are going, by the Moriond meeting [a European physics conference] we may be able to stop calling it Higgs-like and finally say it is the Higgs," said Oliver Buechmuller, a member of the research team on December 19.
4. Unlikely life
Hypothetical life throughout the universe has always been based on the assumption that planetary conditions would have to be much like that of Earth.
This year, however, more evidence emerged right here on Earth that life may take many different forms and may be able to exist in environments previously considered too extreme.
In one of the most remote lakes in Antarctica, nearly 65 feet below the ice, in a briny liquid six times saltier than seawater, where there is no oxygen, no energy source from sunlight and where the average temperature is a chilly -13C, microbiologists have discovered a thriving community of bacteria.
It is perhaps the best evidence so far for life existing not just elsewhere in the universe, but elsewhere in our own solar system.
Scientist currently believe that two of Saturn's moons, Europa and Titan, have liquid water oceans beneath their surfaces. If it can happen in Antarctica, cut off from all the things we have traditionally thought are required for life, why not all throughout the solar system. After all, all the objects in the solar system were formed from the same stuff.
3. Titanic river
Speaking of Titan, Cassini, a spacecraft that has been exploring the outer solar system for years, sent back images in 2012 of a 240-kilometre liquid river near the north pole of Saturn's largest moon.
We have long known that Titan is the most Earth-like object in the solar system. With a dense atmosphere, volcanoes, lakes, mountains and weather, if it wasn't for the -270C surface temperatures, we would surely find it familiar.
At those temperatures, the Nile-like river discovered this year is obviously not water, but methane and/or ethane. These organic compounds, which are natural gases on Earth, are liquid at the temperatures in question. They evaporate, condense, form clouds and rain back down on the surface of the moon in a process analogous to the water-cycle on Earth.
Again, recent discoveries of extreme-ophiles (organisms that live in extreme environments) on our planet, point to the possibility that life may be way more diverse than we have ever given it credit for being except in science fiction.
2. Exo-Earth
When I originally wrote this column, my number two was going to be the discovery of an Earth-like planet around our closest neighbouring star. Exo-planet Alpha Centauri Bb was certainly an exciting find, particularly because it is so close, at least in astronomical terms.
Alpha Centauri B (the star, one of two in a binary system) is not much like our star, however.
The nearest Sun-like star to Earth is Tau Ceti, about three times the distance of Alpha Centauri at approximately 12 light years. On December 19, astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, announced the discover of a five-planet system around Tau Ceti.
One of these planets, dubbed HD 10700e, orbits approximately half the distance as the Earth is from the Sun, but because Tau Ceti is slightly smaller and dimmer, the researchers believe it is right in the "habitable zone" (i.e., where liquid water could exist on the surface).
1. Leukemia-free
I struggled with number one. My head tends to be in the stars a lot and the last two stories were in the running. My imagination was more piqued by them, but ultimately I had to go with the one medical story on my list because it has the potential to help actual individual help people in people in the here and now, unlike exploring the cosmos.
In early December, a seven-year-old girl who had suffered from Leukemia since she was five, was still in complete remission following an experimental treatment in April.
Emma Whitehead was not the only success story for the treatment developed at the University of Pennsylvania, but she was the first child and the first with her type of leukemia.
Of course, researchers are a long way from declaring this a potential cure for cancer, but it is a very promising treatment.
That in itself made the story portentous. What made it really intriguing though was the method. Doctors use a disabled form of the HIV/AIDS virus as a delivery mechanism for patients' own genetically-altered T-cells.
Would it not be the height of irony if the medical scourge of the late twentieth century helps cure cancer in the twenty-first century?
