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- DNA. The discovery of DNA didn’t so much change the world as it did our understanding of it — more so, our understanding of life. DNA is a term we’ve only started using in the 20th century, though its initial discovery dates back decades into the 19th century.
- Earth in Motion. While it may be common knowledge that Earth spins on an axis and revolves around the sun, at one point, this idea was extremely outlandish.
- Electricity. Did Benjamin Franklin Discover Electricity? It’s a common misconception that Ben Franklin discovered electricity with his famous kite experiment.
- Germ Theory of Disease. What Is the Germ Theory of Disease? Germ theory is a scientific principle in medicine that attributes the cause of many diseases to microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses, that invade and multiply within the human body.
- New Human relatives
- Taking Measure of The Cosmos
- The Hottest Years on Record
- Editing Genes
- Mysteries of Other Worlds Revealed
- Fossilized Pigments Reveal The Colors of Dinosaurs
- Redefining The Fundamental Unit of Mass
- First Ancient Human Genome Sequenced
- A Vaccine and New Treatments to Fight Ebola
- CERN Detects The Higgs Boson
The human family tree expanded significantly in the past decade, with fossils of new hominin species discovered in Africa and the Philippines. The decade began with the discovery and identification of Australopithecus sediba, a hominin species that lived nearly two million years ago in present-day South Africa. Matthew Berger, the son of paleoanthr...
When Albert Einstein first published the general theory of relativity in 1915, he likely couldn’t have imagined that 100 years later, astronomers would test the theory’s predictions with some of the most sophisticated instruments ever built—and the theory would pass each test. General relativity describes the universe as a “fabric” of space-time th...
Scientists have been predicating the effects of burning coal and fossil fuels on the temperature of the planet for over 100 years. A 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics contains an article titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” which has a caption that reads: “The...
Ever since the double-helix structure of DNA was revealed in the early 1950s, scientists have hypothesized about the possibility of artificially modifying DNA to change the functions of an organism. The first approved gene therapy trial occurred in 1990, when a four-year-old girl had her own white blood cells removed, augmented with the genes that ...
Spacecraft and telescopes have revealed a wealth of information about worlds beyond our own in the last decade. In 2015, the New Horizons probe made a close pass of Pluto, taking the first nearby observations of the dwarf planet and its moons. The spacecraft revealed a surprisingly dynamic and active world, with icy mountains reaching up to nearly ...
The decade began with a revolution in paleontology as scientists got their first look at the true colors of dinosaurs. First, in January 2010, an analysis of melanosomes—organelles that contain pigments—in the fossilized feathers of Sinosauropteryx, a dinosaur that lived in China some 120 to 125 million years ago, revealed that the prehistoric crea...
In November 2018, measurement scientists around the world voted to officially changed the definition of a kilogram, the fundamental unit of mass. Rather than basing the kilogram off of an object—a platinum-iridium alloy cylinder about the size of a golf ball—the new definition uses a constant of nature to set the unit of mass. The change replaced t...
In 2010, scientists gained a new tool to study the ancient past and the people who inhabited it. Researchers used a hair preserved in permafrost to sequence the genome of a man who lived some 4,000 years ago in what is now Greenland, revealing the physical traits and even the blood type of a member of one of the first cultures to settle in that par...
This decade included the worst outbreak of Ebola virus diseases in history. The epidemic is believed to have begun with a single case of an 18-month-old-boy in Guinea infected by bats in December 2013. The disease quickly spread to neighboring countries, reaching the capitals of Liberia and Sierra Leone by July 2014, providing an unprecedented oppo...
Over the past several decades, physicists have worked tirelessly to model the workings of the universe, developing what is known as the Standard Model. This model describes four basic interactions of matter, known as the fundamental forces. Two are familiar in everyday life: the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force. The other two, howe...
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- Wheel. Before the invention of the wheel in 3500 B.C., humans were severely limited in how much stuff we could transport over land, and how far. The wheel itself wasn't the most difficult part of "inventing the wheel."
- Printing press. German inventor Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press sometime between 1440 and 1450. Key to its development was the hand mold, a new molding technique that enabled the rapid creation of large quantities of metal movable type.
- Penicillin. It's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar.
- Compass. Ancient mariners used the stars for navigation, but this method didn’t work during the day or on cloudy nights, making it dangerous to travel far from land.
- We have ancient DNA. DNA tells us a lot about who we are now. But we also look to ancient DNA to learn about our origins. When the decade first started, scientists recovered ancient genetic material from a fossilized finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia.
- Meet our new ancestors. Over the past decade, we welcomed four new species to our family tree, including the mysterious Homo naledi. In 2015, scientists announced the discovery of fossils of at least 15 individuals of this species in a deep, dark chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa.
- Fossil discoveries tell more of our story. Not all fossil discoveries lead to a new species. But new fossils always reveal more of our story. In the past ten years, we’ve found fossils that widen both the geographic and time range of several early human species.
- We made tools earlier than we thought. When you think of technology today, you might picture computers, smartphones, and gaming consoles. But for our ancestors millions of years ago, it would have been stone tools.
Oct 23, 2013 · The Atlantic asked a dozen scientists, historians, and technologists to rank the top innovations since the wheel. Here are the results. You can also choose your own top five innovations, and see ...
Nov 30, 2022 · The 22 most amazing discoveries of 2022. New clues from the day the dinosaurs died. A mysterious ancient human tooth. Primordial galaxies. See how the past year expanded our knowledge of the ...
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Dec 27, 2022 · Fourteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2022. Smithsonian paleoanthropologists reveal the year’s most riveting findings about our close relatives and ancestors. A team led by Laurits ...
