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Canada’s Science Source since 1970
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After watching CBC’s excellent 2011 year-end science wrap-up with Bob McDonald, we were inspired to take our own stab at 2011’s 11 most important stories in the world of science and technology.
Take a look below at Bob’s list (and lively commentary on TV) and then take a look at our version.
Have any you’d like to add? Check out the stories below, then have your say! See you in 2012:
11. Northern Lights (FINALLY) start to rev-up
Their 11-year maximum looks like it’s finally beginning, with a spectacular North American aurora display this December. Below, you can see Canadian aurora astrophotographer Yuichi Takasaka’s video of one such recent outburst.
10. Cures for AIDS and cancer on the horizon??
Not for a while, perhaps, but these two stories made us think:
Not only was he one of the most successful business people of the digital age, but his ideas and ways of thinking changed the way we interact with digital media.
8. Arctic ice disappearing faster than ever
Scientists say this year’s loss was more than in the last 1,450 years
7. A boom of exo-planet discoveries
Kepler 22b becomes the only planet known so far to lie in the “Goldilocks” zone. PLUS, we found two Earth-sized planets around a sun-like star.
6. “Warp Drive” possible?
Scientists in Switzerland fired neutrinos more than 700 kilometres away…and arrived a few billionths of a second early (suggesting they had traveled faster light.)
5. Back to Mars
Following the huge success of Spirit and Opportunity, NASA’s latest Mars rover – Curiosity, the largest, most expensive space robot ever built – launched this past November and is due to land and begin looking for life on the Red Planet this coming August,
4. Dark energy discovered? (Sort of?)
A 2011 survey of more than 200,000 galaxies looks to confirm the existence of dark energy (though the precise physics of how it all works is still an unknown.)
3. Record-setting wild weather
From swelling rivers to howling blizzards to 199 tornadoes in North America in only one year, not to mention the
wave of disaster that hit Japan…
2. So long, Space Shuttle
30 years and more than 100 flights later, NASA’s space shuttle program ended when Atlantis touched down after its final mission in July, 50 years after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
1. First glimmers of hope in finding the “God particle”
Not only didn’t the Large Hadron Collider create a black hole…50 years after the search began for the hypothetical Higgs Boson, scientists at CERN say they may have got the first evidence of the particle believed to have been responsible for all of our universe’s mass: A find that would affect our understanding of the physics of everything in our daily lives (and a few trillion things we don’t notice in our daily lives.)
