Biggest Science Stories: Bloggers' Picks for 2008

National Geographic News

December 30, 2008

Need a science fix fast? A vast and ever growing constellation of brainy bloggers is here to serve.

Unlike traditional media outlets, blogs allow personal insight, opinions, and voices. Science bloggers put a human gloss on both major developments and smaller stories that would be otherwise lost in the shuffle.

National Geographic News asked six Web celebs (as ranked by the blog search engine Technorati) to write up the most important, most overlooked, and weirdest science stories of 2008. Here are their responses:

ANTHROPOLOGY
Anonymous of Afarensis

Most Important:
For my money, the most important [anthropology story] is the rediscovery of the pygmy tarsier. Tarsiers are very important in terms of understanding the evolution of primates. Over and above that, the fact that the pygmy tarsier has, for the moment, escaped extinction gives conservationists another chance at saving them.

Most Overlooked:
Children are often overlooked in the archaeological record. Frequently, their contribution to the creation of the archaeological record is painted in negative terms—as destroyers rather than creators. Neanderthals have, all to often, been portrayed negatively as well. The most overlooked anthropology story of the year combines both of these issues and looks at the impact of Neanderthal children on the archaeological record.

Weirdest:
Anthropologists have spent a lot of time studying the medical knowledge and practices of other cultures around the world. The weirdest news relating to anthropology concerns the medical practices of an unlikely group. A group of chimpanzees, at Uganda's Kibale National Park, self-medicate by eating dirt and vegetation, which, when combined, have antimalarial properties.

PALEONTOLOGY
Brian Switek of Laelaps

Most Important:
Controversy erupted in the scientific community this year when paleontologist Spencer Lucas was accused of "claim jumping" other scientists—i.e., pushing a new name into the scientific literature first even though he knew others were working on the same material. The debacle surrounded an ancient group of armored crocodile relatives called aetosaurs, which gave the argument the name Aetogate. After months of arguments, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology stepped in to resolve the issue, exonerating Lucas but calling for more stringent scientific practices to prevent this from happening again.

Most Overlooked:
Jurassic Park made Velociraptor a household name, but few people probably heard that a new species of the agile killer was announced earlier this year. Named in honor of paleontologist Halszka Osmolska (who passed away this year), Velociraptor osmolskae represents a new type of the famous predator.

Weirdest:
In the film The Princess Bride, the characters were besieged by "Rodents of Unusual Size." Truth is stranger than fiction, though, because early this year scientists reported the fossil remains of a Pleistocene rodent from Uruguay called Josephoartigasia monesi which would have weighed about a ton. They would have been less threatening than their fictional relatives, though: Their teeth were better suited to fruit and soft water plants.

ENERGY
Hank Green of Ecogeek

Most Important:
This year Craig Venter built a 582,000-base-pair bacterial genome from scratch. Why is this such an important energy story? Because, using this technique, Venter could create bacteria with the ability to convert sunlight directly into fuel in the presence of high amounts of CO2 (say, from a coal-fired power plant). Venter says he'll be able to alter the octane of the fuel produced simply by changing the bacteria's genome.

Most Overlooked:
Ever heard of a nantenna? Chances are, you soon will. Antennas in phones or radio stations work by transmitting and receiving certain wavelengths of energy. But what if those wavelengths were so small they weren't radio waves ... they were light waves? Well, that's the goal of these nano-antennas. The antennas (there are about 500 million of them in a square foot of a nano-antenna array) are so small that they could absorb visible light from the sun and turn it into electricity. They could also absorb radiation that we feel as heat, and release it as radiation that we don't feel, or vice versa, creating a passive, energy-free climate control system.

Weirdest:
If you think of a list of things that could potentially power 22nd-century Earth, lion poop probably wouldn't pop into your mind. But using local sources of energy for power generation is a very important idea. Which is why the Cincinnati and Toronto zoos are both in the process of building biomass plants that would power their facilities using manure created by their residents, with enough left over to sell to the grid.

ANCIENT WORLD
Mary Beard of A Don's Life

Most Important:
For fans of ancient Rome, the most important discovery—or rediscovery—was the house of the first Roman emperor Augustus, beautifully decorated with the best Roman money and power could buy, and now open to the public. It is altogether more impressive than the most hyped discovery of the year: a nondescript Roman portrait dragged out of a French river and trumpeted around the world as the face of Julius Caesar himself.

Most Overlooked:
There has been far too little attention paid to a planned development in rural Crete, which threatens to replace a natural wilderness with a vast hotel complex and three golf courses. It's a really classic case of environmental vandalism.

Weirdest:
It's a tie. The first was the campaign in May by some residents of the Greek island of Lesbos to stop the lesbian community of Greece from using the word "lesbian" in their title. It was said to bring the name of the island into disrepute. The second was the story in November about British city councils trying to ban Latin from all their documents. No more "eg" or "NB" or "vice versa."

PSYCHOLOGY
Vaughan Bell of Mindhacks

Most Important:
For decades Henry Molaison was only known to the world as HM, a patient with a dense and profound amnesia who cheerfully participated in dozens of research studies that have helped us understand the structure of memory. He died at the beginning of December, and memory research has lost one of its most important and valuable contributors.

Most Overlooked:
The new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is being developed and will be released in 2012. The majority of the committee in charge of defining and including diagnoses have financial ties to the drug industry, and the process is being conducted in secret, despite pleas from the past chairman to make the decision-making transparent.

Weirdest:
Big-name professional stage magicians are collaborating with neuroscientists to understand how theatrical illusions fool consciousness—an unlikely combination, but one where the performer's intuitive knowledge of human perception blind spots could give neuroscientists an invaluable source of scientific material that could help explain how we make sense of the world.

ENVIRONMENT
Alex Steffen of Worldchanging

Most Important:
Our understanding that when, and at what size, human population peaks is a choice is changing our understanding of what our priorities ought to be. Since population growth is one of the main drivers of our ecological crisis, and since women with more opportunities, better access to health care choices, and stronger legal rights tend to choose to have fewer children, raising the prospects of poor, younger women turns out to be a critical sustainability strategy: As author Kim Stanley Robinson puts it, empowering women is the best climate change technology.

Most Overlooked:
Scientists have found indications that the Arctic may already have begun releasing its frozen methane, a massive store of a powerful greenhouse gas. It is a reminder that our climate change emissions and other ecological impacts have the potential to push us past a number of ecological tipping points in the coming decades. If they do, all of our ecological problems are likely to get much worse, quite suddenly. The quite real possibility that, through our inaction, we are closing in on a rapid and catastrophic shift toward worst-case scenarios is a story that ought to be front-page news, every day; compared to this possibility, nearly every other news story is trivial.

Weirdest:
"Outquisition" technologies. Some parts of the developed world are growing richer, but others are collapsing slowly, and some of those are going to get hit hard by economic transitions and climate change. What sort of tech would help folks who live there? Can we imagine people with skills and means helping spread access to those technologies?