Scientific American's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013

A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos

found and human evolution revisedthese and other events highlight the year in
science and technology as picked by the editors of Scientific American.
So many stories, so few slots. Our picks this year run the gamut from physics to biology
to technology. But as a group, climate change wins in terms of having the most stories,
followed by space science.

As usual, we had to leave out many exciting developments. To that end, we have decided
to take a cue from Spinal Tap and turn it up to 11 with this top 10 list: specifically, a
page of honorable mentions.
What did we miss? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

1) Moon Shot to the Head: Global Initiatives Target the Brain

Big Science in 2013 embraced not asearch for yet another subatomic
particle, but a quest to elicit the fundamental workings of mind and
brain. Large-scale endeavors worldwide embarked on extended sojourns
to decode the signals coursing along the 100 trillion connections that tie
together 86 billion neurons of the human brain.
Hacking the 1.36-kilogram organ that resides underneath the skull may
take decades, perhaps centuries. Still, one giant leap for neuroscience

or at least one small stepcame as the Obama administration

announced that its second-term showpiece science project would target
the brain.

Earlier this year Pres. Obama announced the Brain Research through
Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, initiative. It
intends to develop tools that can provide a recording of thousands or
even millions of neurons. The goal: gaining an understanding of how
physiologybrain cell activitytranslates into mental functions. It
would reveal the secret of how your neurons file away for later recall a
just-learned phone number or perhaps recognize the bloom of a red
rose.
A still-more ambitious undertaking had its formal start the second week in
October under the aegis of the European Commission. The Human Brain
Project targets a full computer simulation of the bodys master controller
within 10 yearsincorporating the findings from an array of projects,
ranging from analyses of cognition in mice and men to building faster
supercomputers. Other brain initiatives in China, Israel and Australia are
underway. A remarkable consensus seems to be emerging that the yawning
gap between mind and brain cannot be bridged without the sustained
enterprise of the best and brightest from every corner of the globe.

2) Drones Fly Toward Wide Commercial Use, Raising New Concerns

Dronesor at least talk of themwere everywhere in 2013. The

unmanned aerial vehicles, which have already changed how the U.S.
wages war, have the potential to revolutionize law enforcement, wildlife
monitoring, news gathering and, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently
announced, package delivery.
Drone plans are taking shape across numerous industries as the U.S.
awaits new guidelines from the Federal Aviation Administration, due in
2015, on the domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles. In the absence
of regulatory language, entrepreneurs and technophiles such as Bezos
have dreamed up ambitious plans (too ambitious, perhaps) for drone
use, just as others have sounded the alarm about the potential for
drones to malfunction catastrophically or even fall prey to hackers.
Meanwhile, privacy advocates worry that widespread drone use will
infringe on civil liberties that have long been taken for granted. In an
April editorial Scientific American cautioned that unmanned aerial
vehicles pose an immense threat to privacy if misused by law
enforcement agencies, private eyes or even nosy citizens.
And then, of course, there are the drones that kill. In December a drone
strike reportedly targeted a wedding convoy in Yemen, killing more than
a dozen people. As the powerful, potentially dangerous technology

adapts to more and more civilian uses,Scientific American blogger John

Horgan warns, we must stay informed to make sure that drones are
deployed for beneficial rather than insidious ends.
3) Gene Therapy Achieves Major Success
Have blood cancers met their match? Certainly, the enthusiasm greeting
gene-therapy results presented in early December at a hematology
conference seemed to indicate so. The new weapon against leukemia,
however, is not perfect; still, it marks a significant achievement.
In a study begun in 2010 on adults and children suffering from chronic
and acute forms of leukemia, researchers extracted the patients T
cellsthe immune systems targeted torpedoes against invaders. The
researchers then genetically modified the T cells to recognize a protein
that only exists on cancerous cells and to rapidly proliferate on meeting
them. Injected back into the patients, the engineered cells could then
seek out and destroy those cells.

Preliminary analyses suggest that positive responses can occur up to two

thirds of the time. In a study of 27 patients with acute leukemia, 24
showed complete remission one month after treatment, although six
have since relapsed. In another study of 15 patients, six showed
complete remission and another six showed a partial response.

Other scientists at the conference also reported positive results with

gene therapy on other conditions, including SCID-X1, or bubble boy
disease. Treatment restored the immune systems of eight of nine boys.
In addition to the reported successes, none of the studies uncovered
serious side effects of gene therapy, which in past clinical trials led to a
few deathsmost notably that of Jesse Gelsinger in 1999, which set the
field back many years. The latest results suggest that gene therapy has
turned an important corner and is on the verge of becoming a viable
treatment option for life-threatening conditions. Look for an overview
article scheduled for the March 2014 Scientific American.

4) Confirmed: Fracking and Related Operations Cause Earthquakes

The boom in oil and natural gas in the U.S. has an unwanted byproduct:contaminated water. The nation's fossil-fuel wells produce at
least nine billion liters of the stuff every day, and disposing of all that
wastewater has become oil and gas companies biggest headachenot
least because the most common current disposal method is causing
earthquakes.
Such wastewater is typically dumped back down a disposal well and
forgotten. But an uptick in earthquakes in normally seismically
quiescent parts of the country, such as Oklahoma and Ohio, has turned

attention to whether that water is promoting temblors. And studies

published this year of the unusually powerful earthquakes near Prague,
Okla., show that wastewater disposal is indeed to blame.
This is not a huge surprise. Experiments in Colorado in the 1960s
proved that injecting water underground could spawn earthquakes. But
even pumping water underground at high pressurethe practice known
as hydraulic fracturing, or frackingcan set the ground rumbling. The
question is: Now that we know, what, if anything, should be done about
it?
5) The First Neutrinos from Outside the Solar System
For the first time this year astronomers caught neutrinos originating in
distant galaxies, an advance that heralds the start of a new era in
astronomythe era of seeing with particles, not just light.
Scientists have been studying neutrinos for decades, but almost all of
the neutrinos here on Earth come from nearby sourceseither our own
sun or from high-energy cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere. This year
astronomers using the IceCube detector at the South Pole reported
the discovery of 28 neutrinos that were so energetic they could not have
possibly originated in these local sources. (Researchers named the two
most powerful neutrinos Ernie and Bert after the beloved Sesame
Street characters.)

As for what spawned these ultrapowerful neutrinos, speculation

aboundsthe particles didnt all arrive in a single spurt and appear to
come from random directions on the sky. Once scientists can correlate
the location of a neutrino burst to an optical counterpartpossibly
coming from an energetic, short-lived object like a supernovathe era of
neutrino astrophysics will begin in earnest.

6) Recovery of Oldest Human DNA

For all the astonishing advances in ancient DNA research in recent
years, scientists have maintained that they would never be able to
sequence DNA from human fossils more than about 100,000 years old.
But in December a team reported that it had managed to recover wellpreserved DNA from a 400,000-year-old thighbonebelonging to an
extinct member of the human family.
The thighbone comes from an important site in northern Spain known
as the Sima de los Huesos. Previously researchers had obtained DNA
from similarly ancient cave bear remains found at the site, raising hopes
that recovering DNA from the fossil humans might be next.

The new sequence furnished some startling insights into the ancestry of
the Sima people. Based on the anatomy of the fossils, experts suspected

they belonged to eitherearly Neandertals or a species called Homo

heidelbergensis that is thought to have given rise to Neandertals.
But the DNA they recovered (so-called mitochondrial DNA, which
comes from the cells energy-producing structures and constitutes only a
small portion of an individuals DNA) resembles that of a mysterious
human group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Siberia around
80,000 years ago.
Exactly how the Sima people came to have a Denisovan-like DNA
sequence and not a Neandertal-like one is unknown. The recovery of
DNA from the cell nucleus, which is far rarer than mitochondrial DNA,
would no doubt clarify matters. The sequencing ofnuclear DNA from a
700,000-year-old horse fossil in June hints that such a feat may well lie
within the realm of possibility.