Biggest scientific discoveries of the 2010s decade: photos – Business Insider

In March 2010, anthropologists discovered a tiny, lone finger bone in the Denisova cave in Siberia. They determined it belonged to previously undiscovered species of human ancestor.

Genetic analysis revealed that Denisovans (named after the cave in which they were found) were an enigmatic offshoot of Neanderthals.

Thus far, fossilized Denisovan remains have only been found in Siberia and Tibet. The species disappeared about 50,000 years ago but passed some of their genetic makeup to Homo sapiens.Denisovan DNA can be found in the genes of modern humans across Asia and some Pacific islands;up to 5% of modern Papua New Guinea residents' DNA shows remnants of interbreedingwith Denisovans.

People in Tibet today also possess some Denisovan traits and these traits appear to help Sherpas weather high altitudes.

Just after anthropologists discovered Denisovans, geneticists finished sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome.

Scientists discovered that both Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern humans extensively.

While 2010 was a watershed year for anthropology, 2011 was all about achievements in space. NASA sent a new rover to Mars named Curiosity.

Curiosity is the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars. It joined fellow rover Opportunity in searching the red planet for signs of water and clues about whether Mars was capable of supporting microbial lifeforms.

In November 2011, NASA announced that its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope had spotted its first potentially habitable planet, Kepler 22-b.

The Kepler mission was charged with finding and identifying Earth-like planets in our galaxy that existed within a star's "Goldilocks," or habitable, zone. Kepler 22-b is 600 light-years away.

Planets in habitable zones are capable of hosting liquid water, one of the requisites for being considered Earth-like.

Impressive achievements in space exploration continued into 2012. In November of that year, NASA's Voyager 1 probe left our solar system and crossed into interstellar space.

NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. After flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space. It continues to collect data to this day.

In 2019, Voyager 1's successor, Voyager 2, also entered interstellar space. Both probes have been flying longer than any other spacecraft in history.

Voyager 2 has beamed back unprecedented data about previously unknown boundary layers at the far edge of our solar system an area known as the heliopause. The discovery of these boundary layers suggests there are stages in the transition from our solar bubble to interstellar space that scientists did not previously know about.

In May 2012, Elon Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, made history by sending the first-ever commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX's groundbreaking spaceship was called Dragon.

Previously, only four governments the United States, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency had achieved this challenging technical feat.

Seven years later, SpaceX launched Dragon's successor, Crew Dragon, into orbit for the first time. Crew Dragon is designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS; its 2019 trip marked the first time that a commercial spaceship designed for humans had ever left Earth.

Other scientific disciplines made incredible headway in 2012, too. Physicists reported the detection of a new type of particle called the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the "God particle" because it gives mass to all other fundamental particles in the universe that have mass, like electrons and protons.

Scientists knew a particle akin to the Higgs Boson had to exist otherwise nothing in the universe would have mass, and we wouldn't exist but had failed to find evidence of such a particle until 2012.

The same year, the patent for utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology was approved.

Crispr-Cas9 technology enables researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding, or altering sections of DNA. Since 2012, scientists have edited mosquito, mushroom, and lizard DNA, among others. In 2018, a Chinese scientist announced he had edited the genetic information of two human embryos.

In 2013, NASA astronomers observed plumes of water vapor being ejected from the frigid, icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

This discovery made Europa only the second known oceanic world in our solar system aside from Earth; NASA observed jets of water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus in 2005.

The presence of liquid water and ice make these two moons ideal places to search for life in our corner of the galaxy.

Since 2013, water has also been discovered on the dwarf-planet Pluto, a moon of Neptune called Triton, and multiple other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

That year, NASA's Curiosity rover uncovered evidence that the red planet not only once held liquid water, but may also have been habitable.

In September 2012, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had identified gravel made by an ancient river in Mars' Gale Crater.

Then in March 2013, scientists found chemical ingredients for life sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon in powder that Curiosity had drilled from rock near the ancient streambed.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," Michael Meyer, who worked as the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the time, said in a press release about the finding. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

In the following years, evidence has mounted that the planet was once home to a vast ocean.

Since then, evidence has continued to mount that Mars still hosts liquid water today in at least one underground lake.

After three years of studying Mars, Italian scientists determined in July 2018 that it's possible the red planet has a 20-kilometer-wide lake of liquid water at its polar ice cap today.

"If these researchers are right, this is the first time we've found evidence of a large water body on Mars," Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas,told the Associated Press.

Other parts of Mars are too cold for water to stay liquid unless it's deep underground.

In a March 2019 study, researchers suggested that seasonal flow patterns in Mars's crater walls could come from pressurized groundwater 750 meters below the surface, which travels upward through cracks in the ground.

In November, physicists discovered 28 strange particles called neutrinos buried deep under the Antarctic ice. These neutrinos, they concluded, had come from outside our solar system.

Researchers found the particles using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an array of sensors embedded in Antarctic ice. Neutrinos are nearly mass-less and unstoppable; they move at the speed of light and get discharged in the aftermath of exploding stars.

Scientists can use neutrinos to understand events happening in distant galaxies. In 2018, they found more of the particles in Antarctica, then traced them back to the source: a rapidly spinning black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, that's gobbling up gas and dust.

Researchers also achieved a food industry milestone in 2013 when scientists successfully served the first-ever lab-grown hamburger.

The burger which took two years and $325,000 to make consists of 20,000 thin strips of cow muscle tissue that were grown in a Netherlands laboratory.

Since 2013, the lab-grown meat industry has grown in popularity and dropped in price. In 2015, one of the researchers responsible for the first lab-grown burger, said the per-pound cost had dropped to $37.

The European Space Agency got some time in the spotlight in 2014. In November, the agency's Rosetta space probe was able to land on a comet 372 million miles from Earth called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

It took Rosetta 10 years to reach and orbit the comet, then launch a lander down to the surface.

Rosetta's lander, Philae, took the first-ever surface images of a comet.

In 2015, anthropologist Lee Berger announced that his team had discovered a new human ancestor species called Homo Naledi in South Africa.

Two spelunkers had accidentally stumbled across the Homo naledi fossils two years earlier, in a hidden cave 100 feet below the surface.

All told, the chamber contained 1,550 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals who all lived between 330,000 and 250,000 years ago.

2015 was also the year that scientists mapped the human epigenome for the first time.

The epigenome is made up of chemicals and proteins that can attach to DNA and modify its function turning our genes on and off.

An individual's lifestyle and environment factors like whether they smoke or what their diet looks like can prompt sometimes deadly changes in their epigenome that can cause cancer.

Mapping the epigenome may help scientists understand how tumors develop and cancer spreads.

Another NASA spacecraft, Cassini, achieved new heights that same year. In September, astronomers announced that they had confirmed a liquid ocean exists under the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft found that Enceladus emits plumes of water into space following the probe's arrival in 2004. But in 2015, scientists confirmed that the source of these plumes was a giant saltwater oceanhidden beneath the moon's icy crust.

In 2016, an artificial intelligence program from Google's DeepMind division named AlphaGo beat the world champion in four out of five matches of Go, a strategy game.

That wasn't the first time AI beat humans in a complex game.

In 2011, IBM's supercomputer, Watson, defeated two "Jeopardy!" champions including Ken Jennings in a three-day contest.

A year after AlphaGo's success, anAI named Libaratus beat four of the world's top professional players in 120,000 hands of no-limit, two-player poker. Then, in 2019, another DeepMind AI program named AlphaStar bested 99.8% of human players in the popular video game "Starcraft II."

Physicists rejoiced in 2016 when they detected two black holes colliding a billion light-years away.

The catastrophic collision created ripples in space-time, also known asgravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of these gravitational waves in 1915, but he thought they'd be too weak to ever pick up on Earth. New detection tools have proved otherwise.

This collision was the first event scientists observed using gravitational-wave detectors. Then in 2017, they observed two neutron stars merging. In August 2019, astrophysicists detected the billion-year-old aftermath of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star(the super-dense remnant of a dead star).

In 2017, geologists announced they'd discovered a new continent, called Zealandia, hidden under the Pacific Ocean.

The lost land ofZealandiasits on the ocean floor between New Zealand and New Caledonia.

It wasn't always sunken researchers have found fossils that suggested novel kinds of plants and organisms once lived there. Some argue that Zealandia should be countedalongsideour (more visible) seven continents.

In 2019, scientists found that another ancient continent had slid under what is now southern Europe about 120 million years ago. The researchers named this continent Greater Adria. Its uppermost regions formed mountain ranges across Europe, like the Alps.

That year brought a new breakthrough in genetics, too: Scientists successfully created synthetic DNA.

All living creatures' DNA is made up of two types of amino acid pairs: A-T (adenine thymine) and G-C (guanine cytosine). This four-letter alphabet forms the basis for all genetic information in the natural world.

But scientists invented two new letters, an unnatural pair of X-Y bases, that they seamlessly integrated into the genetic alphabet of E. coli bacteria.

Floyd Romesburg, who led the research, previously told Business Insider that his invention could improve the way we treat diseases. For example, it could change the way proteins degrade inside the body, helping drugs stay in your system longer. Romesburg said his team will be investigating how the finding might help cancer treatments and drugs for autoimmune diseases.

It was also a breakthrough year for self-driving car technology.

In September 2017, Audi announced it had produced the world's first "Level 3" autonomous car meaning its self-driving mode requires no human feet, hands, or eyes. The A8 sedan can wholly, safely control itself in self-driving mode, only needing a human to take over in the event of bad weather or disappearing lane lines.

Tesla Autopilot drivers, for comparison, have to be ready to take over at any moment, so they're counseled to keep their eyes on the road at all times.

Just two months later, Waymo the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google's parent company revealed that it was testing self-driving minivans in the streets of Arizona without any humans at all behind the wheel. In 2018, Waymo launched the first fully autonomous taxi service in the US.

Astronomers also witnessed another interstellar collision in 2017. When two neutron stars collided, scientists were able to see how all the gold in the universe was created.

The two massive, exploded stars hit each other at one-third the speed of light and created gravitational waves. Scientific instruments on Earth picked up the waves from that crash, an event astronomers say only happens once every 100,000 years.

The crash happened 130 million light years away from Earth, researchers discovered. It caused the formation of $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of gold and produced huge stores of silver and platinum, too.

That year, researchers at a Hawaiian astronomical observatory also observed the first interstellar object ever seen in our solar system, named 'Oumuamua.

Scientists only had a few weeks to study the interstellar interloper before it got too far, and too dim, to see with Earth-based telescopes.

Guesses as to what the object is run the gamut from comet to asteroid to alien spaceship. One Harvard University astronomer, Avi Loeb, has speculated that 'Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial scout, but nearly all other experts who have studied 'Oumuamua say that hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely.

2017 was also a bittersweet year for astronomers who had to say goodbye to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which took a fatal dive into Saturn in October.

Cassini had been exploring Saturn and its moons for 13 years before the probe plunged to its death on September 15. Scientists planned the crash to ensure that Cassini wouldn't one day run out of fuel and hit one of Saturn's potentially habitable moons (thereby contaminating it with Earthly bacteria).

During its final dive, Cassini beamed back amazing photos of Saturn as we'd never seen the planet before. That last portion of the mission began with a flyby of the planet's moon, Titan. Then Cassini jetted through a 1,200-mile opening between Saturn and its rings of ice an unprecedented feat.

The spacecraft then angled down into the planet's clouds and burned up.

Toward the end of 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new gene therapy treatment for blind people.

The cure for a form of hereditary blindness called leber congenital amaurosis is the first gene therapy approved by the FDA for an inherited disease.

The treatment, called Luxturna, is a one-time virus dose that gets injected into a patient's retina. The corrected gene in the virus taps out the flawed, blindness-inducing gene in the eye, and produces a key vision-producing protein that patients with the disease normally can't make.

People start noticing a difference in their sight within a month. In clinical trials of the treatment, 13 out of 20 patients saw positive results. The treatment costs $425,000 per eye, or $850,000 total, however.

The following year, genetics news of a very different nature came out: Chinese geneticist He Jiankui announced he had successfully genetically modified human embryos.

Jiankui claimed to have edited genes in a pair of twins born in China in November. By using the DNA-editing technique called CRISPR, he said, the babies were born immune to HIV.

This type of genetic manipulation is banned in most parts of the world, since any genetic mutations that the babies may have would get passed on to their offspring, with potentially disastrous consequences.

In 2019, the MIT Technology Review released excerpts from Jiankui's research. The unpublished manuscripts revealed that in the process of trying to manipulate the babies' HIV resistance which some experts say was unsuccessful Jiankui may have introduced unintended mutations.

In 2018, NASA launched another rover to the red planet. InSight touched down on November 26.

NASA's InSight lander spent more than six months careening through space before it landed safely on Martian soil.

The robot is charged with exploring Mars' deep interior and helping scientists understand why Mars wound up a cold desert planet while Earth did not.

InSight has given scientists the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor Mars quakes seismic events deep inside the planet.

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Biggest scientific discoveries of the 2010s decade: photos - Business Insider