2012 was a big year for science. From tiny particles to worlds millions of miles away, there were a lot of science stories worth reading. Here is a compilation of the top five of the year, according to the point-score given by users of Reddit.com. For each major story I’ve made a useful infographic to give you some neat facts about that topic. Here’s to hoping 2013 is an even better year for science!
Canadian officials say a recent E. coli outbreak in their country was caused by California-grown lettuce. The lettuce was distributed by FreshPoint Inc. to KFC and Taco Bell restaurants throughout Canada.
Story on A1 of print version.
The natural beauty and dedicated volunteers at the Fort Ord National Monument were recognized this week by The Wilderness Society, which presented the 15,000-acre nature preserve with a CAPE award for excellence in the conservation of public land.
Lead story on A1 of print version.
Our galaxy wasn’t always the beautiful cosmic ballet it is today. Billions of years ago, the Milky Way was a chaotic jumble of stars and gas moving every which way. Only over time did the Milky Way morph into its current uniform shape, with flat arms of starlight reaching out from a galactic core. Now, a new NASA study shows this process happened much more recently than scientists had thought.
Featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Pg. C1 & online, second most viewed story for January 2013) and the San Jose Mercury News (Pg. 1B & online).
The crumbling volcanic islands of the southern Pacific Ocean could be a major source of undocumented – and potentially dangerous – tsunamis.
Tornadoes are being betrayed by their lightning in a way that could help save lives, according to researchers who made an accidental discovery.
Picked up by The Washington Post.
Volcanic eruptions conjure up images of huge fiery explosions, searing hot magma and charred, decimated landscapes. But some eruptions also create something very different: ice crystals.
Lithium-ion batteries generate electricity when tiny charged lithium atoms move from a negatively charged electrode to a positively charged one. As the battery charges, the lithium atoms move in the opposite direction. The problem is that with each cycle of charging and discharging, the battery’s electrodes degrade and the battery’s capacity drops. To fix this dying battery dilemma, scientists need to see what’s happening inside the battery in realtime at a resolution of one billionth of a meter — something that hasn’t been possible until just recently.
As the Curiosity rover safely studies rocks on the surface of Mars, a NASA mission on route to Pluto may find itself on a treacherously rocky path. NASA announced last month that the $650 million New Horizons space probe’s planned trajectory during its July 2015 flyby could turn into a collision course with unknown moons and debris circling the dwarf planet—an unfortunate end to the mission’s three-billion-mile cosmic road trip.
Special fishing weights could take a bite out of endangered hammerhead shark deaths. The global population of these distinctive sharks has fallen by about 89% in the last 2 decades, largely due to illegal poaching and accidental fishing bycatch. But now, scientists have come up with a shocking way to reduce this collateral damage: generating a mild electric field near fishing lines to keep the sharks away.