Traditionally at this time of year, I use this column to publish some variation on the top stories of the year theme. Doing a Top 5 or 10 is a weird balancing act that involves analyzing and/or predicting impact; choosing between scientific, social and political importance; parsing personal interest against public interest; trying to put them in a logical and evidence-based rather than arbitrary order; along with many other considerations.
I’m not even going to try this year, but I do want to look back in any event. So, here, in no particular order, are 16 of the science stories that caught my attention in 2016 for various reasons.
1. Donald Trump
There may not be any news category Donald Trump does not top in 2016. As far as science goes, he is a scary wildcard, prone to conspiracy theories and distrust of what he calls “elites” and the institutions they inhabit. Detail and information seems to be anathema to the man’s character. Just as one example—a person could write a book—of the kind of anti-science regime we might expect from a Trump administration is his choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency EPA). Not only is Scott Pruitt a climate-change denier and proponent of coal power, as attorney general for the State of Oklahoma he has sued the EPA, the very organization he is now supposed to lead, many times.
2. Sun Power.
While the United States may be stepping back from environmental progress with the election of Donald Trump, India, now the world’s third largest economy and second most populace nation, is embracing it. The country unveiled the most massive solar power plant ever undertaken this year. The $679 million solar park at Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, in southeast India, covers 10 square kilometres with 2.5 million solar panels and can generate enough electricity to power 150,000 homes.
3. Bionic man
Electricity, on a much smaller scale, also powers human bodies. In paralyzed people, electrical signals from the brain are no longer able to relay to limbs and hands and fingers. Experiments in reconnecting brains with limbs have been going on for some time and in April a 24-year-old Ohio man became the first beneficiary of an implant called a “neural bypass” that has allowed him to regain use of his hands. The chip is connected by wires to a forearm sleeve with electrodes that transfer his brain signals to the muscles in his arm and wrist enabling hand movement. He can now swipe a credit card, play Guitar Hero, pour from a bottle, hold a phone to his ear and stir the contents of a cup.
4. Shock waves
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves. The concept itself is something that sounds like science fiction: “ripples in the fabric of spacetime, propagating at the speed of light, generated by extraordinarily violent events, such as the collision of two black holes.” While theoretically proven for decades, the vast scale and infinitesimal sensitivity of the technology needed to actually detect them was prohibitive. That is until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), the result of more than 40 years of development, came online in September 2015. The actual detection of gravitational waves was the odds-on favourite to win the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics. When it did not, it sent waves of a different kind through the scientific community.
5. Health Canada fail
Readers of this column will know how fervently I oppose nonsensical, so-called “natural” health practices. At best homeopathic interventions are useless, but this year we saw a clear example of the dangers when the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning about homeopathic teething “medicines.” Hyland, the snake oil company peddling this scam pulled the product from the shelves in the United States, but not Canada because our health authority failed to follow the rightful lead of the FDA. Health Canada remains a joke when it comes to protecting consumers.
6. In the moons light
NASA reported this year that the Earth has a second moon. Actually NASA reported no such thing, but that is how it was reported in the popular media. Actually, the object, a tiny asteroid approximately 40 to 100 metres across, dubbed 2016 HO3, is something NASA is calling “the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or ‘quasi-satellite’.” It is an interesting relationship, though, because 2016 HO3 is actually in orbit around the sun, but Earth’s gravity also keeps it looping around the planet in a kind of Spirographic pattern varying from about 100 times to 38 times the distance of the Moon.
7. Armstrong’s shadow
John Glenn never got to go to the moon. After becoming the first American to successfully orbit the planet, Glenn should have been first in line, but the lesser feat made him too big a hero to be put at risk in the greater feat to come. Neil Armstrong would end up overshadowing Glenn when he became the first human being to set foot on another world. Glenn remained a space icon throughout his life, however. In 1998, he became the oldest person to orbit the Earth at the age of 77. He died December 8.
8. Homo obsoletum
Autonomous vehicle technology is advancing so quickly human drivers may soon be obsolete. This year saw the first ever commercial transport of a shipment by truck. The tractor-trailer hauled beer for 120 kilometres on Colorado’s I-25, a suitable cargo considering how much leisure time we will all have when the machines take over. The thing is, given enough processing power, computers are much better suited to a task such as driving and all indications are driverless vehicles will drastically reduce traffic fatalities. A guaranteed income is quickly going to become a huge political issue as technology makes human employees obsolete not just in trucking, but many other fields as well.
