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Faster Melting Glaciers 1st Among Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade

by Trilok Kapur on Dec 30 2009 11:52 AM

An article about the top ten discoveries of the decade,listed in Discovery News,puts at No.10 the discovery of Eris in 2005, a minor body thatis 27% bigger than Pluto.

The finding became the trigger that changed the face of our solar system, defining the planets and adding Pluto to a growing family of dwarf planets in 2006.

At number 9 is the discovery of what appeared to be soft tissues blood vessels, bone matrix and other cells - inside the fossilized femur of a small T. rex in 2005.

Since then, the bones have revealed amino acids that resemble those of modern chickens, firming the link between dinosaurs and birds.

At number 8 is the direct confirmation of the mysterious dark matter in the summer of 2006.

The unprecedented evidence came from the careful weighing of gas and stars flung about in the head-on smash-up between two great clusters of galaxies in the Bullet Cluster.

Until then, the existence of dark matter was inferred by the fact that galaxies have only one-fifth of the visible matter needed to create the gravity that keeps them intact.

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So, the rest must be invisible to telescopes: That unseen matter is "dark."

At number 7 is the emergence of new human ancestors, first, in the form of a 6- to 7-million-year-old skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis - known as Toumai, in northern Chad in 2002.

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Then, in 2009, the nearly complete skeleton of "Ardi," in northeastern Ethiopia bumped the famous "Lucy" as the earliest, most complete skeleton of a human ancestor ever found.

At number 6 is astronomers seeing alien planets, or "exoplanets", directly in 2008, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Keck and Gemini observatories in Hawaii.

At number 5 is the concept of cyborgs, that is, half-machine, half-humans, becoming a reality in the last decade, as much progress has been made with people controlling robotic limbs and computers with their minds.

At number 4 is finding of stem cells in new sources in 2007, when scientists from Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, essentially turned back the clock for adult skin cells, allowing these mature cells, which were preprogrammed to become skin, to act like embryonic stem cells.

At number 3 is the discovery of water ice on the surface of Mars in 2008 by NASA's Mars Phoenix lander.

At number 2 is the development of the rough draft of the entire human genome in the year 2000, followed by a completed version in 2003.

At number 1 is the finding that in the past decade, glaciers have been melting much faster than ever expected.

Source-ANI
TRI


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