This year, humanity landed on its first comet, a child was born to a woman with a transplanted womb, and a fossilized sea shell forced us to reconsider our conceptions of human culture. Those are just a taste of the 20 achievements, innovations, and advances we've selected for our roundup of 2014's biggest scientific breakthroughs.
Unexpected Life Found In The Ocean's Deepest Trench →
The Mariana Trench cuts a 1,500-mile incision in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near the island of Guam. That's where an international team of scientists has just spent over a month sending probes down to the deepest place on Earth.
The scientists were stunned by the amount of life they found there, including a fish species inhabiting the deepest depths.
The bottom of the trench lies 7 miles below the ocean's surface. It's a place of perpetual darkness and freezing cold. To explore it, scientists aboard the research vessel Falkor dropped "landers" over the side. Each one is about the size of a large refrigerator and bristles with instruments and cameras...
The REAL Santa Claus →
Saint Nicholas was a real, historical person.
But he didn’t live in some snowy Northern place like the North Pole or Scandinavia. And he probably wasn’t fair-skinned with ruddy cheeks.
He lived in the town of Myra – on the Southern Coast of Turkey – in the fourth century (it was then part of Greece). So he likely had an olive-colored, Mediterranean complexion:
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The real St. Nick came from a wealthy family, and his parents died in an epidemic when he was young. Nick used his large inheritance to help the poor.
Spectacular real virgin births →
Initially, a virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis, was thought to be triggered by extreme situations; it was only documented among captive animals, for example, perhaps by the stress, or isolation. A way to continue the bloodline when all other options had gone, when there was no other choice.
Not necessarily. It now appears that some virgin females produce offspring even in the presence of males.
In Photos: 48 Hours Under Siege by Islamic State Militants In Kobane →
On December 19, VICE News entered the besieged Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane with the help of smugglers and the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the People's Protection Units (YPG). The city was preparing to enter its 100th day of fighting a fierce siege by the Islamic State (IS). Fighters with IS had been pushed back by a combination of US airstrikes and heavy artillery from a small contingency of Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. Surrounded by IS on three sides, and a Turkish military hostile to Kurdish forces on the fourth, Kobane has become a symbol of resistance for those fighting IS. YPG fighters now estimate they control approximately 75 percent of the city, and US military sources say over 1,000 IS militants have been killed.
How a firefly lights up: Researchers reveal the secrets of the incredible 'lantern' structure the insects use to glow →
Fireflies used rapid light flashes to communicate.
This 'bioluminescence' is an intriguing phenomenon that has many potential applications, from drug testing and monitoring water contamination, and even lighting up streets using glow-in-dark trees and plants.
Fireflies emit light when a compound called luciferin breaks down.
We know that this reaction needs oxygen, but what we don't know is how fireflies actually supply oxygen to their light-emitting cells.
Using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, scientists from Switzerland and Taiwan have determined how fireflies control oxygen distribution to light up their cells.
Do Higher Taxes Make Us Work Less? →
There are reasons to think that taxes, unless they reach very high levels, don’t have a big effect on how much people work.
First, most jobs, even part-time jobs, require a minimum number of hours per week. Few people are likely to quit working entirely because of taxes.Second, when you tax people, they are poorer, and they need to work more to maintain their standard of living. University of Michigan economists Matthew Shapiro and Miles Kimball find that this almost entirely cancels out the disincentive, leaving total labor supply about the same. Of course, that’s bad, because people enjoy leisure. But the flip side of it is that if people do actually reduce their work to avoid taxes, they enjoy their time off.
When you look out at the world, you see lots of circumstantial evidence that taxes don’t have a crushing effect on the labor supply. For example, in a recent blog post at the NYT’s Upshot, Neil Irwin reports that countries with higher taxes and more generous welfare systems also tend to have a higher share of the population in the labor force: ...
Also, if you look at the U. S.'s past, you see that although taxes have come down over time, people are not working more than they used to.
The Islamic State is failing at being a state →
Initial reports suggested ISIS/ISIL/IS was picking up the slack where the Iraqi state had failed: garbage services, water, etc. That may have been the case, briefly, or only in certain areas...
Slick Islamic State videos depicting functioning government offices and the distribution of aid do not match the reality of growing deprivation and disorganized, erratic leadership, the residents say. A trumpeted Islamic State currency has not materialized, nor have the passports the group promised. Schools barely function, doctors are few, and disease is on the rise.
In the Iraqi city of Mosul, the water has become undrinkable because supplies of chlorine have dried up, said a journalist living there, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his safety. Hepatitis is spreading, and flour is becoming scarce, he said. “Life in the city is nearly dead, and it is as though we are living in a giant prison,” he said.
In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s self-styled capital, water and electricity are available for no more than three or four hours a day, garbage piles up uncollected, and the city’s poor scavenge for scraps on streets crowded with sellers hawking anything they can find, residents say.