《自然杂志》2012年的366天

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366 days: 2012 in reviewhttp://www.nature.com/news/366-days-2012-in-review-1.12042

This epic year for science saw the discovery of the Higgs boson and Curiosity’s arrival on Mars, but researchers also felt the sting of austerity.

过去的2012年对于自然科学界来说也是不寻常的一年，见证了希格斯玻色子和发现和好奇号登录火星。

• Richard Van Noorden
  

19 December 2012

Superstorm Sandy ravaged New York in October.

WANG CHENGYUN/XINHUA NEWS AGENCY/EYEVINE

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Two of the biggest breakthroughs of this leap year relied on breathtaking amounts of data. The ENCODE project has generated 15 terabytes of data over the past five years to uncover the functions of human DNA sequences; CERN has stored 26 petabytes of data this year alone from its Large Hadron Collider, as physicists worked to prove the existence of the Higgs boson. But data were a source of controversy as well as discovery. Arguments raged over whether information about a potentially dangerous flu virus should be published, for example, and funders, publishers and researchers discussed how to make raw data — as well as peer-reviewed research — more openly available. Meanwhile, high-profile cases of dubious or fraudulent results offered a reminder that above all else, findings need to be trustworthy.

Vindicated: Peter Higgs’s prediction gained weight this year.

GRAHAM STUART/AFP/GETTY

The Higgs at last

Applause, relief, joy and tears: in July, the world’s largest physics experiment officially discovered the Higgs boson. It took more than 500 trillion proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, before physicists could confidently announce that they had seen a new boson with a mass of around 125 gigaelectronvolts. Nearly 50 years ago, theorists including Peter Higgs had proposed that a Universe-filling quantum field imparts mass to some particles. The Higgs boson — the embodiment of that field — is looking disappointingly mundane so far, with no convincing hints of behaviour beyond that predicted by the standard model of particle physics. Nor has the LHC spotted evidence for the additional particles predicted by supersymmetry, a theory that would extend our understanding of the subatomic world and help to explain mysteries such as dark matter.

Going to extremes

In this Olympic year, science provided plenty of its own records. After two decades of drilling, a Russian team broke through 3.8 kilometres of Antarctic ice in February to reach Lake Vostok, a huge body of water isolated for millions of years. Early sample analysis has not found any signs of the life many scientists thought the lake might host. As Nature went to press, a British team hoping to reach Lake Ellsworth, one of the continent’s other subglacial lakes, was battling technical problems with the high-pressure jet of hot water used to bore through the ice. Film director James Cameron, meanwhile, became the first person to dive solo to the deepest spot on the planet: the bottom of the Mariana Trench, almost 11 kilometres deep. Just as gripping — though less scientifically valuable — was skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s jump from more than 39,000 metresabove New Mexico, breaking the speed of sound and a height record held since 1960. But not every record-beating attempt was successful. After six years of trying, the US$3.5-billion US National Ignition Facility in California — the world’s most powerful laser — failed keenly awaited clinical trials — although solanezumab may have slowed cognitive decline in some cases. Researchers think that preventing Alzheimer’s at an earlier stage could be a more promising strategy, and hope to set up pre-emptive trials in 2013. Among significant business moves, California-based sequencing company Complete Genomics went to China’s BGI for $118 million,despite competition from Illumina; biotech giant Amgen said that it would buy deCODE Genetics for $415 million; Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca paid US$5.3 billion to acquire biotech firm Amylin; and GlaxoSmithKline got Human Genome Sciences in a deal worth US$3.6 billion. Pharmaceutical companies also paid a record amount in malpractice fines in the United States this year.

Nature 492, 32


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