2010: the year in science

Physics
There has been one major story this year: the Large Hadron Collider. In March, it started colliding particle beams; last month, it smashed beams of lead ions together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, achieving a temperature of 10 trillion degrees C, equal to the first microsecond after the Big Bang. The results suggest the early universe behaved like a super-hot liquid. From February, it is hoped that experiments will reveal more about dark matter, the nature of quarks, the Strong Nuclear Force, and, of course, the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that is believed to give matter mass.

Elsewhere, physicists at the University of California induced quantum behaviour in a machine, making it exist in two quantum states at once. The experiment won Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year award for its potential to revolutionise quantum engineering by enabling similar objects to exist in two places simultaneously.

Health

For the first time in Britain, a trial of a treatment based on embryonic stem cells – heralded as the next leap forward for medicine – went ahead. Researchers at University College London, said it “marks the dawn of the Stem Cell Age”. In January, we learnt that a vaccine for leukaemia had been tested on humans. Trials at King’s College London are at an early stage, but the vaccine showed promising results in mice.

In February, hopes of “personalised” cancer treatments were raised by geneticists at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Treatment that is customised according to a person’s genetic fingerprint has been tested on patients with bowel and breast cancer. It is a step towards cancer “becoming a manageable, chronic disease”. The race is also on to be the first scientist to sequence a person’s entire genetic code for less than $1,000.

Read more at The Telegraph