2013 IN REVIEW. 365 DAYS: the year in science

8/13/2019 2013 IN REVIEW. 365 DAYS: the year in science

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/2013-in-review-365-days-the-year-in-science 1/6

S hutdowns, lethal viruses,typhoons and meteorites —

much of this year’s science newsseemed to come straight from theset of a Hollywood disaster movie.But there were plenty of feel-goodmoments, too. Space explorationhit a new high, cash poured into investigate that most crypticof human organs, the brain, andhuge leaps were made in stem-cell therapies and the treatmentof HIV. Here, captured in sound-bites, statistics and summaries,is everything you need to knowabout the science that matteredin 2013.

3 4 4 | N A T U R E | V O L 5 0 4 | 1 9 / 2 6 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3

20 3 IN REVIEW

© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved



The Large Underground Xenon dark-matter experiment, deep in a mine in South Dakota.

US workers came out in force against the shutdown.

SHUTDOWN! The slow decline of USfederal support for research and develop-ment — spending is already down 16.3% since2010 — reached a new nadir in October, whenpolitical brinkmanship led the government toshut down for 16 days. Grant money stoppedflowing; work halted at major telescopes, USAntarctic bases and most federal laboratories;and key databases maintained by the govern-ment went offline. Many government research-ers were declared ‘non-essential’ and barred bylaw from visiting their offices and laboratories,

or even checking their official e-mail accounts.Since the shutdown’s end, grant backlogs andmissed deadlines have scrambled agencyworkloads.

Away from the deadlock in the UnitedStates, the European Union negotiated apath to a 2014–20 research budget of almost€80 billion (US$110 billion), a 27% rise in realterms over the previous 2007–13 period. Andfunding in South Korea, China, Germany andJapan continued to increase (the United King-dom and France saw litt le change). But Japan’slargesse came with the clear understandingthat its science investment would bring fastcommercial pay-offs. Along similar lines,US Republican politicians are cal ling forthe National Science Foundation to justifyevery grant it awards as being in the “nationalinterest”.

COSMIC MYSTERIES One of the year’smost important cosmological results was anexperimental no-show. The Large Under-

ground Xenon (LUX, pictured ) experimentat Sanford Underground Research Facilityin Lead, South Dakota — 370 kilograms ofliquid xenon almost 1.5 kilo metres down ina gold mine — did not see any particles ofelusive dark matter flying through Earth. But itput the tightest constraints yet on the mass ofdark-matter particles, and their propensity tointeract with visible matter. Theoret ical phys-icist Matthew Strassler at Rutgers Universityin Piscataway, New Jersey, says a consensusis forming that hints of dark matter seen byearlier experiments in the past three years wereprobably just statistical fluctuations.

Whatever dark matter is, it makes up around84% of the Universe’s total matter, accordingto observations, released in March, of theUniverse’s cosmic microwave background(CMB) by the European Space Agency’s Plancksatellite. Planck’s image ( pictured ) alsostrongly supports the hypothesis of infla-tion, in which the Universe is thought to haveexpanded rapidly after the Big Bang. A betterprobe of inflation might be provided throughits predicted influence on how the polariza-tion of CMB photons varies across the sky(‘B-mode polarization’). That subtle signalhas not been measured yet, but astronomers’hopes were raised by news of the first sightingof a related polarization signal, by the SouthPole Telescope, in July. And another Antarc-tic telescope — the underground IceCubeobservatory — confirmed this year that the

high-energy neutrinos it has detected comefrom far away in the cosmos, hinting at a newworld of neutrino astronomy.

“WE WANT TO DOOUR JOB AND WECAN’T, BECAUSETHE GOVERNMENTISN’T DOINGITS JOB.”Boston University ecologist Robinson Fulweileron the US government shutdown in October.

3.82billion yearsAGE OF UNIVERSE ASESTABLISHED BY THE PLMISSION’S PICTURE OF CMICROWAVE BACKGROU(BELOW).

1 9 / 2 6 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | V O L 5 0 4 | N A T U R E | 3 4 5

IN REVIEWNEWS

P L A N C K :

E S A / P L A N C K C O L L A B O R A T I O N ;

L U X :

C A R L O S H

. F A H A M

J A E C

. H O N G / A P




DECADE OF THE BRAIN US neurosci-entists were excited and confused in equalmeasure this April when President BarackObama unveiled the BRAIN Initiative — thefield’s equivalent of a Moon shot programme.Those feelings are still running high: whatstarted life as a brain-mapping proposal hasrapidly mutated into a more general effort to jump-start new technologies for decipheringthe brain, albeit one that lacks clear visionand funding goals. Together with the Euro-pean Union’s €1-billion (US$1.3-billion)decadal project to simulate the human brainwith supercomputers, announced in January,Obama’s project reflects neuroscience’s gradualshift away from molecular and cellular studiestowards research on how networks of neuronsproduce thoughts, memories and actions. “It’sstarting to become possible to do the kinds ofdetailed, mechanistic analyses of larger circuitsthat were unimaginable ten years ago,” says EveMarder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis Universityin Waltham, Massachusetts.

Among the technical advances helpingto make these dreams reality this year was acalcium-sensing dye that researchers used tocapture the first images of nerve cells firing inan entire vertebrate brain — that of a transpar-ent zebrafish larva ( pictured ). Efforts to mapthe brain’s architecture got a big boost fromCLARITY, a chemical treatment that turnsopaque tissue clear and can expose neural cir-cuits without the need for tedious brain slic-ing. Conventional neuroanatomy approachesalso paid off with the completion of BigBrain,the first fine-scale, three-dimensional atlas ofa human brain. And the introduction of falsememories in mice by using light to stimulate

Typhoon Haiyan was snapped from the International Space Station as it raced across parts of Asia.

Individual neurons flash red in thebrain of a larval zebrafish.

WAVERING ATMOSPHERE Apart froma landmark treaty to cut mercury emis-sions, signed by more than 90 nations so far,large environmental agreements were lowon the political agenda this year. But no oneexpected to see nations actually regress. Japanrenounced any near-term commitment to cutcarbon emissions, Canada withdrew from theUnited Nations convention to combat deser-tification and the Australian government,elected in September, decided to scrap climate-change agencies and carbon taxes. At least theEuropean Union agreed to end overfishing,reducing catch limits to a level that scientistssay is sustainable.

In May, the atmospheric concentrationof carbon dioxide temporarily surpassed400 parts per mill ion for probably the firsttime in human history. It was no surprisewhen the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change warned in its latest report,published in September, that climate change“unprecedented over decades to millennia”is altering natural environments in waysthat could affect bill ions of people. TyphoonHaiyan’s record-breaking wind speeds dem-onstrated the destructive forces that theatmosphere can unleash — although the jury is out on whether and how much globalwarming contributed (see page 361).

There were small signs of promise: emis-sions fell modestly in recent years in the UnitedStates and the European Union, and globalrenewable power generation reached around5,000 terawatt hours — exceeding the totalestimated electricity consumption of China.

In research, the focus was on the apparentslowdown in the rise of global average tem-peratures over the past 15 years or so. A studypublished in August supported the idea that the‘missing’ heat is being stored in the deep oceanand that surface warming will resume soon. Buta November study suggests that the apparent

hiatus is a mere statistical artefact produced byincomplete coverage of Arctic regions in globaltemperature data sets. Stay tuned.

km h -

WIND SPEED OF TYPHOONHAIYAN, ONE OF THE

STRONGEST ON RECORD.

3 0

CO2 ATMOSPHERICCONCENTRATION IN PARTS PER

MILLION MEASURED AT THEMAUNA LOA VOLCANOIN HAWAII.


IN REVIEWNEWS

M I S H A B

. A H R E N S A N D P H I L L I P P J . K E L L E R

K A R E N L

. N Y B E R G / N A S A

400




A TALE OFTWO VIRUSES

The outbreak of H7N9avian flu virus wasspeedily controlled oncelive bird markets wereidentified as the route oftransmission to humans.But the route for theMERS coronavirusremains elusive, and so asteady stream of newcases continues.

8

6

4

2

0

8

6

4

2

0

Mar 2012 Jan 2013

R e p o r t e

d c a s e s p e r

d a y

( b y o n s e

t )

Dec 2013

43 CASES | 45 DEATHS

H7N9

85 CASES | 74 DEATHS

MERS

VANQUISHING VIRUSES The cripplingparalytic disease poliomyelitis is now endemicin only three countries, but 2013 offered a

reminder that the path to eradication will notbe smooth. Although the virus’s geographicalrange in two of the endemic nations, Pakistanand Nigeria, was reduced, efforts to make fur-ther progress faced serious opposition, withassassinations of polio-vaccine workers inboth countries. No new cases were seen in thethird endemic area of southern Afghanistan.But the virus continues to cause sporadic out-breaks elsewhere, with more than 180 casesreported in Somalia. A polio outbreak alsobegan in war-torn Syria, and wild polioviruspersisted in southern Israel, leading to mass vaccinations across the Middle East to try to

stop the virus becoming entrenched in theregion.

This year also saw the emergence of a newfoe: the H7N9 avian influenza virus. An Aprilflare-up in China was quickly brought undercontrol after live bird markets were shut downin the main cities affected (see page 362); thetoll stands at 143 lab-confirmed cases and 45

deaths. Scientists are watching closely for anywinter resurgence — a job made harder becausethe virus does not cause visible disease in poul-try, and its reservoir species are not yet known.There has been less success in subduing the‘MERS’ coronavirus, first reported in September2012 (see ‘A tale of two viruses’). A steady streamof cases has followed — 185 lab-confirmed orsuspected, with 74 deaths by 12 December —most in Saudi Arabia, but also more widely inthe Middle East and Europe. Researchers havecriticized Saudi Arabia’s lack of progress intracking down routes of infection and animalsources — and the case count looks set to rise.

billionTHE YEAR’S LARGESTSCIENCE BUSINESS DEASAW THERMO FISHERSCIENTIFIC OF WALTHAMASSACHUSETTS, BUYBIOTECH-EQUIPMENTMANUFACTURER LIFETECHNOLOGIES OFCARLSBAD, CALIFORNIA

genetically modified neurons in the hippo-campus suggested that the ability to preciselymanipulate neural signals is not that far away.

US$ 3.6

N O O R U L L A H S H I R Z A D A / A F P / G E T T Y

SOURCE: ANDREW RAMBAUT/WHO


years

TIME TAKEN FOR ANEXPERIMENT TO CATCHFALL OF A DROP OF TARON CAMERA (A DROP FOONCE EVERY 7– 3 YEAR

An Afghan health worker gives polio vaccine in an immunization drive earlier this year.

69

-94 °CTHE COLDEST TEMPERAEVER RECORDED ON EANASA SATELLITES PINPOTHE LOW IN ANTARCTICWHERE THE PREVIOUSRECORD OF −89.2 °C WA

MEASURED IN 983.




A large piece of the Chelyabinsk meteorite is raised from the bed of Lake Chebarkul in Russia.

OPENING UP SCIENCE The drive to makescience publications and data more open con-tinued at a rapid clip this year. In February,the United States declared that the results ofgovernment-funded research must be madepublicly accessible (rather than kept behindpaywalls), but researchers have 12 monthsafter publication to comply. By contrast, theUnited Kingdom wants articles to be madefree immediately, although the next few yearswill see the country use a mixture of the twostrategies. (One study found that half of allresearch papers published in 2011 can alreadybe read for free somewhere on the Internet —the majority not at their publisher’s website.) Arumbling undercurrent in the debate concernsthe costs of this change, and exactly how muchsupposedly ‘open’ research can be reused.

Meanwhile, geneticists founded a globalalliance to encourage wider sharing of data onDNA sequences and clinical information. Inmedical research, the UK government begana shake-up that could see patient medical

500 kt TNT ENERGY EQUIVALENT

OF RESULTING FIREBALL —ABOUT 30 TIMES THAT OF

HIROSHIMA ATOMIC BOMB.

“WE WERELUCKY.”

Astronomer Peter Jenniskens,on the fact that no one was

killed when the Chelyabinskmeteor hit Earth.

2,000METRIC TONNES, MASS

OF METEOR WHEN ITENTERED THE ATMOSPHERE.

9 km s -

INITIAL SPEED OFMETEORIN EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE.

908 LAST TIME SUCHA LARGE

OBJECT HIT EARTH.

GENE PATENTS Nearly 20 years of USpatenting practice was turned on its head inJune, when the Supreme Court ruled thatnaturally occurring human genes could notbe patented (see page 359). The aftershocks ofthat decision are only now being felt. The case,brought against medical diagnostics companyMyriad Genetics, challenged the validity ofpatents on two cancer-related genes, BRCA1

and BRCA2 , used to protect the company’sproprietary tests for breast-cancer susceptibil-ity. Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decisionwas announced, several companies launchedcompeting BRCA1/2 tests at lower prices. ButMyriad, of Salt Lake City, Utah, has alreadysued six of the firms, arguing that it holds otherpatents that protect the tests. The effects of theruling have extended further. In October, afederal court judge cited the Myriad decisionin overturning patents held by Sequenom ofSan Diego, California, on fetal DNA circulat-ing in the blood of pregnant women, which thefirm used in some of its prenatal screens. Andlawyers report that US patent examiners arerejecting more patents than before on naturallyoccurring products such as genes and cells.

THE CHELYABINSK METEOR

THE FINAL FRONTIER The planet-huntingspacecraft Kepler will be remembered for thetantalizing results it produced before goingkaput in May: it located more than 3,500 pos-sible extrasolar planets (see page 360). Butwhen a second of Kepler’s metal reaction wheelsstopped spinning, scientists had to give up theirdream of an extended mission for the NASAcraft. Other space missions fared better. China,working towards constructing its second spacestation, saw three astronauts dock with an orbit-ing laboratory module. NASA’s Curiosity rovercontinued to trundle along on Mars, notchingup more than 4.5 kilometres on its odometer onthe way to its ultimate mountain destination. Asif that weren’t enough for the red planet, bothIndia and the United States launched Marsorbiters in November. And by December, Chinabecame only the third country ever to send arover to the Moon.

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft left them allin the dust. After a journey of 36 years and19 billion kilometres, the Voyager 1 probefinally crossed the boundary into interstel-lar space. The actual transition took place inAugust 2012, but not until this year were project scientists confident enough to announcethe final exit into the void between the stars.Next stop for Voyager 1: drifting past a starin the constellation Camelopardalis, about40,000 years from now.


A N T O N M E L N I K O V / R E U T E R S / C O R B I S




IDENTITY PUZZLES In a year studdedwith revelations about spying and snooping,the question of what can be gleaned about

identity from supposedly anonymized DNAdata became an issue in genetics. In January,computational biologist Yaniv Erlich at theWhitehead Institute for Biomedical Researchin Cambridge, Massachusetts, revealed howDNA in databases could be cross-referencedwith public data to identify research partici-pants. The ‘genome hacker’ followed this featby creating a family tree of 13 million individ-uals going back to the fifteenth century fromonline genealogy sites.

DNA analysis continued to uncover clues tohuman ancestry. The 24,000-year-old remainsof a Siberian boy suggested that up to one-thirdof Native American ancestry can be tracedback to Europe, for example. Moving tens ofthousands of years further back, examinationof the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomesequences revealed large amounts of inter-breeding between those human-like groups,as well as with modern humans and anotherunknown archaic population. And in anothermystery, a 1.8-million-year-old fossil skull sug-gested that three separate hominin species mayin fact be one. ■

Written by Richard Van Noorden, JeffTollefson, Erika Check Hayden, Lauren Morello, Helen Shen, Declan Butler, HeidiLedford, Alexandra Witze, Eugenie SamuelReich, Quirin Schiermeier & David Cyranoski

PROGRESS ON HIV Prevention, treat-ment, cure: the three prongs of HIV research

have begun to seem increasingly like part of thesame mission. In March, researchers reportedthat very early antiretroviral therapy had curedan infant of HIV (see page 360), following aJanuary study that found early therapy helps tokeep the immune system intact. That promptedthe World Health Organization to recommendthat treatment begin earlier than previously pro-posed. But the barrier to cures is still formidable.In July, doctors said that stem-cell transplantshad apparently cured two men of HIV — but byDecember, they revealed the virus had returned.

Vaccinologists were buoyed by new structuresof a key HIV protein; by the first study to trackthe development of a broadly neutralizing anti-body in a human; and by the demonstration that vaccines based on these antibodies can protectmonkeys against the virus. “The past year hasbeen perhaps the most revealing thus far aboutHIV’s secrets,” says Bruce Walker of HarvardMedical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

STEM-CELL SUCCESS A decade ago, ahuge fanfare greeted South Korean researcherWoo Suk Hwang’s claim — later provedfraudulent — to have created stem cells fromcloned human embryos. This spring, the featwas accomplished for real, by researchers atOregon Health and Science University in Bea- verton. Yet it stoked much less excitement.

When Hwang was faking his results, hopeswere high for therapeutic cloning: creatingembryonic stem cells specifical ly matchedto patients (see page 362). But few now thinkthat cloning will be widely needed (althoughOregon group leader Shoukhrat Mitalipovis working on clinical applications). This isnot just because of concerns over destroyingembryos, but also because the same end mightbe achieved using induced pluripotent stem(iPS) cells, reprogrammed from human adultcells. This year, a Japanese pilot study began

records shared with scientists. And regulatorybodies renewed their efforts to throw open the vaults of data from clinical trials. The Euro-pean Medicines Agency led the push, but hasbeen stalled by lawsuits from drug firms tryingto prevent the release of some of their trial data.

recruiting people with the eye disease maculardegeneration — the plan is to transplant sheetsof retinal epithelial cells, derived from iPScells, into their eyes. And in November, Japanapproved a regenerative-medicine law to speedup approval for iPS-cell and related therapies.

Meanwhile, clinics offering unapprovedstem-cell therapies continue to play cat and

mouse with regulators. This year, Italy’s healthminister at first sanctioned a previously bannedand unproven treatment for terminally illpatients (based on reinjecting stem cells frombone marrow), then offered money for a clini-cal trial — before reversing course on the adviceof its scientific committee. In a final twist, thecommittee was ruled unlawfully biased —leaving the issue in limbo (see page 331).

“I HAVE NEVER SEEN SOMANY PHYSICISTS FROMCERN SO WELL DRESSEDBEFORE.” Fabiola Gianotti of CERN on the lavish ceremonyfor the US$3-million physics awards sponsored byInternet billionaire Yuri Milner.

QUOTABLES

TEST YOURKNOWLEDGE


IN REVIEWNEWS

Five skulls found in Dmanisi, Georgia, suggest that varying hominin fossils may not be different species.

“IT’LL BE DIFFICULT TOCOMPETE WITH THEREADY AVAILABILITY ANDVERY CHEAP COSTS OFHUMAN POOP.” Tom Moore, a physician in Wichita, Kansas, on effortsto create synthetic pills of faecal bacteria, for curinggut infections.

“ARE WE THERE YET?YES, WE ARE.” Space physicist Ed Stone confirms that theVoyager 1 spacecraft has finally crossed theboundary into interstellar space.

“MOST OF US HAVELITTLE SENSE OF SOCIALRESPONSIBILITY.” Phillip Rogaway, a computer scientist at theUniversity of California, Davis, who has sworn not toaccept funding from the US National Security Agencyand is critical of other researchers’ silence.

“IT JUST SEEMS LIKE AGRATUITOUS KILLINGOF A MOSQUITO WITH ASLEDGEHAMMER.” Genome policy analyst Misha Angrist, after theUS Food and Drug Administration asked personal

genetics firm 23andMe to stop marketing its products.

C . Z

O L L I K O F E R A N D M

. S . P

O N C E D E L E O N / U N I V

. Z U R I C H

Q: THE OLDEST ANCIENTGENOME ON RECORD WAPUBLISHED THIS YEAR, BWAS IT HORSE OR HOMINFind out how much you can recallabout the year in science withNature ’s end-of-year quiz

go.nature.com/izlxfn

Documents

2013 IN REVIEW. 365 DAYS: the year in science