It is the particle discovered at Cerm that wins first place among the most important researches of 2012. But genetics is the protagonist with 3 out of 10 studies. From the Encode project, to DNA engineering up to the genome of an ancestor of the Homo Sapiens, lived 50,000 years ago. And then fertility, protein structure and the history of the thought-controlled robotic arm.
26 DEC – The end of 2012 is approaching and it's time for rankings, even for scientific journals. After that of Nature which indicated the ten characters who each embodied an important story of the year, today comes Science, which publishes a real one instead top 10 best discoveries of the last 12 months. No surprise that in first place is the Higgs boson, a by now much talked about particle discovered at Cern in Geneva, but if this is removed, the real prize perhaps goes to genetics, present in as many as 3 studies out of 10. In addition to these, 3 other topics are present related to biomedical sciences.
Already in second position in the ranking, in fact, we find a study of genetics, but combined with archaeology. The research is from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and concerns the Denisovan man, or rather the Denisova girl who lived 50,000 years ago and whose entire genome was sequenced in August starting from fragments of the bone of a little finger. The result, possible only thanks to a very recent sequencing technique that binds some molecules to DNA strands, was published online in February and then taken up again in August by own Science.
The bronze medal goes instead to a research concerning fertility, published in October in the same journal: some scientists from the University of Kyoto have in fact demonstrated how it is possible to obtain oocytes – and consequently embryos and animals in perfect health – both starting from cells
