Significant scientific achievements or breakthroughs in 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Significant scientific achievements or breakthroughs in 2014

quora.com

71 pointssongco10 comments

"Science journalists" continued to misrepresent science on a regular basis.

The list is pretty good, but mesons are an entire class of particle, not a particle, so although the new particle discovered is a meson it is not the meson.

And Lockheed-Martin did not claim to have invented a working fusion reactor. They claimed to have an approach that they believe will lead to a working fusion reactor in five years or so.

Those are just two that caught my eye. It's been a good year for science, and for technology, and for humanity (mod some nitwits who think that violence and faith are good ways to improve the human condition) but science journalism is still a terrible mess.

To add to this list, the gravitational waves interpretation of BICEP2's B-mode polarization signal is incorrect.

The story about the three girls producing a breakthrough crop yield is complete nonsense, they didn't invent anything new.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2heown/16yearold_...

A lot of the headline-making science fair projects are complete BS. It's a shame, too, because there are actually a lot of novel and interesting research projects at high-school level science fairs. The good ones win reasonably frequently, but they're realistic enough not to make click-winning headlines.

Hm. That doesn't refute the core issue: faster germination time. It just nay-says the hype leading up to that conclusion. Again, more a criticism of science journalism than of those three scientists.

This list is also good and cataloged for other years :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science

Thanks. I got quite excited for a moment, but the list is actually full of things thats don't qualify as 'science breakthroughs'. Example:

"16 February – American science educator and engineer Bill Nye (presenter of Bill Nye the Science Guy) debates global warming with congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).[74][75][76]"

Many of the mentioned "breakthroughs" are not even science but engineering.

The biggest CRISPR breakthroughs were all in 2012 and 2013- while it's an exciting up and coming biotech application, it wasn't a breakthrough of 2014.

Tokyo is saying they will have robotic Olympics in 2020 and it doesn't seem that far off.

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