Name: Top 20 Biggest Scientific Discoveries of the Century So Far
Uploaded: 2020-03-26T16:00:56.000Z
Duration: 16 min 10 s
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It's only been 20 years, but we've already accomplished a lot.

And today we're counting down our picks for the top 20 biggest scientific discoveries of the century.

So far for this list, we're looking at the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries, inventions and breakthroughs in the 1st 2 decades of the 21st century.

The average human cell is made up of 23 chromosomes, each containing hundreds to thousands of genes.

These 23 DNA molecules serve is the instruction booklet for building a human being in the year 2000.

Through the combined efforts of a global community of researchers, we successfully mapped out a rough draft of the human genome before completing a final draft in 2003.

This took a colossal effort spanning over 10 years and remains to this day the single largest collaboration in the history of biology.

Thanks to this groundbreaking work, we now have a fundamental understanding of our genetic makeup and DNA.

Essentially, the Human Genome Project has given future generations of scientists the keys to unlock many mysteries of the human body.

Number 19 the first image of a black hole of the many strange and wondrous things that make up our universe.

Black holes are without a doubt among the most captivating, but until recently we had only ever observed their effects rather than the black holes themselves.

In 2019 we finally got to gaze into the abyss.

That year, the Event Horizon Telescope, actually a collaboration of radio telescopes around the world, brought us the first ever image of a black hole larger than our own solar system.

It's located at the heart of the messy 87 galaxy, 53 million light years away.

The image is an accomplishment that many once believed to be impossible, even within the scientific community.

The history of this substance can be traced all the way back to 18 59 when English chemist Benjamin Collins Brody first made observations suggesting its existence.

But it would take almost 150 years before graphing was properly isolated.

The honor of having made this breakthrough goes to physicists Andre Dime and Constant in Nova sell off who cracked the graphing mystery in 2004.

Graphene is a nano material that's at once harder than a diamond but somehow also more flexible than rubber.

It's at once incredibly strong, incredibly light and conductive.

In short, it's something of a miracle substance.

And while its potential has yet to be fully realized, the theoretical applications could revolutionise many fields from space travel to home electronics number 17.

Mapping the Neanderthal genome After sequencing human DNA, scientists have been able to do similar things for other species.

And every genome we sequence gives us a better understanding of the world we live in today.

Using bones from the underthe ALS, a team based out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Germany mapped out the genome of our distant cousins, People have speculated, of course, about these for Neanderthals.

We've just got the record of what they left behind the stone tools and so on.

Now we have a completely different way of addressing that problem.

They published an initial draft in 2010 followed by a detailed full coverage genome map in 2013.

With this information, we've gained invaluable insights into our own evolutionary history, even learning that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species.

Theoretically, this could also be used one day to bring me andr falls back from the dead number 16 Harris A new planet As you may have heard since 2006 poodle has been downgraded to the status of a dwarf planet.

Thankfully, PLOO TOE doesn't need to feel lonely.

The year before it got demoted in 2005 a team of scientists working at California's Palomar Observatory discovered a previously undocumented object in our solar system.

Initial estimates of its eyes were so big that there was talk of it being considered 1/10 planet.

Ultimately, it was categorized as a dwarf planet like Pluto's, due to its size.

But that label disguises its significance.

Heiress represents something much larger, the endless discoveries to be made in space even relatively close to home number 15 discovering the building blocks of life beyond Earth.

Much to the disappointment of alien enthusiasts, another decade has come and gone without the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Be that, as it may, various off planet findings did provide ample caused a hope.

A European Space Agency mission to comet 67 p churyumov Gerasimenko found that it carried ingredients essential for the origin of life, including an amino acid.

This has caused much speculation about the origins of life on Earth and that crucial initial material may have originated elsewhere.

Furthermore, NASA confirmed the presence of organic compounds in the water vapors of Saturn's moon Enceladus, further bolstering the hope that life could exist in the moon's subsurface ocean.

Once, not so long ago, we spoke of artificial intelligence as if it were a concept limited to the distant future and works of science fiction.

But in reality, we're already living in the age of a I.

In 2016 the Google Ai ai program, Alphago, which is part of Deepmind, bested the world champion of Go in four out of five matches.

It's a testament to the very real potential of computer learning, not to mention the superior processing power of artificial intelligence compared to the human brain.

And this is by no means a one off Watson.

Over the past decade, various Ai ai programs have been beating some of the world's top players in a variety of games, including poker, Jeopardy and even Starcraft two.

Ebola outbreaks are deadly and devastating, especially when affected communities have inadequate access to medical treatment.

In 2015 however, field trials of a vaccine developed in Canada and license to mark proved hugely successful.

In 2019 the vaccine was officially approved in Europe, with the American Food and Drug Administration soon following suit in mid December of the same year.

The Ebola vaccine wasn't the only breakthrough of its kind, however.

We also saw the rollout of a malaria vaccine that performed well in trial applications, as well as major improvements in HIV prevention and treatment both in America and around the world.

Number 12 T rex Soft tissue from a femur Admit it.

Based on all the hubbub about DNA when we were kids, a lot of us expected cloned dinosaurs by now.

Well, although a baby dino petting zoo seems unlikely to open soon, we have gotten closer in the last few decades.

In 2005 a team from North Carolina State University found a 68 million year old dinosaur femur, complete with blood vessels and cells.

While the fossil is informative in its own right, it represents an even bigger discovery.

Soft tissue and proteins can survive within bones for millions of years.

This flies in the face of everything we previously thought we knew on the subject and encourages us to seek out more soft tissue if we could get at l elemental molecular structure.

That's where the really evolutionary information is housed.

Number 11 Measuring cosmic microwave background Radiation Dinosaurs larger than life though they might be, are easy to wrap your mind around as a concept.

This next breakthrough not so much, but that doesn't make it any less groundbreaking.

During the Big Bang, the universe expanded from a hot and dense initial state cooling overtime.

This process left a residual sign in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation first discovered in the 19 sixties.

S team led by astrophysicist John Carlstrom managed to obtain incredibly detailed measurements of this radiation, their data at its support to the idea that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion and for the existence of dark matter and dark energy.

Number 10 reusable rocket NASA gets a lot of flak for not doing more manned missions to space.

But the simple reality is the cost of sending people into space and getting them home safely is astronomical.

Space X, however, has developed reusable rockets that will hopefully make space travel far more affordable heading into the next decade.

In December of 2015 after a few failed attempts, Space X achieved its goal by successfully landing the craft in an upright position.

In 2017 they achieved another milestone by reusing a recovered orbital class rocket booster.

And with the first crude launch of their dragon craft scheduled for 2020 commercial space travel will soon become a reality number nine.

Discovering some of the world's oldest art.

These cave drawings might not set new standards for realism, but when you consider their age, they are certainly mind blowing.

Discovered in the Maris Caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi decades ago, these works of ancient art have finally been properly dated as having been produced nearly 40,000 years ago and can now be counted among the oldest known works of art found anywhere on earth.

Much of the images have been worn away by the passage of time, but rough outlines of hands and animal illustrations remain in terms of age.

They're rivaled only by the show of a cave Paintings of Southern France discovered in 1994 and their identification forces us to re evaluate the history of human development in relation to representational art around the world.

Synthetic bacteria Why, you might be thinking.

Would scientists choose to make synthetic bacteria?

Bacteria gets a bad rap and is associated with everything from food going bad to illness.

Bacteria is also essential to digestive health gives us fermented foods like cheese and plays a key role in the world ecosystem.

From a scientific perspective, bacteria is also about a simple an organism is even fine or make.

In 2010 pioneering geneticist Craig Venter and his team wrote an original bacterium genome and brought it to life in a cell.

Those such a breakthrough could lead to biological weaponry.

It also paves the way for designer bacteria that helps us do everything from generating biofuels and recycling plastics to creating new vaccines.

Rewriting the human family tree already the 21st century has welcomed many new members to our family.