Most Extreme News Stories of 2008
From the hottest planet to the oldest organism, here are the year's extremes.
Dec. 29, 2008— -- It's been a year of extremes for science and technology. From camera footage of the deepest living fish, swimming some 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean, to the creation of the smoothest ever surface – a lead and silicon film.
Here are eight more extremes that New Scientist brought you in 2008.
In July, an international team of craftsmen unveiled an unusual pair of balls – believed to be the roundest objects in the world. "If you were to blow up our spheres to the size of the Earth, you would see a variation of only 3 to 5 metres in the roundness," said optical engineer Achim Leistner. The silicon balls are designed to each contain a near-identical number of silicon atoms, and become a new way to define the kilogram.
The shortest ever pulse of light – just 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long – was created in June. That's short enough to act like a kind of superfast flashgun to study the movement of electrons around large atoms. But there's still room for improvement – it's theoretically possible to produce pulses of just a zeptosecond (trillionths of a billionth of a second).
Concerns about global warming are put in the shade by the discovery of a planet called WASP-12b, which is 1.5 times as massive as Jupiter and takes just over a day to circle its host star, orbiting at 1/40th the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The tight embrace heats WASP-12b to an estimated 2250 °C – about half as hot as the surface of the Sun – making it the hottest planet yet discovered, as well as the planet with the fastest orbit, say researchers.
Later in the year, archaeologists unearthed the earliest nuclear family – an adult couple and their two children, buried together 4600 years ago in Eulau, Germany. "The two kids have her mitochondrial DNA, and his Y chromosome – that's a nuclear family," said molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp of Washington State University. But the real-life Flintstones had it much worse than their cartoon counterparts. Their shared grave is one of a number in the area, apparently marking the site of an ancient massacre.
