The Seven Most Mind-Blowing Science Moments Of 2013

Between baby-eating/regurgitating zombie frogs, 3D-printers taking over the world and a $300,000 burger confusing the hell out of hippies and kosher Jews alike, you’ll find endless nerdy conversation starters here about the year that was in science.

Read this list and sound smarter at your Christmas party.

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1. Scientists Confused The BEJEEZUS Out Of Vegetarians

Stem cells. This year we found out that one day they will make the blind see. We also saw they might make paraplegics walk.  They could even cure Alzheimer’s disesase.

Sure, sure. But more importantly? They can make a beef burger without harming a single animal!

The recipe? A few stem cells that usually go around repairing cow muscles, a slurry of bovine foetal serum, and antibiotics. Sounds good, right? Apparently it tastes just like meat, but a little on the dry side.

Vegans can sleep soundly knowing this burger is off-limits. I’m not sure about vegetarians — it certainly ain’t no vegetable, but no cows were hurt in the making. As for whether or not a cheeseburger made with this stuff is Kosher? Well, you’ll need to consult your rabbi.

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2. The Universe Got Papped (In A Kinda Creepy Way)

Paparazzis with a big lens can make a lot of money. But they ain’t got nothing on the scientists at the Eurpean Space Agency. The lens on their Planck space telescope is so big they can papp the entire universe at once. So that’s exactly what they did.

But their telescope is so freaking big that the things they’re looking at are actually WAY in the past. So when they recently snapped a shot of the whole universe, it was actually a baby picture. (Which makes this papparazi analogy even creepier.)

The picture they took shows the way the universe was at just 380,000 years old. If you calculate universe-years the way you calculate dog-years, that’s kind of like a one day-old baby. Mazel Tov, universe! You can see how much of an improvement it was over previous, fuzzy maps here.

The shot isn’t all about shits and giggles, though. It reveals the universe is strangely lop-sided, and has a big cold patch in it. Physicists are excited about that because it means they’re assured billions of dollars in funding to try to explain what it all means.

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3. We Became True Believers In The Higgs Boson “God Particle”

There’s a 27 km ring underground near Geneva called the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates subatomic particles to practically the speed of light. The particles are smashed together 600 million times every second and somehow, by sifting through all the shards of broken particles, scientists can figure out the most fundamental stuff about the very nature of the universe.

2012 might have been the year the guys doing that found a new particle that was probably the Higgs boson. But 2013 was the year they confirmed it was a Higgs boson. In other words, they found out that, without doubt, this little particle is responsible for why some stuff has mass and why other stuff — like light — does not.

In October, Peter Higgs and his mate François Englert won a Nobel prize for figuring out in 1964 that this particle probably exists. When the Nobel committee tried to find Higgs to tell him, the old dude was holidaying without a mobile phone. When reporters finally tracked him down and interviewed him, he gave hope to all us easily-distracted no-hopers by saying he was so unproductive that, if it wasn’t for the fact he’d been tipped to win a nobel prize, he would have been fired from his job years ago. 

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4. Voyager Has Left The Building Solar System

In 1977, NASA launched two spacecrafts to study the edge of the solar system. As the dulcet tones of Carl Sagan explained at at the time, they both also carried a golden record with a message for any aliens that stumble across it. Encoded in the grooves are greetings in 59 languages (and one whale language), a sound essay including the sound of the beating heart of a woman in love, and 19 pieces of “earth’s greatest hits”. Sure it’s cheesy. But this was the ’70s, man. Everything was cheesy.

Ever since 2005, space junkies have had Voyager-fever, with repeated claims that Voyager-1 had finally crossed the boundary, into the interstellar medium. But this year, voyager 1 and its golden record finally actually crossed that boundary.

It’s now on its way toward other stars. Let’s just hope that aliens there have record players.

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5. Jurassic Swamp!

What’s more creepy than a frog that eats its eggs, and then vomits its babies when they’re ready to hatch? A ZOMBIE FROG THAT EATS ITS EGGS AND THEN VOMITS ITS BABIES WHEN THEY’RE READY TO HATCH!

Australian researchers essentially created exactly that this year when they resurrected the extinct gastric brooding frog. If you’re worried about these zombie frogs eating your babies, fear not: they haven’t yet managed get the embryos to fully develop. But it’s only a matter of time…

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6. It’s Getting Hot In Here

So obviously, climate change is real. But in 2013, it got REAL real.

In May, carbon dioxide levels hit the terrifying symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million. Levels haven’t been that high for about 4.5 million years.

And what’s more, the connection between that carbon dioxide and global warming became clearer than ever, with the IPCC declaring we are now 95% certain that humans have caused most of the global warming over the past 60 years.

So: we know there’s HEAPS of carbon, and we know that carbon is heating things up.

If you were convinced by climate-deniers that this warming won’t really matter, you must have had your eyes closed this year. In Australia,  we broke 123 climate records in 90 days of summer. We had the hottest January on record, the hottest day on record, and the hottest 12 months on record, not to mention several rainfall records broken as well. And of course, 2013 produced what might have been the biggest storm ever seen just north of Australia.

As climate scientist Will Steffen said: “’Temperature records are broken from time to time in Australia, but it is the sheer number of records being broken that is really unusual.”

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7. 3D Printing Got Crazy

As creepy cool as it might be to get a model of your foetus 3D printed while you’re pregnant, 3D printing became ridiculously amazing in 2013. It even became possible to download and print a 3D gun, creating a headache for regulators.

But it turns out 3D printers might not just be used for killing people — they could save people, too. In April, it was announced that scientists had loaded a 3D printer with cells and made a teeny tiny human liver. Scaled-up, a 3D-printed organ might be usable in humans.

3D printers were also used to change the way palaeontologists study fossils, and aeronautical engineers made the world’s first 3D printed plane.

But, of course, this just all takes us one step closer to the singularity, when machines take over the world.  Don’t believe me? Check out this 3D printer that makes more 3D printers.

I for one welcome our new 3D printing overlords.

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Michael Slezak is the Australian reporter for New Scientist, writing for them about everything from Higgs bosons to future space economies and dangerous virus outbreaks. He tweets from @MikeySlezak.