Millions of new scientific research papers are published every year, shedding light on everything from the evolution of stars to the ongoing impacts of climate change to the health benefits (or determents) of coffee to the tendency of your cat to ignore you. With so much research coming out every year, it can be difficult to know what is significant, what is interesting but largely insignificant, and what is just plain bad science. But over the course of a decade, we can look back at some of the most important and awe-inspiring areas of research, often expressed in multiple findings and research papers that lead to a true proliferation of knowledge. Here are ten of the biggest strides made by scientists in the last ten years. - The human family tree expanded significantly in the past decade, with fossils of new hominin species discovered in Africa and the Philippines. The decade began with the discovery and identification of Australopithecus sediba, a hominin species that lived nearly two million years ago in present-day South Africa. Matthew Berger, the son of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, stumbled upon the first fossil of the species, a right clavicle, in 2008, when he was only 9 years old.
- A team then unearthed more fossils from the individual, a young boy, including a well-preserved skull, and A. sediba was described by Lee Berger and colleagues in 2010. The species represents a transitionary phase between the genus Australopithecus and the genus Homo, with some traits of the older primate group but a style of walking that resembled modern humans.
- One prediction of this model is that the acceleration of masses can cause “ripples” in space-time, or the propagation of gravitational waves. With a large enough mass, such as a black hole or a neutron star, these ripples may even be detected by astronomers on Earth. In September 2015, the LIGO and Virgo collaboration detected gravitational waves for the first time, propagating from a pair of merging black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. Since then, the two instruments have detected several additional gravitational waves, including one from a two merging neutron stars.
- Scientists have been predicating the effects of burning coal and fossil fuels on the temperature of the planet for over 100 years. A 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics contains an article titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” which has a caption that reads: “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly.
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