The Top 10 Science Stories of 2009 Posted by Xeno on January 1,
2010 Scientific American has a slide show with their picks for
the top ten Science stories of 2009. Here they are compiled as
one list. A hominid ancestor, swine flu, the world’s biggest
laser system and other highlights that defined this year in
science. Restart of the Large Hadron Collider Last year was
supposed to be the year of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but
a faulty connection between two magnets quashed the machine’s
operations just days after it was powered up in September 2008.
After more than a year of repairs, retrofits and testing, the
LHC’s operators switched the massive collider back on in
November of this year. In short order the machine began
eclipsing world records, first accelerating beams of protons to
unprecedented energies and then colliding those beams head-on,
producing the most energetic collisions ever seen in a particle
collider. The H1N1 Pandemic In April news about a novel “swine
flu” that was killing people by th