Every year, the editors and experts of the magazineScienceselected the ten most outstanding scientific milestones of what has happened in the course of 2012. On this occasion, the first place has been for the discovery of the Higgs boson, whichconfirms the hypothesis about its existence formulated forty years ago and completes the standard model of physics, providing an explanation to how other fundamental particles obtain their mass. This discovery was made by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which cost $ 10 billion to build and is located underground on the Franco-Swiss border. With it, particles like protons were accelerated to almost the speed of light.
To the list of great scientific milestones of the year is also added theobtaining eggs from stem cells, theDenisova man genomic sequencefrom an 80,000-year-old bone, the discovery of theMajorana fermion(a particle that is, at the same time, its own antiparticle), the advances in genomic engineering that allow“edit” the DNA of a living being, the measurement of an angle of the elusive particles known asneutrinoswhich will help to understand why the universe contains so much matter and so little antimatter, theCuriosity robot descent systemcurrently exploring Mars, the DNA Encyclopedia project calledENCODE, advances in brain-machine interaction that have allowed a person tomoving robotic limbs with thought, and the deciphering of protein structures of the parasite that causes sleeping sickness by means ofx-ray laser.
