The thread discusses the annual vote for the Breakthrough of the Year organized by Science Magazine, highlighting various scientific advancements from 2018. Participants express their preferences among the listed breakthroughs and share opinions on the significance of these discoveries.
Participants generally express multiple competing views regarding their favorite breakthroughs, with no consensus on a single choice. Various opinions on the significance and reliability of the breakthroughs are presented, indicating an unresolved discussion.
Some claims about the breakthroughs lack detailed references or established consensus on their implications. Discussions about the reliability of certain scientific claims remain open-ended, and the significance of breakthroughs is subject to individual interpretation.
Readers interested in recent scientific advancements, debates on the significance of breakthroughs in various fields, and discussions surrounding the implications of scientific discoveries may find this thread informative.
Ygggdrasil said:Development cell by cell (22%)
http://vis.sciencemag.org/breakthrough2018/finalists/#cell-developmentFrom at least the time of Hippocrates, biologists have been transfixed by the mystery of how a single cell develops into an adult animal with multiple organs and billions of cells. The ancient Greek physician hypothesized that moisture from a mother’s breath helps shape a growing infant, but now we know it is DNA that ultimately orchestrates the processes by which cells multiply and specialize. Now, just as a music score indicates when strings, brass, percussion, and woodwinds chime into create a symphony, a combination of technologies is revealing when genes in individual cells switch on, cueing the cells to play their specialized parts. The result is the ability to track development of organisms and organs in stunning detail, cell by cell and through time. Science is recognizing that combination of technologies, and its potential for spurring advances in basic research and medicine, as the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year.
Driving those advances are techniques for isolating thousands of intact cells from living organisms, efficiently sequencing expressed genetic material in each cell, and using computers, or labeling the cells, to reconstruct their relationships in space and time. That technical trifecta “will transform the next decade of research,” says Nikolaus Rajewsky, a systems biologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. This year alone, papers detailed how a flatworm, a fish, a frog, and other organisms begin to make organs and appendages. And groups around the world are applying the techniques to study how human cells mature over a lifetime, how tissues regenerate, and how cells change in diseases.