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Best of 2011

Feature | December 21, 2011

What were you reading in 2011? From the origin of life and a better way to explore history to the evolution of words and forecasting the future through monitoring the mass of news reports, we count down the most popular stories of the year:

Don Holmgren pulls a GPU node out of its rack at the Fermilab Grid Computing Center. Image courtesy of Reidar Hahn/Fermilab.

10. Exploring history with HyperCities

What would happen if you combined Google Street View with a history textbook? Hypercities promises the answer, with statues, buildings, and old city layouts to explore.

9. Porting to GPUs en masse

Researchers worldwide have access to a growing library of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) software that has been ported to run on graphics processing units, thanks to the efforts of a handful of researchers.

8. Forecasting humanity

Scientist Kalev Leetaru believes news is capable of teaching us much more than just what happened in the world today - it can tell us about relationships and sentiment between people and countries. This information, and how it changes over time, could be used to predict the outcome of events before they play.

7. The case of the missing proton spin

This year was 25 years since the European Muon Collaboration made a startling discovery: only a portion of a proton’s spin comes from the quarks that make up the proton.

6. From mice to men

It required billons of bases of DNA, millons of genomes, thousands of GBs of RAM, many dedicated scientists, and a handful of mice to make headway in the fight against the common, but deadly, birth defect Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia.

5. Don’t stop the beat

Up to 40% of new drugs being tested fail because of adverse effects on the heart. But in a project that finished in May 2011, European researchers built computational models of the heart’s electrical activity. As a result, they can now more accurately predict which drugs are likely to cause arrhythmia – abnormal electrical activity in the heart that can be fatal.

4. The evolution of words

German researchers are building a 'metadictionary' containing the core units of all the words used in the last 500 years in the German language, including those specific to regional dialects. The goal, the researchers said, is to develop and test methods and algorithms for detecting and understanding variance.

Evidence of ancient, microbial life admist a sunset at Shark Bay, in Western Australia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site

These stromatalites are evidence of the ancient microbes that were the only form of life for 85% of the history of life on Earth before more complex life evolved. Photo from Shark Bay, in Western Australia, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Image courtesy NASA.

3. Accelerate physics with your own computer

The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest, most complex machines in the world. Physicists are reviving the volunteer computing project Sixtrack, part of LHC@Home, to design the 2020 upgrade.

2. Virtual atom smasher in LHC@Home's Test4Theory

Anyone anywhere can now donate time on their computers to help theoretical physicists at CERN calculate what the huge experiments using the LHC should be looking for in their data, with a new project called Test4Theory, part of LHC@Home.

1. CERN lends a hand to the origin of life

On May 20, a small group of chemists and biologists gathered at CERN for a brainstorming workshop discussing ideas about the origin of life. Running one model on the LHC computing grid, they found that a set of about 65,000 different molecule types have a high probability of forming a self-sustaining reaction, which might be the first step to creating artificial life.