Every year, reporters and editors at Science
choose several runners-up,
and one Breakthrough of the Year.
Before we get to the Breakthrough,
here are the runners-up.
In Mexico, researchers have drilled rock cores
from the Chicxulub crater.
The cores chronicle in minute-by-minute detail
the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Other studies have revealed how the impact
immediately destroyed living things thousands
of kilometers away, and how mammals and plants
recovered in the thousands of years that followed.
A team of physicists claimed its rudimentary
quantum computer performed a calculation in
200 seconds, that would overwhelm
a conventional supercomputer.
The achievement is known as quantum supremacy,
and it marks a significant milestone on the
long road to a fully functioning quantum computer.
Artificial intelligence systems have conquered a variety
of complex two-person games.
But this year, a system called Pluribus upped the ante.
It beat professional players in thousands of six-hand
games of no-limit Texas Hold ’em poker,
a vastly more complex challenge.
Denisovans, the extinct cousins of Neanderthals,
have been known only by scraps of fossils
from a Russian cave in Siberia.
But their genetic traces are found in modern humans,
especially in Melanesia and Australia.
This year, scientists used a new protein method
to identify a jaw bone found
on the Tibetan Plateau as Denisovan.
It's the first physical trace of a Denisovan
found outside Siberia.
And another research group used genetic data
to reconstruct the face of a Denisovan girl.
The search for effective treatments for Ebola
has seen a string of disappointments.
But this year, two drugs tested
during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, dramatically increased
a patient's chance of survival.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft celebrated
the new year by relaying images of an icy
object from the far reaches of the Solar System,
1.6 billion kilometers beyond Pluto.
It looks like two merged lumpy pancakes.
Researchers believe it hasn't been disturbed
since the formation of the Solar System,
and it holds clues to how planets form.
A series of studies has indicated that some
severely malnourished children recuperate
slowly, if at all, because their gut microbes
remain in an immature state.
This year, researchers came up with nutritional
supplements the gut flora in these children recover,
paving the way for more effective treatments.
A drug combination approved this year
in the United States, aims to turn Cystic fibrosis
from a progressively damaging lung disease,
into a manageable chronic illness for most patients.
The treatment, which counteracts the effects
of a genetic mutation carried by 90%
of Cystic fibrosis patients, comes 30 years after
researchers identified the gene behind the disease.
This year, microbiologists took a major step
toward understanding the origin of eukaryotes,
the group that includes plants, animals,
and other organisms with cell nuclei.
After 12 years of trying, they succeeded in
culturing a microbe that belongs to an elusive
group called Asgard archaea.
They are the closest relatives to eukaryotes,
according to recent DNA analyses.
Now, researchers have this missing link
in hand to study.
And now, the Breakthrough of the Year.
In a technical tour de force, astronomers
combined observations from dozens of radio
telescope dishes at eight observatories around
the globe, to generate the first image of a
black hole.
The image shows a ring of light surrounding
a supermassive black hole at the center of
a galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth.
Science is recognizing this impressive international
collaboration, and its impact on our understanding
of the cosmos, as the
2019 Breakthrough of the Year.
