Author: John Timmer

Science is an inherently visual activity. Yes, we can know about all sorts of things in the abstract and try to envision them in our minds. But it's one thing to hear a description of the developing brain, and another thing entirely to see one as it's developing. In some cases, images tell us things that it was simply impossible to know otherwise.

2015's science came with its own host of images, some of them taken by the scientists and engineers involved, others we managed to take ourselves. So, we put together a gallery of some of our favorites from this past year; what follows is a little bit on why we liked them.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

A close up showing the jagged peaks of Norgay Montes, some of which reach 3,500m. The late evening sunlight captures just how rugged this terrain is.

16 more images in gallery

New worlds: Pluto is too small to have much heat left over from its formation, so the expectations were that we'd see little more than a crater-ridden landscape. Pluto is anything but, and the images have left scientists scrambling to explain a landscape with complex geology. Similar things are true about another dwarf planet, the largest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres. Here, the surface was a crater-scarred landscape, but it contained enigmatic bright spots that continued to grab everyone's attention as the Dawn probe moved closer.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When it comes to evolution, people tend to focus on the big driving force of natural selection, which latches on to helpful mutations while purging the harmful ones. But there are other processes that change the frequencies of mutations—everything from random drift to the founding of small isolated populations.

Looking at our own species' history, we would expect to see some of this in action. After modern humans established themselves in Africa, smaller populations branched out to establish footholds in Asia before spreading east, eventually reaching the Americas. At each step, a small group of migrants took a fraction of humanity's genetic diversity with it, creating a series of population bottlenecks.

This should be easy to see in our DNA, but so far it has turned out to be complicated. Different attempts using distinct populations and methods have come to mixed conclusions about whether a clear signal is there. Now, a large international team of researchers has gone and sequenced genomes from multiple populations along humanity's route out of Africa, and they found a signature of these bottlenecks both in terms of genetic variation and in terms of potentially harmful mutations.

For all its flaws, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. Despite the vandalism, edit wars, and arguments over what constitutes a point of view, it provides key information about a dizzying variety of topics. Most entries have the basics—who, what, when, where, and why—and a long list of reference if going beyond the basics is required. I've relied on them for a lot of information.

Most, but not all. Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you're likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible.

This failure is a minor problem for Wikipedia, as most of the entries people rely on are fine. But I'd argue that it's a significant problem for science. The problematic entries reinforce the popular impression that science is impossible to understand, and isn't for most people—they make science seem elitist. And that's an impression that we as a society really can't afford.

(credit: Glenn Asakawa, University of Colorado)

Moving data around inside a computer means shoving it through wires, which have inherent bandwidth limitations and produce a lot of heat. Once that data hits a network, however, it often runs across optical hardware, which can send information long distances at high bandwidth without needing a dedicated nuclear reactor for power.

The contrast between the two methods has most companies thinking about ways of getting optical connections inside computers and, eventually, inside chips themselves. This poses a significant challenge. While it's possible to use silicon to create light-handling features, the processes used to do so are incompatible with the CMOS techniques used to make circuitry. As a result, most efforts in this area have used separate chips: one for the processor, one for the optical interconnect.

Now, a research team has put together a single chip that handles both optical and electrical processing, and which uses an optical connection to its main memory. While the bandwidth remains low, the entire system was manufactured using standard CMOS processes. And it incorporates a small RISC processor that's able to run standard text and graphical programs.

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In my blog post on my 10th anniversary at Ars, I promised to answer readers' questions. This is one of my attempts to do so.

Someone asked how to deal with a denialist/skeptic on scientific topics. I think the process can be best explained using a flow chart.

The first question is whether you’re dealing with a fully committed denialist. You’re never going to get Peter Duesberg to admit HIV causes AIDS or someone from the Heartland Institute to accept that we’ve got over a century’s worth of science behind climate change. So if your first answer is “yes,” then you have to think about whether an audience is present or likely to ever see the conversation. If not, then there’s no point in engaging. You’re never going to get anywhere with the individual, and nobody is going to benefit from the time you will spend trying.

If you like Ars' coverage of science, you've undoubtedly been thrilled by having Eric Berger and Beth Mole join the staff here. If you had a hard time imagining that things could get better, then prepare to expand your imagination: as of this week, we're happy to welcome Annalee Newitz to the Ars staff!

Annalee's official title will be Tech Culture Editor, giving her a broad remit when it comes to what she writes about. Technology, culture, and science have an intricate relationship, each having a profound influence on the others. Understanding how that influence flows and how we can study and possibly shape it is a significant challenge.

Fortunately, it's a challenge that Annalee is phenomenally well-equipped to handle. After getting a PhD in English and American Studies (from the finest graduate institution in the world, I might add), she received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship that allowed her to study at MIT. She's been an analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has published in places ranging from The Smithsonian Magazine to Popular Science.

In my blog post on my 10th anniversary at Ars, I promised to answer readers' questions. This is one of my attempts to do so.

Quite a few people have asked me to go into more detail on the Ars editorial process—how do science news stories get chosen? So here’s a quick look at how the sausage gets made.

Everything starts the week or weekend before publication (depending on how organized I am). By Friday, Nature and PNAS have both put together lists of some of the stories they’ll be releasing the next week. Nature has its editors select some articles for full PR treatment, providing a several-paragraph summary that’s generally accurate. Others just have their titles listed; the majority aren’t released until the full edition of the journal appears online. PNAS also issues press releases for a few stories, but it also dumps the entire collection of articles. Science usually makes a list similar to Nature’s, and it's available on Sunday night.

(credit: UMass Medical Center)

Yesterday, Congressional negotiators released a budget agreement that is likely to be signed by the president if it could pass both houses. The overall outlines of the deal—tax breaks that benefit businesses and increases in spending—will draw opposition from members of both parties, so it's not clear the president will ever see it.

Assuming it passes, however, the deal would be good news for scientific research. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has done an analysis of the bill and finds most research-focused agencies will see a boost. The priorities of many legislators, however, has ensured these boosts are not evenly distributed.

This appears to be a case where each party came in with a number (the president, House, and Senate each had spending bills under consideration), yet in many cases, they compromised by spending more than anybody had asked for. Overall, federal R&D money will go up by 8.1 percent in 2015, to nearly $150 billion. Roughly half of that, $73 billion, will end up being spent on defense research. Of that figure, $15.4 billion will go to basic science and tech research, even though none of the parties had asked for more than $14.6 billion.

Enlarge (credit: Nick Matzke/Science)

We're just a few days from the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller v Dover, the case that declared teaching intelligent design in science classrooms an unconstitutional imposition of religion. The sound legal defeat at Dover, however, hasn't convinced people who dislike evolution from trying to limit its use in public education. Instead, they've simply adapted to the new legal environment by developing new tactics.

If all that adapting to the environment sounds a bit like evolution to you, you're not alone. Nick Matzke played a key role in the Dover trial, and he went on to graduate studies in evolutionary biology. In a short report that's being released by Science, Matzke describes how you can apply evolutionary analysis to the dozens of bills that have targeted science education in various states. The results look a lot like evolutionary lineages, with lots of dead ends and the rapid expansion of successful innovations.

Matzke used to work for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which helped support the plaintiffs at the Dover trial. He's most famous for finding another evolution analog in a key text: a search of early drafts of the intelligent design book promoted by the school board turned up a "transitional fossil."

(credit: University of Maryland)

Quantum systems are inherently fragile as any interactions with the outside world can change their state. That makes creating things like quantum memories rather challenging, since it can be hard to know if it actually preserves the information you put into it. To get around this, researchers have been looking into ways of creating error-correcting quantum memory.

Now, researchers have come up with a rather simple scheme for providing quantum error controls: entangle atoms from two different elements so that manipulating won't affect the second. Not only is this highly effective, the researchers show that they can construct quantum logic gates with the setup. And while they were at it, they demonstrate the quantum nature of entanglement with a precision that's 40 standard deviations away from classic physical behavior.

People have managed to entangle different types of particles previously. For example, you can entangle an atom and a photon, which allows the photon to transfer information elsewhere—something that's undoubtedly necessary for a quantum computer.