Amazing Science Discovery

Science is amazing, wonderful, and fascinating. There are so many science discoveries that you don't ever imagine. This is some of the most fascinating science discovery...

In scientific circles, 2012 will be remembered as the year we finally caught a glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson, otherwise known as the God particle. But these past 12 months were about much more than particle physics, with key findings in the fields of biology, deep space, and neuroscience. Here, in no particular order, some of the year's most fascinating discoveries from across the scientific spectrum.

1. The Higgs boson Back in July, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) were cheered like rock stars when they announced they'd finally caught a glimpse of the biggest and most elusive catch in modern physics: The Higgs boson. The particle, which they're 99.99997 percent sure is the real deal, validates the Standard Model of physics, which explains how, if not why, the universe is able to take on a tangible existence. "There's no underestimating the significance of this discovery," said Jeffrey Kluger at TIME. "No Higgs, no mass; no mass, no you, me, or anything else."

2. Ancient antarctic life 60 feet below the surface Lake Vida isn't like other lakes. For one thing, it's in Antarctica. For another, it's located deep beneath a 60-foot-thick slab of ice and has consequently been cut off from the surface world for 2,800 years, untouched by outside oxygen or light. Now after years of drilling, scientists have discovered samples of previously unknown species of bacteria swimming around in it, suggesting that life can exist in conditions previously deemed unfit.

3. The smell of white We can see the color white. We can hear white noise. But what about a white smell? For the first time, scientists have compiled what they've deemed a completely neutral scent, or "olfactory white," by combining a large assortment of widely diverse smells (meat, flowers, etc.) to give our noses a whiff of pure equilibrium.

4. A massive planet 13 times the size of Jupiter Kappa Adromedae b is a world so big it defies conventional classification. At 13 times the size of Jupiter, it circles a proportionally gigantic star 2.5 times larger than our own sun. This system's existence proves that super-sized stars are capable of producing super-sized planets.

5. The biggest black hole ever What's 250 million light-years away from Earth and possesses 17 billion times the mass of our own sun? This black hole at the heart of the galaxy NGC 1277, which weirdly doesn't gobble up nearby stars and planets as black holes tend to do.

6. Selfish, if mysteriously attractive, jerks Why are high school narcissists disproportionately cool? And why are we obsessed with the romance of the self-involved Kim Kardashian and Kanye West despite our better judgment? A small but interesting study reveals that people possessing "dark" qualities like narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were consistently rated as more attractive than so-called normal people — at least when they got to choose their own clothes.

7. A flawless invisibility cloak Most so-called invisibility cloaks can bend light around an object to disguise it, but tend to reflect something called incident light, ruining the illusion. Researchers at Duke University managed to skirt this problem by arranging a new class of metamaterials into a diamond shape, successfully hiding a miniature cylinder completely.

8. The (sigh) impossibility of Jurassic Park Sorry, dinosaur fans. Scientists discovered that DNA breaks down far too rapidly to make it even conceivable that a genetic engineer could clone a dinosaur. They found that DNA has a half-life of 521 years; in other words, after 521 years, half of the bonds between the DNA's nucleotides will have been shredded. The last dinosaur died 65 million years ago.

9. The oldest galaxy ever spotted The universe is estimated to be somewhere between 13 billion to 14 billion years old. After the Big Bang, it took hundreds of millions, even billions of years for the void of space to fill itself with the galaxies and cosmic clusters we can observe today. This newly discovered galaxy — a tiny, fuzzy red orb in photographs — is just 200 million years younger than the Big Bang, and might give us a clearer picture of what the universe was like in its infancy.

10. An implant that makes monkeys smarterIt's a breakthrough that seems torn straight from a Planet of the Apes script: Researchers have designed an electrical brain implant that improves the thinking power of monkeys, allowing debilitated animals to solve complex brain puzzles faster. 

11. Gangster dolphins Marine biologists studying Australian dolphins discovered that the mammals form complex hierarchies within their pods in order to attack other groups. Some individuals serve as fighters. Others serve as liaisons to go out and recruit new members. These "intricate webs" are rare in the animal kingdom, says Virginia Morell at Wired, and strikingly reminiscent of "the Mafia."

12. Ancient Mars could have supported life Only seven months after its spectacular landing on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered signs that ancient Mars could have supported life in the form of primitive microbes. The determination was made after instruments on the rover identified some of the key ingredients necessary for life in the rocks of Mars. Curiosity isn't searching for current life on Mars, only for signs of the Red Planet's potentially habitable environments in the past.In December, the Curiosity team announced evidence of a freshwater Martian lake near the planet's equator that could have supported life for extended periods of time. The lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, far more recently than scientists previously thought habitable environments existed on the Mars. More recently, scientists have used NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to determine that dark seasonal streaks near the equator could indicate the presence today of flowing salt water on Mars during the planet's warmer months. Previous signs of existing flowing water on the planet were limited to the poles, while the equatorial regions were considered completely dry. Altogether, Mars is shaping up to be a far more habitable place after the discoveries of 2013. 

13. Earth's Almost-Twin At the end of October 2013, scientists announced the discovery of Earth's closest exoplanet twin, in terms of size and composition. The planet, called Kepler-78b, is just 20 percent wider and 80 percent more massive than Earth, and boasts a similar density. But don't look for a twin environment on the rocky planet; it orbits its sun once every 8.5 hours, at a distance of about 900,000 miles (1.5 million km), with surface temperatures reaching more than 3,680 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius).This discovery came shortly after the confirmed extrasolar planet count reached 1,000, a significant milestone since the first planet outside of the solar system was found 20 years ago. But the number of these planets is sure to increase. Of the almost 3,600 planetary candidates announced by NASA'sKepler spacecraft, just over 150 have been confirmed. [Related: Biggest Alien Planet Discoveries of 2013] But astronomers aren't simply content with increasing the number of extrasolar planets; they want to know more about the alien bodies. In early October, scientists announced that they had produced the first cloud map of a planet outside the solar system. Scientists used the Kepler spacecraft and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to study Kepler 7-b, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting near its sun.