Biggest science breakthroughs of 2014

The image released by the European Space Agency ESA shows an artist rendering by the ATG medialab depicting lander Philae separating from Rosetta mother spaceship and descending to the surface of the comet. Photo / AP

The Rosetta mission which has for the first time put a spacecraft in orbit around a comet and landed a robotic probe on its surface has been voted 2014's most important scientific breakthrough by the editors of the journal Science.

Rosetta was voted top from a list of 10 scientific breakthroughs which included major advances in medicine, robotics, synthetic biology and palaeontology - the discovery that cave art in Indonesia thought to be 10,000 years old is actually between 35,000 and 40,000 years old.

The European Space Agency (ESA) mission began in earnest 10 years ago when the Rosetta spacecraft was launched but this year saw it catch up with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and complete a complex serious of manoeuvres to put it into orbit.

However, the highlight of the mission was the successful soft landing of its Philae probe on to the surface of the icy object - not once but three times as it bounced twice from its intended landing site.

"Philae's landing was an amazing feat and got the world's attention. But the whole Rosetta mission is the breakthrough. It's giving scientists a ringside seat as a comet warms up, breathes, and evolves," said Tim Appenzeller of Science. An instrument on Rosetta has already detected water, methane and hydrogen as well as rarer molecules such as formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, findings that could indicate whether comets delivered the vital ingredients of life to the early Earth.

"Breakthroughs should do one of two things: either solve a problem that people have been wrestling with for a long time or open the door to a lot of new research," said Robert Coontz, deputy news editor of Science.

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The other breakthroughs that made it onto the list are:

Dinosaur-bird transition

A series of papers compared the fossils of early birds and dinosaurs to modern birds and revealed how certain dinosaur lineages developed small, lightweight body plans, allowing them to evolve into many types of birds and survive the last major mass extinction about 66 million years ago.

Young blood fixes old

Blood from a young mouse - or even just a factor known as GDF11 from young mouse blood - can rejuvenate the muscles and brains of older mice. The findings have led to a clinical trial with Alzheimer's patients.

Getting robots to cooperate

New software and interactive robots that, for example, instruct swarms of termite-inspired bots to build a simple structure are proving that robots can work together without human supervision fater all.

Neuromorphic chips

Mimicking the architecture of a human brain, engineers at the computer company IBM and elsewhere rolled out the first large-scale "neuromorphic" chips, which are designed to process information in a similar way to brains.

Beta cells

Two groups pioneered methods for growing cells that closely resemble beta cells - the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas - in the laboratory this year, giving researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study diabetes.

Indonesian cave art

Researchers realised that hand stencils and animal paintings in a cave in Indonesia, once thought to be 10,000 years old, were actually between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. The discoveries suggest that humans in Asia were producing symbolic art as early as the first European cave painters.

Manipulating memory

Using optogenetics - a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light - researchers showed they could manipulate memories in mice. Deleting existing memories and implanting false ones, they went so far as to switch the emotional content of a mouse memory from good to bad, and vice versa.

CubeSats

Although these were blasted into space a decade ago, cheap satellites with sides that are just 10cm squared, called CubeSats, really took off in 2014. Once considered educational tools, these miniature satellites have started to do some real science.

Expanding the genetic alphabet

Researchers have engineered the gut microbe E.coli so that it possesses two additional "letters" of the genetic code - nucleotides known as X and Y - in addition to the normal G, T, C, and A that make up the standard building blocks of DNA. Such synthetic bacteria may be used to create designer proteins with "unnatural" amino acids.

- INDEPENDENT