Digg Science

Scientists had plenty of reasons to celebrate in 2008. After decades of work, researchers made rat stem cells, built the first memristor, and watched a language evolve like an organism. But none of those accomplishments impressed us as much as the breakthroughs on this list. From stem cell therapy to finding ice on Mars.

If you’re dead and worried about the carbon emissions created from your cremation, relax. The Swedish town of Halmstad has a solution. After an environmental review showed that Halmstad’s crematorium was pumping too much smoke into the air, the facility’s director decided to re-use heat from the cremations to warm up the crematorium’s buildings.

In an early move to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from farms, was the EPA angling to tax livestock?

By observing the remains of smashed up asteroids around dead stars, astronomers were able to deduce their chemical composition. They found that the dust of many chewed-up asteroids resembles the materials inside Earth and the other small, rocky inner planets of our solar system.

Today is the most stressful day of the year, according to researchers. A combination of the cold weather, economic gloom and end to Christmas festivities will leave workers battling the January blues.

Bell-bottoms… Designer jeans… Disco… Big hair… Gas shortages. Some icons of the 1970s are emblazoned in the memories of those old enough to remember. A few styles, to the dismay of many, have come back in vogue—oil-related crises among them.

Bailing out the entire human race might turn out to be cheaper than bailing out Wall Street: Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, suggests inventor Ron Acer in a patent petition for “a colossal refrigeration system with a 100,000-fold performance multiplier.”

A new building with affordable rents in the Bronx will be powered partly by 10 wind turbines, which should cut its utility bills for common areas in half.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, giant versions of Australia's unique wildlife stalked the continent. There were kangaroos up to 3m tall and enormous wallabies, wombats and echidnas. There were also koalas: larger and weightier than the creatures sometimes seen today in eucalyptus trees.

Space is getting crowded. The last 12 months have seen everything from a high profile space tourist, a powerful new space telescope, and everyone's favorite cuddly-looking microbes launched into space. Here are this year's tops.

The Cassini space probe snapped a series of images during two hours in July that have been put together to create a full, natural color view of the planet, its rings, and six of its moons.

When it comes to big money industry disaster spills, the media takes a "safe until proven toxic" attitude contrary to common sense. The coal ash sludge which has devastated the Tennessee River now shows to have elevated levels of arsenic.EPA says water safe, but arsenic at levels "considered harmful to humans"... so the H2O is safe but harmful

When it comes to big money industry disaster spills, the media takes a "safe until proven toxic" attitude contrary to common sense. The coal ash sludge which has devastated the Tennessee River now shows to have elevated levels of arsenic.EPA says water safe, but arsenic at levels "considered harmful to humans"... so the H2O is safe but harmful

The U.S. Department of Defense is looking to develop virtual parents to comfort children when moms and dads on active duty aren't available to talk.

New backgrounds in 3...2..

Scientists have long blamed climate change for the extinctions, for it was 12,900 years ago that the planet's emergence from the Ice Age came to a halt, reverting to glacial conditions for 1,500 years, an epoch known as the Younger Dryas. Now the proponents of this apocalyptic scenario say they have found a new line of evidence: nanodiamonds.

Neuroscience has learned much about the brain's activity and its link to certain thoughts. As Lesley Stahl reports, it may now be possible, on a basic level, to read a person's mind.

First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared. Then it took the children.

When President-elect Barack Obama showed off Steven Chu, the Nobel-prize winning physicist he picked to be his energy secretary, you could almost hear the American scientific community exhale, loudly & deeply – thousands of researchers, from Berkeley to MIT and everywhere in between, breathing a long, satisfying collective sigh of relief.

Apparently, "lenticular clouds, technically known as altocumulus standing lenticularis, are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, normally aligned at right-angles to the wind direction." In short: they look badass.