Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9731111

by forgottenacc56 • 11 years ago

217 230 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

This sounds more like an AskReddit post than AskHN... but I'd say printable organs, smaller and smaller computer chips, commercialization of space flight, possible warp drive tech(may get us there in 100+ years, lol not expecting anything soon).. anti-aging (expected to double or triple life expectancy by 2050.) etc...

BerislavLopac2• 11 years ago

Those are mostly inventions, as opposed to discoveries.

zmeden• 11 years ago

I'd consider most of the things you listed to be inventions/innovations. Discovery, for me, is closely connected to uncovering of a new phenomena or an effect. And invention/innovation would be the use of it for some specific purpose.

CoryG89• 11 years ago

Surely the techniques and logic used to empower such inventions and innovation had to be discovered by someone at some point. For every great new invention is their not usually some discovery made sometime prior which ushered it in? For things like smaller and smaller computer chips. I'd say that Moore's Law was discovered, not invented.

recursive• 11 years ago

The warp drive is definitely a brand new effect.

golergka• 11 years ago

AskReddit post than AskHN

What's the difference, apart from the quality of answers?

mikeokner• 11 years ago

If BuzzFeed could rip off the top few answers and combine them into one article "The 8 greatest discoveries of the past few years!", then it's probably not a great HN post.

rockdoe• 11 years ago

You mean, worse answers here, right.

kang• 11 years ago

blockchain

BerislavLopac2• 11 years ago

I would say, in no particular order:

    * the fact that many of the dinosaurs had feathers
    * myriad of exoplanets
    * water on Mars (and many other new data on the planet)
    * Higg's boson (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)
    * Neanderthal genes present in modern humans
    * new ancient Mayan cities

That's it from me for starters, hopefully others will join in.

arethuza• 11 years ago

Great list - I'd certainly go for the exoplanets as #1

danieltillett• 11 years ago

What about the denosovians?

jballanc2• 11 years ago

I'd argue that the discovery of Denisovans might be bigger than Neanderthal genes, but they're in the same ballpark. Modern sequencing technology has led to an explosion in discoveries about early human (and other organisms') evolution.

Actually, I'd just put "rapid sequencing" right near the top of the list. When I started grad school (in 2003 if you must know), there was a feeling that it'd be very hard to get any better/faster than Sanger sequencing (and modifications of the same). Now there's a plethora of technologies that are both faster and more accurate.

new2993• 11 years ago

Now there's a plethora of technologies that are both faster and more accurate.

Sorry to nitpick, but the inherent error rate of high throughput sequencing platforms is still higher than capillary sequencing. This is more than mitigated for by the massive throughput advantage though.

jhallenworld• 11 years ago

Dark energy / accelerating expansion of the universe: well this goes back to 1998..

imglorp2• 11 years ago

This is first on my list.

Understanding our place in the universe will tell us where we came from and where we're going. There's also clearly some fundamental physics left to master which might have unforseen practical applications.

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

* the fact that many of the dinosaurs had feathers

And the fact that chickens are actually coming from Dinosaurs.

mcv6• 11 years ago

* myriad of exoplanets

More importantly: the fact that other solar systems look nothing like our own. They tend to have large (often super-Jovian) planets close to their sun, and often multiple planets closer to their sun than Mercury. There are very, very few solar systems we know of that resemble our own.

PaulRobinson• 11 years ago

I'd say that in terms of what we are able to do next, Graphene wins by a long way. Graphene is remarkable stuff, literally.

I'd say in terms of impact on philosophy, religion and way of life, the large number of planets we're discovering.

jbrooksuk2• 11 years ago

How is it literally remarkable stuff?

chriswarbo• 11 years ago

Graphene is a single layer of graphite. Graphite is used in pencils. Pencils can make marks, which are erasable, and hence re-markable.

;)

brockers• 11 years ago

I fear the graphene will fall by the wayside due to legal and social pressure. News sources have already pointed out that it is significantly more dangerous, if inhaled, than asbestos; another material this is insanely useful for a number of applications but is effectively blackballed as a engineer-able material.

Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe. The fear of radiation exposer has turned it into a pariah in the world community; totally ignoring the fact the radioactive elements in coal emissions have kill more people in the last 30 years than 100 Three Mile Island incidences would.

blumkvist• 11 years ago

Nuclear energy is very expensive. Not in the sense that your bills are high. Cost are hidden and paid by the government, largely. The initial project's cost is astronomical, but it always goes over budgets and deadlines. Those are provisioned for in the initial contract, so the additional cost is rarely talked about.

Nuclear companies are in bad shape nowadays, because governments around the world caught up with the way they conduct business.

trebor• 11 years ago

I lived near one of the asbestos super-sites that the EPA was still involved in monitoring. Back in the day it had been a huge asbestos mine. As far as I know, it was safe when I lived in the area but the health impacts were still being felt.

Graphene will see adoption, but will probably be halted at the first sign of asbestos like diseases. I can only imagine how hard it would be to dispose of products with graphene correctly.

xorcist• 11 years ago

Nuclear, by which I take it you mean uranium fission energy, is far from a clean energy source. Extraction and refinement both have environmental challenges, and waste disposal is very much an unsolved problem in practice. Simple in theory, but with problematic economical and political issues.

The "fear of radiation" is perhaps the least important problem (with bigger ones including cost, centralization, waste disposal and environmental issues), yet the only problem some proponents of the technology wants to discuss, perhaps with the implication that if we treat everyone else as stupid they will go away. Perhaps after so many years it is time to reevaluate that strategy.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

I fear the graphene will fall by the wayside due to legal and social pressure. News sources have already pointed out that it is significantly more dangerous, if inhaled, than asbestos; another material this is insanely useful for a number of applications but is effectively blackballed as a engineer-able material.

But, unlike asbestos, graphene won't be literally all around everyone right? And it won't be worked on by people who weren't informed of risks and provided with proper safety gear.

discardorama• 11 years ago

Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe.

Yeah, but what do you do about the waste? The US has tons of waste sitting around. The grand plan of using Yucca Mountain to store the waste fizzled. We have just postponed the cost to a future generation who'll have to deal with the waste we're producing today.

dimino6• 11 years ago

I just want to be able to build huge buildings. I want that landscape in the Star Trek reboot at the beginning when the mountainous building is in the background of the Iowa landscape.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

That's a good point, but asbestos used to be in everything from pipe covers to shingles to oven gloves. I don't see any proposals for such bulk deployment of graphene.

VLM2• 11 years ago

A VERY specific request, no inventions, just things found and cataloged aka discovered.

http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/systems/

Also see pretty much every space probe of the "last few years". Pity you couldn't wait another month for the Pluto flyby, unless it completely fails there will be plenty to talk about.

I would imagine the biological sciences could list all kinds of interesting, possibly useful, critters.

The geologists and archeologists are always digging something cool up.

coreyoconnor• 11 years ago

I think the discovery of exoplanets will have far reaching cultural implications.

We've gone from believing planets are extremely rare to knowing planets are relatively common. Now that planets are known to be common, does that mean life is common? What will that do to the cultures that, in effect, support themselves on the belief that humans and the earth are unique?

JoeAltmaier10• 11 years ago

Denial has worked so far. Heck, even the relationship between forms of life on Earth is effortlessly denied by the Creationists.

velavar• 11 years ago

Though theoretically predicted long ago, I suppose the Higgs boson can be said to have been "discovered" in 2012 when its presence was first confirmed.

zt• 11 years ago

CRISPR for gene editing:

"Since 2013, the CRISPR/Cas system has been used for gene editing (adding, disrupting or changing the sequence of specific genes) and gene regulation in species throughout the tree of life. By delivering the Cas9 protein and appropriate guide RNAs into a cell, the organism's genome can be cut at any desired location."

(From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR)

Edit: Hear a recent Radiolab episode on the topic (http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/)

baldfat3• 11 years ago

This means curing: Color Blindness, Liver Disease, Hopefully Cancers, Genetic Defects, MAYBE one day Aging?

JoeAltmaier10• 11 years ago

More likely the first (profitable) applications will be: changing eye color, hair color, losing fat, changing height, changing skin tone. Billions in each market.

Protostome2• 11 years ago

I would first want to see people accept GMO crops. Then I'll be willing to think of people going to the doctor to change their eye color.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

That's the first I've come across gene drives and gene drive escape. It's every bad movie about genetic engineering come to life, and just as scary.

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

It's not so bad if you know some evolutionary biology. Most of these things have huge fitness costs (e.g. genes that render a mosquito sterile have a fitness of zero), so the possibility of escape is less than the chance of the sun turning into a pumpkin.

cconcepts3• 11 years ago

Truly extraordinary stuff. But does anyone else lie awake at night wondering why we can do amazing stuff like this yet can't provide everyone clean drinking water or enough protein to eat?

bgilroy262• 11 years ago

I don't. It is easier to control variables in a few laboratories than to control them in the entire world

ISL• 11 years ago

Thoughtful Nature feature on the subject: http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-the-disruptor-1.17673

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

There has been a consistent pace of advancement in understanding gene regulation, microbiological evolutionary processes, and the systems of cellular machinery and regulation. There haven't been individual huge breakthroughs that are easy to point to and say "ahah! that's the lynchpin of everything, gimme a nobel!" but it's been a steady progression of improved knowledge. It'll be interesting to see if that trend continues and what that new understanding will translate into. In large part it's this stuff which is really fulfilling the promises of things like the human genome project.

mrestko• 11 years ago

CRISPER/Cas9 for targeted gene editing.

JonnieCache• 11 years ago

While it's not really "great", the absence of new fundamental physics this century is certainly striking...

OTOH Quantum error correcting codes are pretty bananas. Won't be useful for a good while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction

EDIT: the correct answer is that gene editing stuff though.

bradneuberg• 11 years ago

The revolution in biotech happening from the discovery of the CRISPR process will be as important as the semiconductor in the long run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

Neural networks via deep learning started showing incredible results the last few years (after about 40 years of development) across a range of fields, including speech recognition, machine vision, and more. It's still early days, but combining reinforcement learning with neural networks looks like it will be very exciting too: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature1...

lalalandland2• 11 years ago

Unraveling the link between brain, lymphatic system: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150615094258.ht...

VLM2• 11 years ago

Is reality invented or discovered? Is math invented or discovered? Was automata theory invented or discovered? OK well then is the quicksort algorithm invented or discovered? Is LISP invented or discovered? Is my code invented or discovered?

SuddsMcDuff• 11 years ago

Are invented and discovered just a matter of perspective?

contingencies• 11 years ago

> Are invented and discovered just a matter of perspective?

invented

rjcz• 11 years ago

If something did not exist prior to our action then it is an invention, otherwise it's a discovery.

frozenport• 11 years ago

>Is reality invented or discovered?

discovered, this is a tautology

> Is math invented or discovered?

invented

> Was automata theory invented or discovered?

invented

>OK well then is the quicksort algorithm invented or discovered?

invented, unless you believe that humans do quicksort intuitively. In which case it wasn't invented by you, personally.

>Is LISP invented or discovered?

invented

>Is my code invented or discovered?

invented

jonmc12• 11 years ago

I thought the discovery of the quantity of distinct populations (~5k currently) and densities (relatively even) of upper-ocean viruses was perhaps an under-rated discovery that could lead to more advanced understanding of both the evolution of cellular organisms on earth and our current ecosystem. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150521-ocean-viruses/

robg• 11 years ago

How sleep washes the brain of toxins: http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/october2013/10282013clear...

This mechanism could also be the cause of the refreshment we feel after a short nap or meditation. Much harder to study though!

etrautmann2• 11 years ago

This study didn't show that. They showed that toxins that are injected into the brain clear faster during sleep, but not that the brain is actually clearing anything endogenous. Sounds like a technicality but the claims were overblown based on their data.

chintan• 11 years ago

Mermistor (discovery in 1971 but actual implementation in 2008)

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-pla...

aerovistae• 11 years ago

Wasn't sure if you had misspelled "memristor" or if there was some sort of aquatic resistor I had not heard of.

miduil2• 11 years ago

* Hackerspaces

moron4hire• 11 years ago

They're an older concept than you think.

miduil2• 11 years ago

That's true. :)

steven2012• 11 years ago

Preserved soft tissue was found in dinosaur bones, allowing us to see the actual structures, and apparently this is not a rare phenomenon. Maybe DNA can be extracted?

AC__4• 11 years ago

Vampires! Technically speaking, parabiosis. Although it is not actually a new discovery at all, personally I'm convinced there are humans who have already transfused young blood plasma(as the linked article points out illegal stem cell transplants are common as well). Yeah, that's right, vampires.

http://www.nature.com/news/ageing-research-blood-to-blood-1....

AC__4• 11 years ago

I went a massive life extension technology reading binge a few months back, IMHO it is, right now, possible to extend human life indefinitely.

pault• 11 years ago

Do you have a recommended reading list?

loup-vaillant• 11 years ago

Ageing has several causes, including the accumulation of clutter (basically poison) inside and outside of our cells. I'm not sure becoming a vampire is enough to overcome that.

Given the uncertainties, I'd still want to keep cryonics as a back up. (Though it looks unavailable here in Western Europe.)

bhouston• 11 years ago

Any idea if that Ray Kurzwiel guy is doing young blood transfusion? It sounds like it would fit his goals as an early adopter of life extension tech..

AC__4• 11 years ago

Down-voters know I am on to them...

Gatsky• 11 years ago

I have gotten into the habit of appending "except when it doesn't" to every one line life sciences headline...

http://www.nature.com/news/young-blood-anti-ageing-mechanism...

etrautmann2• 11 years ago

Grid cells are pretty cool, and thought to form the basis for spacial navigation in the brain, and the discovery of these cells in 2006 won this year's Nobel prize

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell

unusximmortalis• 11 years ago

Researchers at Audi are making synthetic diesel fuel using only water and air. Miracle? No. Science.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/28/technology/audi-diesel-air-w...

jobu• 11 years ago

Neat! It looks like "e-diesel" may not be price competitive yet, but hopefully it goes somewhere.

"Audi and Sunfire claim that the process to make e-diesel is 70 percent efficient. They estimate that once production is ramped up, the cost to consumers in Europe would be comparable to traditional diesel, at 1.00 to 1.50 euro per liter (approximately $4.00 to $6.00 per gallon)."

http://blog.caranddriver.com/powering-your-car-with-water-au...

Toast_• 11 years ago

Hydrocarbon production from seawater. https://www.google.com/patents/US20110281959

rtb• 11 years ago

Using water, air and large amounts of heat.

(Where does that heat come from? Many possibilities, but currently from fossil fuels.)

meric• 11 years ago

Not for e-diesel:

First, the researchers heat up steam to very high temperatures to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. This process requires temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 Fahrenheit) and is powered by green energy such as solar or wind power.

ableal• 11 years ago

Synthetic fuel is not exactly new, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

stillsut• 11 years ago

Ryan Gosling and fracking.

figure8• 11 years ago

In nutrition and medicine, why red meat causes cancer in humans:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/01/02/red-mea...

riemannzeta• 11 years ago

CRISPR, blockchain, and direct connection between brain and lymphatics system are way bigger, but this was a big one for economics and political science:

Zero-Determinant Strategies in Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma http://www.pnas.org/content/109/26/10409.full.pdf

eli_gottlieb3• 11 years ago

The most wildly fundamental paper I have seen recently is last December's "Anytime Algorithms for Non-Ending Computations" by Calude and Desfontaines.

NOW HANDS OFF IT'S MINE! MINE I SAY!

natrius3• 11 years ago

Blockchains. Distributed consensus is incredibly powerful. It will allow us to rebuild our society around individuals instead of corporations and governments that formed because economic transaction costs were so high that economies of scale (and sometimes the use of force) were required to coordinate our society.

All economic activity will be blockchain-mediated. It will make us wealthier and freer.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

The "low costs" of bitcoin are a myth. Bitcoin transactions are extremely expensive, both financially and ecologically, it's just that those costs are currently subsidized by block rewards to miners instead of paid by consumers/end-users. If bitcoin were ever to be widely adopted, the high fees would have to be passed on to users: http://www.coindesk.com/new-study-low-bitcoin-transaction-fe...

At some level, this basic fact should be incredibly obvious to anyone with any technical background: It's much cheaper and easier to operate a centralized, eventually-consistent database (today's banking system) than a distributed ledger that requires constantly burning electricity and computing resources on useless math puzzles. Nevertheless, I still see bitcoin advocates claiming bitcoin will be cheaper than the legacy transaction system.

fizx• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

natrius3• 11 years ago

I am not talking about Bitcoin in particular, nor am I talking about transaction fees. I am talking about transaction costs and blockchains in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_cost

popinman322• 11 years ago

Just curious, what do you think of Stellar's consensus system?

https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...

lamby• 11 years ago

Blockchains

Just out of curiosity and not to diminish their current practical implications, are blockchains really a new invention?

r2• 11 years ago

In solar cell research, the biggest recent breakthrough was probably the creation of efficient perovskite solar cells [1]. They're cheap, easy to make, and their efficiency in the lab is rising more rapidly than that of just about any other research cell since NREL began tracking (up from 3.5% in 2009 to 20.1% today) [2,3]. If their chemical stability problems can be resolved, they'll have big commercial applications.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6165/1438.2

[2] http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/images/efficiency_chart.jpg

[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517811/a-material-that-...

jotux• 11 years ago

Not very "fundamental" but I'm very excited about low-power advancements in ICs. There are companies like AmbiqMicro making microcontrollers that are reaching 30uA/MHz and 100nA sleep modes. This is starting to make ambient and RF energy harvesting viable.

http://ambiqmicro.com/low-power-microcontroller

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Awesome, never heard of their work.

lalalandland2• 11 years ago

An invention but also a dicovery: The EmDrive (or RF resonant cavity thruster) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

Ar-Curunir• 11 years ago

Fully Homomorphic Encryption will have far reaching applications. That along with things like efficient MPC.

anotherevan• 11 years ago

That we basically know bugger all about nutrition.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-f...

bootload• 11 years ago

Mary Schweitzer extracting collagen, haemoglobin, elastin, laminin from 80 million year old Hadrosaur and verifying it. [0],[1]

[0] 2012: http://www.nature.com/news/molecular-analysis-supports-contr...

[1] 2009: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17060-first-dino-blood...

alpha1234• 11 years ago

Eugene Podkletnov gravity beam generator and TT Brown experiments showing coupling between electricity and gravitation [1].

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Antigravity-Propulsion-Classif...

advanderveer• 11 years ago

Aminoacids in the tail of comets

Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

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