“Not all ratings are equally useful”

Comments by Yegor Zadereev on the Time magazine rating

It should be noted that most of the results included in the ranking of the main scientific events of the year are the work of American scientists. I’ll try to comment on this top ten from the point of view of a “boring scientist”.

Number one. The Large Hadron Collider. I wouldn’t rush here: the collider, roughly speaking, “flew” at launch - let’s wait until next year, and then we’ll put it in the ratings.

The Phoenix rover certainly made a splash in the spring, especially after the announcement of the discovery of water. However, then everything calmed down a little - either the Martians were found, or, as usual, some bolt broke off...

In third place is the world's first artificially created chromosome. To be honest, despite the fact that this is biology, I can’t say anything right away. We need to look into this topic separately. The Chinese spacewalk ranks fourth in the ranking. The achievement is, of course, good, but I would not classify it as a scientific event.

In fifth place is the determination of the number of gorillas in the Congo. I understand that Americans love to talk about environmental protection and feel sorry for some animal in Zanzibar and the Sahara. But if we talk about environmental problems on a global scale, then true ecologists, perhaps, have the most complaints about the American consumer society.

Astronomers who discovered 45 new exoplanets rank sixth. Well, okay - they opened it and it’s great - probably worthy of a rating. In seventh place is an invisibility cloak made of nanofibers - 10 times thinner than a sheet of paper. Light passes through them (nanofibers). An object wrapped in such a cloth is not visible. Good technical result.

Decoding 80% of the mammoth genome is in eighth place. Well, guys, let's get to 100%, and then into the ratings. In ninth place there is an interesting result. It turns out that only a quarter of US residents have the scientific literacy to read and understand scientific articles in newspapers. I wonder how many Russians read popular science articles in newspapers? Well, and in last place is the discovery of a human burial made 4600 years ago in Germany. After looking at it, scientists decided that already in the Stone Age people had families of the modern type - consisting of parents and children. That is, the problem of communal services was already relevant almost 5,000 years ago.