
Significant scientific achievements or breakthroughs in 2014 - songco
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-significant-scientific-achievements-or-breakthroughs-that-have-taken-place-this-year-2014?share=1
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tjradcliffe
"Science journalists" continued to misrepresent science on a regular basis.

The list is pretty good, but mesons are an entire class of particle, not a
particle, so although the new particle discovered is _a_ meson it is not _the_
meson.

And Lockheed-Martin did not claim to have invented a working fusion reactor.
They claimed to have an approach that they believe will lead to a working
fusion reactor in five years or so.

Those are just two that caught my eye. It's been a good year for science, and
for technology, and for humanity (mod some nitwits who think that violence and
faith are good ways to improve the human condition) but science journalism is
still a terrible mess.

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jwuphysics
To add to this list, the gravitational waves interpretation of BICEP2's B-mode
polarization signal is incorrect.

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imaginenore
The story about the three girls producing a breakthrough crop yield is
complete nonsense, they didn't invent anything new.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2heown/16yearold_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2heown/16yearold_irish_girls_win_google_science_fair/cks43u1)

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wyager
A lot of the headline-making science fair projects are complete BS. It's a
shame, too, because there are actually a lot of novel and interesting research
projects at high-school level science fairs. The good ones win reasonably
frequently, but they're realistic enough not to make click-winning headlines.

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vinchuco
This list is also good and cataloged for other years :

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science)

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FrojoS
Thanks. I got quite excited for a moment, but the list is actually full of
things thats don't qualify as 'science breakthroughs'. Example:

"16 February – American science educator and engineer Bill Nye (presenter of
Bill Nye the Science Guy) debates global warming with congresswoman Marsha
Blackburn (R-TN).[74][75][76]"

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eng_monkey
Many of the mentioned "breakthroughs" are not even science but engineering.

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tstactplsignore
The biggest CRISPR breakthroughs were all in 2012 and 2013- while it's an
exciting up and coming biotech application, it wasn't a breakthrough of 2014.

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traviagio
Tokyo is saying they will have robotic Olympics in 2020 and it doesn't seem
that far off.

