The LHC’s big bang and bust
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was fired up to global applause on September 10, feeding the collective fantasy of a people eager for a flashback to the beginning of time. With 9,300 magnets filled with 60 tonnes of helium and operating at a temperature of about -271 degrees Celsius, the LHC was designed as a mighty leviathan to study cosmic fundamentals, but technical glitches forced the atom smasher to be shut down almost immediately. It is expected to be restarted in summer, after repairs costing $29 million.

Stemming disease
Stem cell research was big in 2008, with Harvard scientists creating stem cells for 10 genetic disorders, which would enable them to study their development in a laboratory and possibly devise measures to curb them. In a big step towards growing replacement tissues, scientists also excelled in the art of reprogramming stem cells, even as moral issues were raised. Be it reprogramming skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease and growing them into nerve cells or making insulin in live, diabetic mice, it was a good year.

The resurrection of the woolly mammoth
The evolutionary paths of elephants and woolly mammoths diverged some six million years ago. In 2008, the genetic code of the extinct ice age animal was decoded for the first time, raising questions about the possibility of its resurrection—and of other animals that went extinct in the last one million years—some day. With improvements in genome sequencing, scientists were able to unravel the ancient DNA, probing mammoth hair found frozen in the Siberian permafrost.

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