Foto: REUTERS/Gregg Newton Spectators at Cocoa Beach watch SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center on February 6, 2018.
In 2018, scientists succeeded in some impressive feats: engineers at SpaceX sent a sports car flying past Mars, Chinese researchers cloned a pair of monkeys, and in Egypt, people found some cheese manufactured over 3,000 years ago. (Pro tip: don’t eat it.)
Over the last year, scientists also figured out how to “touch” the sun, use tiny robots to kill cancer, and stop some painful migraines.
These and other accomplishments were an encouraging reminder that every day, scientists across the globe are learning more about how life and the universe work.
As the new year approaches, take a look back at some of the most marvelous, life-altering, and astonishing scientific discoveries and feats from 2018.
1. In February, SpaceX nailed an impressive feat: the company launched its re-usable, 27-engine Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. It’s the company’s most powerful yet.

Foto: sourceThom Baur/Reuters
After Falcon Heavy launched on February 6, 2018, two of the rocket’s three reusable boosterslanded safely on the ground in Florida.
The core booster, however, missed its landing pad on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
“Apparently it hit the water at 300 miles an hour and took out two of the engines on the drone ship,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said. That loss was relatively minor in the context of the launch’s overall success, though.
2. The payload on that Falcon Heavy rocket was Musk’s red Tesla Roadster, complete with a dummy driver and a note on the dash: “DON’T PANIC!”

Foto: sourceYouTube / SpaceX
The car is still cruising the solar system today. In November, SpaceX announced it had sailed past Mars.
3. In March, scientists at NASA revealed new findings about how living in space can mess with your eyes and immune system.

Foto: NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, left, and his identical twin brother Mark Kelly.sourceGetty Images/Bill Ingalls/NASA
When NASA astronaut Scott Kelly left his identical twin brother Mark on Earth and spent a year in space, scientists seized on the opportunity to learn more about out how life away from our home planet can change a person.
Researchers found that up to 7% of Scott’s gene expression hasn’t returned to its Earthly “normal” state since he came back. Those changes may be part of the body’s response to the stress of living in space, and they could lead to lasting consequences for Kelly’s immune system and retinas.
4. Star-gazers spotted a new kind of aurora that travels farther south than most. Its name is STEVE.

Foto: STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) and the Milky Way at Childs Lake, Manitoba, Canada.sourceKrista Trinder/ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The purplish aurora travels on different magnetic field lines than others, so it can appear much closer to the equator than the Northern Lights.
The strange lights were first reported by citizen scientists in Canada in 2015. The amateurs formed a group and started working with researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The result of that collaboration – the discovery of a new kind of aurora – was published in the journal Science Advances on March 14.
STEVE (which stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancementcan be tough to see, though, because the display typically lasts for less than an hour.
5. After three years of studying Mars, Italian scientists determined in July that it’s possible the red planet has a 20-kilometer-wide lake of liquid water at its polar ice cap.

Foto: This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago, when it had an ocean of water.sourceESO/M. Kornmesser
“If these researchers are right, this is the first time we’ve found evidence of a large water body on Mars,” Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas told the Associated Press.
Other parts of Mars are too cold for water to stay liquid.
6. Astronomers found a ghost particle in Antarctica, revealing a source of some of the most high-energy radiation in the universe.

Foto: An illustration of a blazar, or spinning black hole that gobbles up matter and shoots out jets of high-energy radiation and particles.sourceDESY/Science Communication Lab
Researchers found the particle, a neutrino, in September using IceCube, an array of sensors embedded in Antarctic ice.
“When scientists tracked the particle back to its source they found a galactic monster called a blazar: a rapidly spinning black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, that’s gobbling up gas and dust,” Business Insider’s Dave Mosher reported.
7. Humans came closer to touching the sun than ever before, after the Parker Solar Probe launched in November.

Foto: The Parker Solar Probe will come closer to the sun than any other probe before it.sourceNASA Goddard / Youtube
The probe is now the fastest human-made object, capable of flying past the sun at speeds up to 213,200 miles an hour.
Solar experts hope that by traveling through scorching-hot areas of the sun, which can be 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit, the robot will help unlock mysteries about how our star works.
8. Back on Earth, a bountiful pirate’s booty worth as much as $17 billion was discovered off the coast of Columbia.

Foto: This photo reveals a key distinguishing feature of the San José—its cannons.sourceREMUS image, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The treasure comes from a 310-year-old Spanish ship, the San José, which sank in the Caribbean Sea during a 1708 battle with British ships during the War of the Spanish Succession.
The wreck was first found in 2015, and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts sent a submarine drone down to explore it in more detail. In May 2018, they finally revealed the details of their discovery.
The sunken bounty may include gold, silver, and emeralds.
9. A 24-year-old Dutch man invented and launched a plastic-trapping pipe that he hopes will help heal our oceans. (But it’s running into some technical issues.)

Foto: sourceThe Ocean Cleanup
Boyan Slat hopes that his Ocean Cleanup device, which launched in September, will help make a dent in the growing plastic pollution problem. Plastics in the ocean are killing sea turtles and other life in the water at alarming rates.
But as the device combs through plastic stuck in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it’s letting some of that plastic waste escape back out into the ocean, Slat wrote in November.
“We are positive we are close to making it work,” he said.
10. Drugmakers scored some wins this year, too. There’s a new pill for peanut allergies, but it can come with nasty side effects.

Foto: Two new therapies use peanuts to desensitize those with the allergy, in hopes of protecting people from accidental exposure. These products could be the first peanut allergy therapies approved in the US.sourceShayanne Gal/BI Graphics
New allergy drugs like the one from Aimmune aim to re-train people’s immune systems to tolerate allergens like peanuts. Promising data from a trial, which was published in November, showed that after a year on the treatment, 67% of kids with peanut allergies were able to tolerate about two peanuts, compared to only 4% of those who got the placebo.
But the results aren’t always finger-licking good – because the drug includes peanuts, people can have severe reactions. More than 50 people in that trial had to get a shot of epinephrine after they had an allergic reaction.
11. Drugmaker Eli Lilly created a new kind of migraine drug, but it costs $575 a month.

Foto: sourceSamantha Lee/Business Insider
The treatment, which got the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September, is the first drug that’s been approved to treat migraines. Previously, migraine treatment involved tools or medications originally created to serve a different purpose, like Botox and anti-seizure medicines.
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