Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

Why just this week, they’ve upstaged fleas at flea markets and Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon and Keira Knightly at the Toronto Film Festival. “The Daily Dish”, found at SFGate, reports that:

The world-renowned movie event is due to kick off in the city on September 9, but officials have found the parasitic insects in cinemas due to be used for the film screenings.

Bosses at the Cineplex movie theater complex are taking steps to make sure the festival is “itch-free” and organizers are hopeful the outbreak will be contained.

They’re also hogging the limelight on prominent science websites, starring in two separate videos. The New York Times posted a video earlier this week called “Studying Bedbugs” and producer Flora Lichtman adds to her wonderful Science Friday videos with talking bedbugs, (yes, bedbugs that speak into a microphone) posted just last week.

So what gives?  Why are bedbugs so hot right now?

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. describes it perfectly in an article in the New York Times earlier this week:

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker.

Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.

That’s right. This pest is serving up quite a mystery. Bedbugs had virtually disappeared from America for 40 years until the 1990s. No one knows exactly why (DDT disappearance? Cockroach bait changes?). Unlike many other parasites, they don’t spread disease, so researchers haven’t studied them as thoroughly as some of their pesky brethren (for another itch-inducing article, you can read our previous post about disease-spreading body lice here).

Now these divas are gaining national attention. The CDC and EPA wrote in a joint statement, “In recent years, public health agencies across the country have been overwhelmed by complaints about bedbugs.” And according to the website IdentifyUS, formerly connected to the Harvard School of Public Health, “Bedbugs have increasingly become a problem within residences of all kinds, including homes, apartments, hotels, cruise ships, dormitories and shelters.”

No one quite knows how to contain them. The EPA and CDC, concerned about pesticide overuse within homes and apartments (read this AP article for more info), are giving somewhat feeble advice: “try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things.” [New York Times]  And at least one New York Times op-ed asked why we can’t learn to love them.

In the meantime, the battle (and entomological stardom) rages on.