My Looking Glass

Tomorrow is officially the first day of a new year, and the start of the yearly trend of mistakenly putting the previous year on forms and checks where we have to write down the date, then curse loudly when we realize that we were writing in ink.

January 4: Britain’s first hand transplantation operation is successfully conducted.

January 9: A gamma secretase inhibitor previously experimented for treating Alzheimer’s disease is found to have regenerative effects on inner ear hair cells, potentially allowing for the effective treatment of deafness

January 10: Half of all food is wasted worldwide, according to a new report by the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME)

January 23: Scientists encode large amounts of digital information, including the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare, on a single strand of synthetic DNA. DNA has immense potential as a storage medium, and may become commercially available for this purpose in the near future.

March 14: CERN scientists confirm, with a very high degree of certainty, that a new particle identified by the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012 is the long-sought Higgs boson

March 29: The Neanderthal genome is sequenced by German scientists from a toe bone found in southern Siberia.

May 22: Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, report that Earth is pushing the Moon away more quickly than it has done for most of the past 50 million years

July 16:NASA’s Curiosity rover reaches a milestone in its journey across Mars, having travelled 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) since its landing in 2012

November 17: Researchers have made the first battery electrode that heals itself, repairing imperfections within a few hours.