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[Photo:© 2012 CERN]
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London: The discovery of the Higgs boson particle by physicists
using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland has been rated as the main
scientific breakthrough of the year by Science magazine.
The magazine has released the Top 10 scientific discovery of
the year 2012 and the discovery of the Higgs Boson was hailed as an
'intellectual, technological and organisational triumph.
In July this year team from the European nuclear research
facility at Cern in Geneva announced the detection of a particle that fitted
the description of the elusive Higgs.
The discovery of Higgs boson, nicknamed as “God Particles” defines
how fundamental particles are able to acquire mass.
Physicists believe that the force of the Big Bang generating
the Higgs Boson, which gave rise to the formation of galaxies, stars and
planets in the primordial chaos.
Nine other pioneering achievements from 2012 include the
genome Denisovskoye human and successful experiments Japanese scientists to
grow eggs from stem cells.
Japanese researchers showing that embryonic stem cells from
mice could be coaxed into becoming viable egg cells was hailed as another
breakthrough.
Curiosity
rover's Landing System was also an achievement for the scientific world as
mission engineers at the American space agency Nasa safely and precisely placed
the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.
In another advance, researchers used an X-ray laser, which
shines a billion times brighter than traditional synchrotron sources, to
determine the structure of an enzyme required by the parasite that causes
African sleeping sickness.
The journal has also predicted next year's breakthroughs,
which it believes include the most precise map yet of the afterglow of the big
bang, the event in which the universe is thought to have been born, and the
exploration of a mysterious sub-glacial lake four kilometres beneath the
Antarctic ice, which is likely to have been cut off from life on the rest of
the planet for millions of years.