Top 10 discoveries of the decade

At number 10 is the discovery of Eris in 2005, a minorbody that is 27 percent bigger than Pluto.The finding became thetrigger that changed the face of our solar system, defining the planets andadding Pluto to a growing family of dwarf planets in 2006.At number9 is the discovery of what appeared to be soft tissues - blood vessels, bonematrix and other cells - inside the fossilized femur of a small T. rex in2005.Since then, the bones have revealed amino acids that resemblethose of modern chickens, firming the link between dinosaurs andbirds.At number 8 is the direct confirmation of the mysterious darkmatter in the summer of 2006.The unprecedented evidence came fromthe careful weighing of gas and stars flung about in the head-on smash-upbetween two great clusters of galaxies in the Bullet Cluster.Untilthen, the existence of dark matter was inferred by the fact that galaxies haveonly one-fifth of the visible matter needed to create the gravity that keepsthem intact.So, the rest must be invisible to telescopes: Thatunseen matter is "dark."At number 7 is the emergence of new humanancestors, first, in the form of a 6- to 7-million-year-old skull ofSahelanthropus tchadensis - known as Toumai, in northern Chad in2002.Then, in 2009, the nearly complete skeleton of “Ardi," innortheastern Ethiopia bumped the famous "Lucy" as the earliest, most completeskeleton of a human ancestor ever found.At number 6 is an astronomerseeing alien planets, or "exoplanets", directly in 2008, using the Hubble SpaceTelescope and the infrared Keck and Gemini observatories inHawaii.At number 5 is the concept of cyborgs that is, half-machine, half-humans, becoming a reality in the last decade, as much progress has been made with people controlling robotic limbs and computers with their minds.At number 4 is finding of stem cells in new sources in 2007,when scientists from Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison,essentially turned back the clock for adult skin cells, allowing these maturecells, which were preprogrammed to become skin, to act like embryonic stemcells.At number 3 is the discovery of water ice on the surface ofMars in 2008 by NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander. At number 2 is the developmentof the rough draft of the entire human genome in the year 2000, followed by acompleted version in 2003.At number 1 is the finding that in thepast decade, glaciers have been melting much faster than ever expected.