Top 10 stories of 2019: A black hole picture, measles outbreaks, climate protests and more
Science is good at measuring progress — and where we fall short. Science News’ Top 10 stories of the year reflect that duality, from celebrating great achievements to highlighting problems we had hoped to avoid. This was the year in which more than a decade of effort by hundreds of scientists who created a globe-spanning “telescope” to see the previously unseeable paid off. The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a black hole. That now-iconic picture confirmed a fundamental theory of how our universe works (Einstein, still right) and opened up a new era of exploration, making it our top story of 2019. That wasn’t the year’s only big milestone. Just seven years after its development, the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 moved into human clinical trials in the United States to see if the approach can treat cancer, blood disorders and an inherited form of blindness. And Google claimed quantum supremacy, saying it...