Every year, Scientific American Magazine has a ranking of ten scientific events that were decided by the experts at the magazine.

In third place came NASA’s Curiosity Rover landing on Mars. The main reason why Curiosity was chosen was because it is the biggest Mars rover yet (about the size of a small car) and has much more equipment that will tell us more about Mars than other rovers have. So, you may be “curious” why they sent Curiosity- they sent it to try to find signs of life, look at the building blocks of life, find the materials that Mars is composed of, and see the broad spectrum of radiation. You’re probably also wondering what has been going on since Curiosity was sent, so Curiosity has recently started drilling on Mars and using those samples to find out more about the composition of the material and the radiation. The Curiosity Rover was a big accomplishment, but the discovery that was made at CERN was also a huge deal.

In second place was the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Higgs Bosons were theoretical particles that were discovered to be real last summer at CERN. It is believed that the Higgs Boson is the particle that causes gravity.  CERN is a 16 mile long science facility containing a huge particle collider that smashes atoms together at extremely high speeds. Bosons are particles with no spin, no electric charge and no color but are also very unstable. The Higgs part of the name is from Peter Higgs who was one of six physicists who proposed the mechanism that could potentially find the particle. The main reason why it happened was because of Peter Higgs making a theory that there is a gravity field and it would be full of Higgs Bosons. The people who worked on it include CERN scientists and many other scientists on the planet. What was found at CERN was a big deal, but Sandy also shows that it doesn’t have to be intentional to be big in news in science.

In first place comes Super Storm Sandy. The reason Super Storm Sandy came in first is because it shows that our global climate is changing. The weather was so extreme that as John Miksad said, “This will be one for the record books.” Sandy, as most of you know by now, hit almost all of our east coast and the Caribbean.  Super Storm Sandy did not act like typical tropical storms. Also, Beijing Normal University in China has been recording data since 1923 and has discovered that big storm surges have been increasing and that large-scale events are about twice as likely to happen in hotter years than colder ones. Some other people have said that the potential summer ice melt in the ocean and more open waters in the Arctic Ocean could make events like Sandy happen again in the future. Some New York City officials say that it may have broken a record set by a surge that happened about 200 years ago.