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That we can even have this category has nothing to do with science “failing,” but with how science has been sucked into the 21st century information cycle. Call it the 24-hour-newsing of science. Maybe it has a little to do with science being awesome and normal people now being served science news on a more regular basis and how the popularization of science is outing religious fundamentalists/science deniers and how important science literacy is in the century of biology. And, oh my, all of the arguing about science.

But, the point is that science is really f#cking cool these days and there are a whole lot of science trainspotters to serve news to on the regular.

That’s a system set up for disappointment, because science just doesn’t work that way. Politics can erupt instantaneously, burst out and keep delivering on-the-hour statements, reactions, and updates. And then comes the analysis.

Science happens as the result of rigorous method; blogs not so much. The next update to a science journal article is the next data set. An experiment isn’t performed one day in a lab and, bang, the result becomes a discovery.

No, the experiment is repeated and repeated again. Science news is released weekly-at-best in science journal articles in technical language for other scientists, and then science writers like me try to decode it for you. Perhaps the current most notable source of research that isn’t on this cycle is arxiv.org, a science paper clearinghouse notably without the rigorous standards of the print journals. (I don’t think I could post my paper, “Tendency of Dogs To Fart Near Humans,” on arxiv.org, but you get the idea.)

The problem happens when people that aren’t “in the sh#t,” so to speak – that is, in the non-science mainstream – get bummed out by science not delivering what they think it should deliver, which is eureka!! moments in drug research and optical images of aliens and particles that have something to do with god.

And, god forbid, If science actually occurred at that rate, the world would feel more like quantum leaping through radically different worlds as our understanding of our world changes while, simultaneously, rapidly emerging science changes that world that we’re just trying to get a fix on.

Imagine if the past century’s worth of science advances – penicillin, relativity, universal expansion, quantum mechanics, and so on – were crammed into a single year. This would be great for bloggers, but it would also look like technological diarrhea.

Truth is, science moves at a pretty agreeable rate for us. That doesn’t mean it’s dull. No way. It just takes some paying attention. An arsenic-based lifeform is huge!

Anyhow, these are the things that seemed just so close. But. . . but. . .

New Earth

People were just about out in their garages building escape pods after NASA announced Gliese 581g, an “Earth-like” planet that sent various science folks who should know better into a frenzy of speculation about habitability. To wit, a Discovery News post titled, “New Earth-like Planet Can Sustain Life.” The inconvenient truth is that the planet is 20 light years away, too far for us to tell much of anything substantial about it save for its distance from its star and the planet’s approximate size. The semantics of astronomy are a b#tch indeed. (Also read: Beware of Promises of New Earth.)

Aliens

So, back in November, NASA announces a press conference a couple days ahead of time, like it usually does. It’s about an “astrobiology finding. . .that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Granted, that sounds more like “aliens” than most things, but astrobiology finds aren’t all that rare and so far haven’t been at all close to finding actual alien life. Examples: methane in Mars’ atmosphere, water on the Moon, new weird bacteria in the arctic. And, not to quibble over semantics, but impacting “the search for extraterrestrial life” seems to be somewhat different than “finding” extraterrestrial life.

The only thing different this time is that NASA had previously identified an exoplanet that falls within the broad “Earth-like” category. A category that has little to do with how most of us identify Earth-like. Earth-like here means of a certain size and within a range of orbits around a star. Said exoplanet is even only really detectable indirectly. Actual biology has nothing to do with it. But, there was a coincidence, and so there was hype that we’d found aliens.

We hadn’t, of course. And the world was naturally disappointed. What’s worse is that NASA even sort of apologized for not finding aliens, which would seem like some slight admission that the burden of being super-exciting on the institution. Even NASA, like the sexiest scientific institution in American, shouldn’t be charged with the task of snagging massive hit counts or whatever.

Of course, this leads into another discussion about funding. Unfortunately, science is politics and a popular NASA is one that is well-funded by Congress. If you’ve doubts, consider the Moon program, something that had/has basically no actual scientific value but, nonetheless, found itself with a (planned) $200 billion, while the Hubble Space Telescope, which was responsible for one of the biggest astronomy discoveries of the past half-century, the accelerating universe, almost became space junk in the same period of time that the most recent Moon program, Constellation, was being touted by then-President George W. Bush. Now that that’s dead, NASA is left doing whatever it can to recapture the public’s imagination, such as a Foursquare check-in on the Space Station.

The Higgs Boson

Phew, this was brutal. Some blogger with some supposed connections to Chicago’s Fermilab leaked that researchers there had found the Higgs boson. (Read What Finding the Higgs Boson Would Actually Mean.) Fermilab in turn denied the hell out of the rumor and chalked it up to a “fame-seeking blogger” Sad trombone.

But, man, between Fermilab’s Tevatron collider and the Large Hadron Collider, researchers amassed a truckload of data, which narrows down closer and closer exactly what should be looked for in regards to the Higgs. Indeed, the Large Hadron Collider is so close to finding the particle that it’s been granted an extra year to run experiments before shutting down for a year’s maintenance.

One huge also: this year we discovered at least what the Higgs should sound like. Aphex Twin, of course.

The Cure for HIV/AIDS

The truth is that this might prove to be more than an “almost.” Doctors are indeed claiming to have cured a patient in Germany.

From a Motherboard post earlier this month:

doctors in Berlin have announced that a patient, Timothy Ray Brown, has been cured. Completely. The nuts and bolts are a bit complicated, but it reduces way down to a sort of accident or coincidence. Brown was being treated for leukemia and, during the course of that treatment, received stem cell transplants that included a certain HIV-resistant variant. After the transplants, and two years of brutal therapy, Brown was found to be HIV negative and was able to quit antiretroviral therapy.

Now, he’s healthy and, as he told Stern magazine, enjoys a “drink and a cigarette.”

So: two years of intensive, painful therapy that would certainly be out of limits for anyone but the fantastically rich and otherwise healthy. This is where we ask: Is that a cure? Or even: What is a cure?

On the bright side, advances in the past year in vaccines, prevention, and therapy were off the charts. If anything in nature were to be more resistant to silver bullets than HIV, we haven’t found it; hopefully we never will.

Dark matter

In a sense, dark matter was discovered in 1933 when researcher Fritz Zwicky identified its gravitational effects on nearby galaxies. Since, researchers have worked out a variety of different solutions as to what it actually is and how we can actually find it, first hand. Currently, some of the most impressive stakes of particle-free nothingness on Earth have been occupied by researchers-qua-miners with next-level particle detectors: a mine in South Dakota, an abandoned sewer underneath Chicago, another mine in Ontario.

Technically, this occurred in 2009, but last December, researchers with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search identified two ‘events’ that have a 23-percent chance of being WiMPs, the proposed dark matter particle. Twenty three percent, and that is the closest we’ve come. Which is, frustratingly, a result that is too big to ignore, but too small to put on parade.

This Fall, something very peculiar was discovered in the heart of our Milky Way. It’s too bright. That dense center is giving off more gamma-rays than we should expect from the usual pulsars and dying stars. The excess, researchers think, is the result off dark matter collisions. That is, they’re colliding and annihilating each other; as they annihilate, they give off showers of gamma-ray particles.

Notably, based on that radiation, researchers have even come up with a mass for the suspected dark matter particles. And, neatly enough, it matches the mass of the particle detected in the Minnesota mine. In other words, going into 2011, we have everything but a WiMP tied to the roof of our car.

Clicking through

The world tumbling into 2011 works against science. It works against repetition, rigorous method, and questions. It wants only answers and it wants them now. How do you fix that? How do you tell the mainstream to have patience when everyone and everything else is telling it the exact opposite: if Gawker can’t chomp and digest it in two paragraphs, it’s probably not worth knowing about.

You could argue that this isn’t science’s problem: science should be about doing science and not running its own PR campaign. Science shouldn’t be beholden to politics. And it probably shouldn’t. Which puts the onus on us in the media to know from aliens, and readers to click through that Gawker link to the original source. Otherwise, we’re burying crucial scientific literacy under another kind of dark matter.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv and @everydayelk