Boring??

Some gems from scientific discoveries of 2008, courtesy of Discover magazine.
People have the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. So do great apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants. However, until this year, no non-mammals have passed the recognition test. The European magpie now is on the list of animals that can recognize themselves in the mirror and react appropriately to that recognition.
A small tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rain forest were discovered to have no words in their vocabulary to express numerical concepts as "one", "two", or "many". These people evidently don't count and don't have words for numbers.
Swiss scientists sent a pair of photons along fiber-optic cables, in opposite directions from each other. When they measured one photon upon its arrival at its destination, the other photon changed instantaneously, even though it was 11 miles away. This linkage of matter is called quantum entanglement, and is a baffling reality of the quantum world.
A team of European scientists has built the worlds' smallest transistor. It contained about 10 atoms and was one atom in thickness. It's made of a material called graphene, a carbon nanomaterial only one atom thick.
Dutch researchers have found compounds in human saliva that hasten healing. Thise simple proteins are called histatins. They are well-known compounds, but just this year they have been found to cause cells from the skin's surface to close over a wound.
Physicists have created a motion picture of a single atom. They used a laser light that flashed for one attosecond (one quintillionth of a second) to capture the image. By the way, an electron orbits a hydrogen atom in about 150 attoseconds.
A ckBot is an aggregation of 15 blocks, which make up a robot. It is a machine that can propel itself. But it can also do something else. If the robot is kicked and the blocks are knocked apart and scattered over the floor, they flip over and about, wriggle toward each other, and latch themselves back together and reassemble themselves. See video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JG5GrAtalE
These are just a few of the marvelous, the weird, and the surprising things that scientists and others have found, found out about, or created this year. And you thought it was a rather boring 12 months!