In the first month of 2009, people gave to me: a coal ash spill in Tennessee. (Technically occurred in 2008, but it lingered.)

Ever since the wildly optimistic projections of progress from the mid-20th century--robot companions, extra-orbital sojourns , 200-year life spans--scientists have been gently dialing back the public's expectations. So, perhaps it is no sobering surprise that many of the hopeful predictions for scientific advancements for the new millennium have yet to come to pass.

The journal Nature Methods recently announced their method of the year, and it is: induced pluripotency. Embryonic stem cells have the potential to be any type of cells, a characteristic known as pluripotency. In 2006, a researcher in Japan announced that he’d genetically reprogrammed mouse fibroblasts--a type of skin cell--to make them pluripotent. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, could now become any cell.

Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos by Paul Murdin. University of Chicago Press, 2009

As part of the U.S. charm offensive at the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change , a roughly one meter-diameter orb helped display a decade's worth of climate data collected by NASA satellites. "This is the golden age," NASA's Jack Kaye told me. As associate research director for the agency's Earth Science Division, he's "reaping the benefits of the 1990s."

Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades after first being proposed as a method of harnessing solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz., for the first time. Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft .

The 1.5 megawatt (MW) demonstration site, known as Maricopa Solar, is set to begin operations early January 2010, with units provided by the Arizona-based Stirling Energy Systems (SES). While 1.5 MW is only a fraction of the power that may be generated at sites SES has contracted to develop in California and Texas, spokesperson Janette Coates says this is a necessary first step in the technology’s commercialization. “It’s important for our industry to see--and our partners and investors--that we can take a small-scale plant and get it operational before we break ground on larger ones,” she says.

In the 2003 movie The Last Samurai , Tom Cruise plays a former U.S. Army captain named Nathan Algren, an alcoholic and mercenary who in the 1870s goes to Japan to work for the Emperor Meiji. The young emperor is facing a samurai rebellion, and Algren trains a rag­tag bunch of farmers and peasants in modern warfare, including the use of rifles. When Algren is captured by the samurai, however, he is gradually converted to their ways and ends up fighting alongside the warriors in a losing battle against the Imperial Army he helped to create.

The movie was both a critical and popular success, and why not? It offers lots of exciting swordplay, exotic costumes and a fascinating piece of history that was probably unfamiliar to most Americans before the film was released. Indeed, it’s fair to say that many Americans have learned much of what they know about the westernization of Japan from watching films such as The Last Samurai .

Roiling, incandescent magma and boiling gases covered the earth in the wake of its formation 4.6 billion years ago. Regions of this fiery sea eventually cooled enough to crust over, leaving the planet’s first hard rocks floating like slag on the white-hot liquid. But they were nothing more than a thin veneer. The thick roots of terra firma were much longer in the making.

Exactly how--and how quickly--continents arose and grew is a matter of ongoing debate. Scientific wisdom long held that the earth’s inner workings alone drove continent formation. But recent findings have turned the spotlight toward a once heretical idea: that large asteroid impacts played a constructive role as well.

Every era has its essential consumer products--witness the ubiquity of cell phones and iPods today. In the first half of the 20th century, what gave some gifts their "gotta-have-it" allure is, in retrospect, rather alarming: radioactivity.

JANUARY 1960 ASTOUNDING TALES -- “The press of the Soviet Union has been astounding its readers with accounts of a ‘revolution’ in science and a ‘miracle’ of technology. Nikolai A. Kozyrev, an astrophysicist, was said to have wrought the revolution, with his hypothesis that the passage of time is the source of cosmic energy. The miracle was the harnessing of a ‘concentration of energy.’ Speaking for the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, three distinguished physicists joined in a public rebuke to the press for ‘cheap sensationalism’ and for placing its pages ‘at the disposal of absolutely incompetent people.’ They declared: ‘We are not against bold hypotheses, provided they are given substantiation.’ However, ‘This is not a case of the concentration of energy but of the concentration of amazing ignorance.’”

Patent Lead In “ Origin of Computing ,” Martin Campbell-Kelly writes that the first digital computer was J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly’s ENIAC, finished in 1945 as part of the war effort. But the first person to build and operate an electronic digital computer was a physics professor, as noted in “Dr. Atanasoff’s Computer,” published in the August 1988 Scientific American . John Vincent Atanasoff’s first computer was a 12-bit, two-word machine running at 60-hertz wall-plug frequency and could add and subtract binary numbers stored in a logic unit built with seven triode tubes. This was 1937. There was no war, no Pearl Harbor, just a theoretical physicist trying to solve problems in quantum mechanics with his students at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa.

The H1N1 pandemic, the Copenhagen climate talks, the restart of the world's biggest experimental device--2009 sped by many scientifically relevant mile markers. The year also celebrated several important past events: It saw the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species ; the 40th anniversary of the first humans on another world ; and the 400th of Galileo's report that proved not all heavenly bodies circle the Earth. The year also marked the first occasion in which the science Nobel Prize committee honored more than one woman --four, in fact.

Here is the latest draft text of the " Copenhagen Accord " put forward on December 18 by the U.S., China, India and South Africa, among other countries, at the climate summit in the Danish capital.

Copenhagen Accord

The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby . Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to the end in one piece.

In some respects, the story of our universe resembles a Hollywood action movie. Several physicists have argued that a slight change to one of the laws of physics would cause some disaster that would disrupt the normal evolution of the universe and make our existence impossible. For example, if the strong nuclear force that binds together atomic nuclei had been slightly stronger or weaker, stars would have forged very little of the carbon and other elements that seem necessary to form planets, let alone life. If the proton were just 0.2 percent heavier than it is, all primordial hydrogen would have decayed almost immediately into neutrons, and no atoms would have formed. The list goes on.

The latest physical anthropology research indicates that the human evolutionary line never went through a knuckle-walking phase. Be that as it may, we definitely entered, and have yet to exit, a knuckle-cracking phase. I would run out of knuckles (including those on my feet) trying to count how many musicians wouldn’t dream of playing a simple scale without throwing off a xylophonelike riff on their knuckles first. But despite the popularity of this practice, most known knuckle crackers have probably been told by some expert--whose advice very likely began, “I’m not a doctor, but ...”--that the behavior would lead to arthritis.

One M.D. convincingly put that amateur argument to rest with a study published back in 1998 in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism entitled “Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?” The work of sole author Donald Unger was back in the news in early October when he was honored as the recipient of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine.