Some years stand out in our minds, stamped into our memories by the dramatic events that unfolded during those 365 days. Maybe for you it's 1929, the year of the momentous stock market crash that kicked off the Great Depression. Or 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon. Or 1989, when the Berlin Wall finally came tumbling down.
The year 2008 may wind up burning just as brightly in our collective consciousness. We saw the United States elect Barack Obama, the country's first black president. We witnessed the complete unraveling of the global financial markets, and we watched food prices climb so high that eating three meals a day became a luxury that many of us couldn't afford. It was also the year in which words like "grassoline" seeped into the public lexicon and in which Google continued its bid for general world domination.
At HowStuffWorks, we're never content to watch history happen. We're bent on poking around for the reasons behind these big events. So stick with us as we answer the top 10 questions of 2008, and we'll satisfy our curiosity together.
First up, vaccines and autism.
9: Could we clone our organs to be used in a transplant?
- Surgeons implant a donor heart in a patient.
- One day, that replacement heart could be made of your own cells
8: Grassoline: Can we fuel cars with grass?
Don't start hording your grass clippings just yet. Switchgrass, a promising source for making cellulosic ethanol -- a type of fuel derived from plants -- probably isn't carpeting your backyard, although the perennial is found in the Americas and parts of Africa. The tall grass looks more at home billowing in the prairie, maybe alongside a field of corn, another source of ethanol for your car.
7: Why is offshore drilling so controversial?
Whether you cheered when Gov. Sarah Palin famously exclaimed, "Drill, baby, drill!" or slapped your palm to your forehead in horror, you heard a lot about offshore drilling in 2008. Even before the issues of oil and taxes dueled for time during the U.S. presidential election, drivers were emptying their wallets at the pump and wondering when gas prices would stop climbing higher (and sighing with relief when the price of oil dropped precipitously).
6: What is water boarding?
Like the sensations of falling that haunt our nightmares, dreams of drowning snap us awake with a shudder. But for some prisoners, there's no waking up from that unimaginably terrifying feeling of the water pulling you under. That's because water boarding is a form of torture, one that the CIA has said that it used on more than one occasion.
5: What does CERN mean for the future of the universe?
The name CERN, shorthand for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, might not ring any bells, but the name of its biggest pet project -- the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC -- probably does. Like all of us, CERN wants to know how the universe works -- how it began, what it's made of, all that good stuff. Only instead of, say, reading books, CERN scientists study the tiniest particles in the universe. And they built the most powerful particle accelerator, the LHC, to do it.
4: How easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb?
Although popular television shows such as "24" might make it look like a cakewalk, stealing an entire nuclear bomb isn't easy, even for practiced terrorists. But obtaining the parts of a nuke is a different story, and unsavory characters certainly have tried both routes.
3: Why is the Google algorithm so important?
Whether you're trawling the Internet for information about the new World of Warcraft release or for homemade remedies for halitosis, you probably punch your query into Google's waiting hands. When the search engine returns your desired results lickety-split, you might scan the first two or three pages, check out a few sites and, satisfied, call it a day. You probably don't dwell on how or why Google returned those results to you, but anyone with a Web site does.
2: Why is the cost of food rising so rapidly?
How many calories did you eat today? If you overindulged and packed in a few hundred extra calories, you may be one reason behind the prohibitively high price of food in 2008. Food prices have jumped more than 80 percent in three years, according to the World Bank, and their meteoric rise doesn't show signs of stopping, not least because of people eating excess calories. To learn what governments, global organizations and people like you and me are doing to try to solve the problem, read Why is the cost of food rising so rapidly?
1: How will the U.S. government spend the $700 billion bailout funds?
Of all the questions that have been on people's minds this year, particularly in the United States and particularly as the most financially tumultuous year in decades ends, perhaps no question was as pressing as this one -- how would the U.S. government spend the gargantuan bailout it announced in September 2008. Certainly, anxious homeowners biding their time against foreclosure wanted to know. Baby boomers sitting on depleted retirement savings wanted to know. Banks definitely, desperately wanted to know.
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