After my post entitled New Ape Found, I realized that there are many such groundbreaking newsstories in the area of science that are so woefully underreported that most people never even hear about them. Here are a handful that I think are very significant:
Forcefield Created:
Machinery at a 3M polypropylene plant suddenly generates an invisible and impenetrable wall of force strong enough to prevent a man from passing through. This occurred in front of witnesses and was reproducible. Then employees at 3M "fixed" the machine, so the problem would not recur. There are lots of complex theories as to what exactly caused the phenomenon, but the bottom line is that forcefields are no longer just science fiction; they have been observed firsthand, and we know how to produce them.
Artificial Hippocampus:
Scientists at the University of Southern California have designed a chip which can, in theory, replace the hippocampus in the brain. (That's the part that encodes new memories.) The fact that we have now moved into the realm where we can realistically speak of replacing even a tiny part of the brain with a manmade device is astonishing. We've taken our first significant step toward the eventual reverse-engineering of the human brain!
Ion Propulsion:
NASA has designed and tested a new propulsion method which would enable "an interstellar probe launched in 2010 ...[to]... pass the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant spacecraft bound for interstellar space, in 2018 going as far in eight years as Voyager will have journeyed in 41 years." Read about the history of the development of the technology here.
SETI's Wow! Signal:
Most people are under the impression that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has found absolutely nothing in all the years that researchers have been sweeping the sky for that one faint signal. The truth of the matter is that once in a great while, they do find something interesting. However, since it is generally recognized that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, anything that is found must satisfy a strict set of criteria before it can be declared to be a legitimate extraterrestrial signal. There have been a handful of signals which satisfied most of the criteria, such as verifiably coming from outside earth and being picked up in a narrow band frequency, but they have all lasted for very short periods of time and never repeated. Hence they do not satisfy the criterion of repeatability. In other words, they may very well be signals from otherworldly beings; we can't prove that they are, but we also can't explain the creation of these signals through any known natural phenomenon. The most spectacular is the so-called Wow! Signal of 1977.