2012
Higgs boson confirmed
Physicists at CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider, the most complex machine ever built, had detected a new particle behaving exactly like the long-predicted Higgs boson, the field responsible for giving everything else mass. Peter Higgs, eighty-three, wiped his eyes in the audience in Geneva. Forty-eight years of painstaking theoretical and experimental work had finally found its missing piece.
Curiosity lands on Mars
A car-sized rover descended to the Martian surface in seven minutes of terror, lowered the final stretch by a hovering sky crane in a maneuver that had never been attempted. JPL engineers in red shirts hugged each other on live television. Curiosity would spend the next decade trundling across Gale Crater, sniffing for ancient habitable lakes.
Malala shot in Swat
A Taliban gunman boarded a school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley, asked for Malala Yousafzai by name, and shot the fifteen-year-old in the head for the crime of advocating girls' education. She survived a flight to Birmingham and a decade later became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history.
Sandy Hook massacre
A twenty-year-old man with a semiautomatic assault rifle walked into a quiet elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed twenty first-graders and six adults in less than five minutes before turning the gun on himself. President Obama wept on television. America passed no significant new gun law. The mass-shooting era settled into a grim, unbroken rhythm.
London Olympics open
Danny Boyle's exuberant opening ceremony staged the Industrial Revolution, the National Health Service, and James Bond delivering the Queen by helicopter in a sequence that made the world laugh and cheer. The Games that followed were a model of organization and good cheer. London, sometimes accused of cynicism, was, for two weeks, almost embarrassingly proud of itself.