In a year jam-packed with major advances, over-hyped findings and controversial studies, it was tough to pick which breakthroughs were the largest in 2010. So we’ve collected the ones that stood out one of the most to us.

From synthetic life and three-parent embryos to the potential for a new human ancestor and a habitable exoplanet, listed below are the breakthroughs that made us shout ” Science!” the loudest this year.

Dinosaur Colors

For the first time, scientists were ready to use direct fossil evidence to make an affordable interpretation of a dinosaur’s color.

Building on the discovery of preserved traces of pigment structures in cells in fossilized dinosaur feathers (above), paleontologists compared the dinosaur cells with the corresponding cells in living birds. By studying the colors created by different combinations of these melanosomes in bird feathers, the researchers recreated the coloring of a recently discovered feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi (right).

The dinosaur probably had bright orange feathers on its head and speckled on its throat, a grey body and white accents on its wings.

The same technique was subsequently used to make a decision the color of a large fossil penguin .

Images: 1) Sam Ose /Wikimedia Commons 2) Michael DiGiorgio/Yale University

Self-Replicating Life With Synthetic DNA Created

Treating genetic code as software, bioengineers at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first self-replicating, synthetically designed life in May.

The organization’s researchers created a genome entirely on computers, even adding special watermarks resembling the DNA-ified names of 46 researchers who worked on the project and an internet URL. They then printed the DNA in chunks, allowed the pieces to self-assemble in a yeast cell and witnessed an organism ” boot up” after a number of hours.

Venter and his colleagues hope to patent Mycoplasma laboratorium, as they call it, and engineer it to manufacture cheap biofuels, medicines and other useful compounds.

Patenting the organism isn’t without its critics, however, who argue the move will stifle future science hoping on a man-made microbes. The Obama administration has also known as for oversight to the emerging field, but hasn’t issued any federal regulations governing it – yet.

Image: Schematic demonstrates the assembly of an artificial genome in yeast. /Science/AAAS

The Universe Is also Recycled

A new analysis of leftover radiation from the massive Bang suggests the universe was recycled over and over. Two theoretical physicists claimed in November that circular patterns inside the otherwise uniform cosmic microwave background, which records the break of day emitted after the beginning of the universe, mean the universe didn’t struggle through one massive growth spurt in its first fraction of a second, as most cosmologists currently believe.

Instead, the universe as we are aware of it can be just the latest iteration in an extended cycle of births and deaths. The circles within the microwave background may be the gravitational echoes of supermassive black holes colliding inside the epoch before the recent Big Bang, meaning there has been a couple of Big Bang.

But the circles may be noise. The controversial theory might be settled by a new microwave background mapper, the Planck satellite, which released its first map of the universe’s earliest light in July.

Image: V.G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose /arXiv

Australopithecus sediba

Reported in April and known from two 1.9-million-year-old skeletons discovered in a South African cave, Australopithecus sediba offers a glimpse of a hazy time in our lineage’s evolution.

Some of its characteristics, inclusive of long arms and a protruding nose, are recognizably human. Others, akin to extra-long forearms and flexible feet, date from deeper inside the primate past.

It’s too soon to grasp whether A. sediba is an instantaneous human ancestor, or just seems like one. Either way, it’s an attractive creature.

Image: Lee Berger /Science

NDM-1 Superbug Decoded

A Swedish citizen returned from New Delhi in 2008 with a virtually untreatable pneumonia due to NDM-1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase – the most recent multidrug-resistant superbug.

NDM-1 isn’t a single microorganism, but rather an enzyme ready to chew through most antibiotics. Only two classes of medicine seem capable of fighting the infections, if at all.

In addition to tracing its origins to southern Asia this year, scientists discovered that the gene coding for NDM-1 can ride in a plasmid, or self-contained snippet of DNA, and easily spread from one infectious (and unrelated) microbe to the subsequent. U.S. hospitals also documented their first NDM-1 strains in 2010.

Although new infections and NDM-1-powered strains are spreading, no less than one compound has been discovered that can combat the superbug strains.

Image: Klebsiella pneumoniae, the first microbe identified to carry a gene NDM-1 gene. /Public Health Image Library

Three-Parent Embryos

By taking chromosomes from one zygote – the one cell formed when sperm and egg fuse – and putting them into a zygote stripped of chromosomes but still containing mitochondria, British researchers produced an embryo with genetic contributions from three parents .

Other scientists had managed versions of the trick before, but not in human cells, with such sophistication.

The technique hasn’t been approved for use in human reproduction, but could conceivably be used to stop hereditary, often-fatal mitochondrial disease. It also opens up a new ethical question: If mitochondrial DNA – just a small fraction of a cell’s DNA, but integral to its function – comes from someone who isn’t mom or dad, are they a parent, too?

Image: A nucleus is transferred into a recipient zygote. /Nature

A Habitable Exoplanet (Maybe)

An extrasolar planet that may support liquid water finally showed itself in September. Exoplanet hunters announced a new world orbiting in its dim star’s habitable zone, the not-too-hot, not-too-cold region where liquid water is stable and life could potentially find a foothold.

The planet’s existence was quickly called into question when a second team of astronomers didn’t find it in their data. But the find bolstered astronomers’ hopes that dozens of habitable worlds will occur as an increasing number of exoplanets are unearthed.

Image: Artist’s rendering, Lynette Cook

Self-Recognition in Rhesus Macaques

For decades, the failure of rhesus macaque monkeys to recognize themselves in a mirror kept their species on the far side of a cognitive divide, break away humans, chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants.

In September, University of Wisconsin neuroscientists reported mirror self-recognition in their macaques . The findings haven’t begun to be replicated, but still had profound implications.

Maybe humans had underestimated the intelligence of monkeys, as that they had other animals who eventually passed the mirror test. More fundamentally, maybe the mirror test, a methodological remnant of a behaviorist legacy of animals as biological automata, reflects nothing more than a human inability to grasp animals.

Image: Flickr / Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble

HIV Microbicide Discovered

At long last, there’s an HIV drug that seems to work .

In a study of 889 South African women, folks that used a vaginal gel with the antiretroviral microbicide tenofovir in it were 39 percent less prone to contract HIV. Women who used it generally saw a 54 percent drop in risk of infection.

It’s no foolproof vaccine, but the researchers who conducted the 2.5-year trial contend it’s the first-ever hope of thwarting the spread of HIV and AIDS. They’re anxious to discover the drug’s safety and effectiveness more widely to determine if it’s safe to release to the public.

Image: A rendered cross-portion of an HIV virus. /LANL

Water on the Moon

Last year, NASA smacked a spent Centaur rocket into a shadowed lunar crater and blew out the first definite signs that the moon is chock-crammed with water.

Although technically the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission sent back the first whiffs of water at the tip of 2009 , the final numbers weren’t in until October. The crater that LCROSS carved out contained 341 pounds of water, and an estimated 5.6 percent of the soils there is perhaps moist. That’s enough water to be useful to future lunar colonists, scientists say.

All that water was near the moon’s south pole, but in March a radar instrument on India’s Chandrayaan-I orbiter found millions of hundreds water at the North Pole, too.

Image: Science/AAAS

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