Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at Open University, said the images of rocks and minerals beamed back from Mars by the Curiosity rover were "spectacular, beautiful and absolutely compelling", and that the findings were shifting scientists' views on how life might have existed on Mars.
A7 NATIONAL A10-16 Stem Cell TechniqueMay Shift Debate Scientists have developed two new techniques to derive human embryonic stem cells, one of which avoids the destruction of the embryo, a development that may shift the grounds of the longstanding political debate about the research.
In genetics, the results of a £180m decade-long study to create an encyclopedia of DNA elements, known as Encode, were published to wild acclaim in parts of the science media with this newspaper describing it as "the most significant shift in scientists' understanding of the way our DNA operates since the sequencing of the human genome".
Any large-scale funding shift forces scientists to take notice, but there's far more to this than just funding.
Climate change is causing this border to shift, and scientists and interested parties have installed sensors to track its movement.
Obviously, though, a broad scientific consensus - its precise shape still shifting as scientists debate - cannot compared to church dogma, even if some scientists are behaving capriciously.
Webb was not an astronomer, but head of NASA in the 1960s a sharp indication of how the balance of power has shifted between scientists and bureaucrats.
While studies of climate patterns in the distant past clearly show the potential for drastic shifts, these scientists say, there is enormous uncertainty in making specific predictions about the future.
From those two frequency shifts, the scientists can deduce both the molecule's position on the beam and its mass.
