Our year-in-review special looks back at the wacky, weird, and wondrous stories of 2012.

Shaken, then in stir

In October, seven Italian scientists and government officials were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison for not giving adequate warning of a deadly April 2009 earthquake. The former members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks gave what prosecutors described as “incomplete, imprecise, and contradictory” statements concerning the risk of a major earthquake prior to the temblor that struck L’Aquila, killing 308, injuring more than 1,000, and levelling thousands of buildings.

The distaff conundrum

“They are a complete mystery.”

—Eminent theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, on women

Planets are a girl’s best friend

Astronomers have found a planet 40 light years away that is twice the size of Earth and appears to, essentially, be made of diamonds. The planet, named 55 Cancri e, is made up mostly of carbon, which—along with surface temperatures of up to 2,150 ° C—makes it ideal for creating diamonds. Study leader Nikku Madhusudhan, who utilized NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope for the study, said: “Science fiction has dreamed of diamond planets for many years, so it’s amazing that we finally have evidence of its existence in the real universe.”

A Nobel calling

“They passed the phone around and congratulated me…When one person calls you, it can be a joke, but when five people with convincing Swedish accents call you, then it isn’t a joke.”

—American scientist Brian Kobilka, cowinner with Duke University professor Robert Lefkowitz of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, on how he found out he had won. The pair were honoured for their studies of human protein receptors, which can lead to better drugs. According to Mark Downs of Britain’s Society of Biology, “this groundbreaking work spanning genetics and biochemistry has laid the basis for much of our understanding of modern pharmacology”.

Nazis. I hate these guys

German and Austrian scientists determined that an ancient Buddhist statue was carved 1,000 years ago from a meteorite that fell near the border of Russia and Mongolia 15,000 years ago. The 10.6-kilogram relic was brought from Tibet to Germany by a 1938 Nazi-backed expedition.

Zombees

A parasitic “zombie” infection of honeybees that was first discovered in California in 2008 has spread as far north as Seattle. The infection—caused by a small fly that injects eggs into a bee’s abdomen, which then hatch into maggots that eat the bee’s insides—causes bees to fly at night, lurch about, and, eventually, die.

Numb to death

After several U.S. drug makers objected to their products being used in lethal injections for executions, German drug maker Fresenius Kabi USA, the only domestic supplier of the anesthetic propofol, withdrew its use in executions. Propofol was blamed for the death of Michael Jackson. Fresenius Kabi spokesman Matt Kuhn said the drug’s use in executions contradicted its medical purpose.

Here comes the sun

After the Japanese government restarted the Oi nuclear plant following the Fukushima disaster, the nearby small farming village of Sanno, in Hyogo Prefecture, severed itself from the grid and became the first municipality to rely totally on solar power. The villagers used a decades-old contingency fund to construct a bank of 216 solar panels.

Slip slidin’ away

“I don’t know of any that are bigger.”

—B.C. Forest Service research geomorphologist Marten Geertsema, on a mammoth rockslide in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, about 10 kilometres from the B.C. border. The landslide registered as a magnitude 3.4 (Richter) quake in the state and was estimated to be about 8.5 kilometres long and 800 metres wide. Geertsema said scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that climate change is playing “an important role” in the worldwide frequency of landslides.

Ocean underfoot

Scientists working for the Namibian government have identified a vast new underground water supply that lies under the boundary between Angola and Namibia. The aquifer, named the Ohangwena II, could supply the north of Namibia, the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, for 400 years. The aquifer on the Namibian side covers an area about 40 kilometres by 70 kilometres and contains very clean, drinkable water up to 10,000 years old.