Our guest scientists pick the breakthroughs and discoveries that defined their year, from insights into human evolution to our first trip aboard an asteroid

Take a deep breath. Dive into the emerald water. It’s 13 minutes and 70 metres down to lunch. Are you dead yet? Not if you are one of the Bajau “sea nomads” of south-east Asia, who have been free-diving like this for more than 1,000 years, relying on their remarkable physiology, and, as we learned in April, their genes. Humans left Africa 50 millennia ago, encountering new environments that required adaptation to survive. Adaptation is mostly cultural – building shelters, using fire, deciding what to eat, and transmitting instructions from generation to generation. But alongside this are advantageous genetic mutations grasped by natural selection.

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