Science made astonishing progress. It was also hijacked by those with an axe to grind | Laura Spinney

Attacks and scepticism are on the rise, even as leaps are made in fields from gene editing and AI to interplanetary exploration

The 2010s were the decade in which we were reminded that science is just a method, like the rhythm method. And just like the rhythm method, it can be more or less rigorously applied, sabotaged, overrated, underrated and ignored. If you don't treat it with respect, you may not get the optimal result, but that's not the method's fault.

That may be where the similarities end, because when it's done well, science is very effective, and this decade furnished its fair share of breakthroughs to make us gasp. Physicists detected phenomena that were predicted decades ago - gravitational waves, the Higgs boson particle - indicating that they have been on broadly the right track in their understanding of how the universe works. Astronomers added awe-inspiring detail. Nasa probes found towering ice mountains on Pluto and organic chemistry - the stuff of life - on Mars and a moon of Saturn. And who could forget the exoplanets - those planets orbiting distant stars? Thousands of them were discovered in just the past 10 years. No wonder science fiction is booming.

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