What's the most amazng thing you read in 2011?

Or "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" that you came across in 2011, if John Brockman of edge.org had asked me.

The most amazing book that Vivian read in 2011 was probably the first book she learned to sight-read. The Hungry Caterpillar. 

 Jo got me a book about elements for my birthday - "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements". Easily qualifies as the book with the longest title that I read in 2011. As a book it was average. But it had three pages in there that were astounding. 

Ninety percent of the universe is hydrogen. The remaining 10% is helium. Me, my macbook, the room I'm in, this planet, and all the solid stuff you can image in the entire universe? That's just noise. In a first approximation we can ignore all that. 

As if that were not amazing enough, there's this story about how hydrogen ends up being converted to you and me. Stars form when there are very slight differences in the distribution of matter in the emptiness of space. Gravity starts pulling more matter together till it is dense and hot enough for the star to burn hydrogen and produce helium. A star could stay lit for billions of years burning hydrogen. Once the hydrogen in it's core is gone, it starts burning helium in the core. The star grows in size - our sun would be large enough to engulf the earth by this time in it's life. After helium, if a star is massive enough, the core creates and burns successively heavier elements, one at a time - carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon, and eventually iron. The star runs out of each successive type of fuel faster, from billions of years for hydrogen down to a matter of days for the last stages. Once thermonuclear reactions can't be supported,  the core collapses downwards rapidly (in seconds) and there's a huge explosion called a supernova that shines brighter than an entire galaxy of billions of stars - for a month or so. This collapse and explosion makes all the other elements which are pushed out into space unevenly due to the explosion. From which new stars start forming. And in one case, eventually, you and me.

By the 1920s we knew that stars produce energy by burning hydrogen in thermonuclear fusion. By 1957, most of the major portions of this theory were in place. So this was old news by the time I was born. And I managed to remain completely ignorant about it till 2011.