The next frontier in physics may require teeny-tiny answers to big questions, and vice versa.

From new insights into the building blocks of matter to advances in understanding batteries, superconductors, and a protein that could help fight cancer, 2014 was a year of stunning successes for the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Oh, and did we mention the opening of a brand new facility that will push the limits of discovery across the scientific spectrum? For details on these and the rest of our Top-10 breakthroughs, check out the items below. You can follow Brookhaven Lab on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to learn about the discoveries of 2015 as they happen.

Using extremely faint light from galaxies 10.8-billion light years away, scientists have created one of the most complete, three-dimensional maps of a slice of the adolescent universe. The map shows a web of hydrogen gas that varies from low to high density at a time when the universe was made of a fraction of the dark matter we see today.

Up to half of the water on Earth is likely older than the solar system itself, University of Michigan astronomers theorize.

In the beginning, or at least following the Big Bang more than 14 billion years ago, there was hydrogen, some helium and a little bit of lithium. A grand total of three elements.

The detection of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe came to be. The discovery, made in part by Stanford University Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, supports the theoretical work of Stanford's Andrei Linde.