30.12.2022
SCIENCE MAGAZINE HAS ANNOUNCED THE 10 BIGGEST SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS OF 2022.
Every year in mid-December, the journal Science publishes a list of the scientific achievements of the year, choosing one major breakthrough and nine other important discoveries. Unlike Nature, the Science list is not dedicated to the people whose names are associated with the most important scientific stories of the year, but to the events and discoveries themselves.
In 2021, the journal's editors announced as the major scientific breakthrough of the year advances in protein structure prediction using machine learning, specifically the open source algorithms AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold. The main breakthrough, according to the editors, this year is the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Top 10 scientific achievements for 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope mission
JWST is a space observatory for studying the universe in the infrared wavelength range (unlike, for example, Hubble, which works in the optical and ultraviolet part of the spectrum). The observatory's main mirror consists of 18 gold-plated beryllium segments with a total area of 27 square meters and a weight of 625 kilograms: six times larger than Hubble's mirror and almost a third lighter.
It took almost a quarter of a century and $10 billion to prepare for the launch of the telescope. Therefore, the launch and start of observations is a real breakthrough.
In fact, the space observatory will not fly into space in 2022, but at the end of 2021 - on December 25, 2021, after three years of comprehensive tests, the Ariana 5 rocket with the telescope launched from Kourou in French Guiana. To avoid chronological inconsistencies, the editorial board calls the breakthrough not the launch, but the telescope flight, because it occurs after the publication of the previous list.
In January 2022, the infrared telescope entered orbit around the second Lagrange point in the Sun-Earth system and on February 11 sent its first technical image. Another five months later, the observatory officially began its science program, and the first science image—an example of gravitational lensing of light from a distant galaxy from the early universe—was released on the evening of July 11. The following day, images of the Carina and Southern Ring Nebulae, as well as the Stefan Quintet group of compact galaxies, were presented.
For six months after that, the telescope regularly took pictures of both new and well-known objects, but with previously unavailable resolution and in a different part of the spectrum.
Perennial rice
According to the editors of Science, a high-yielding perennial rice variety deserves a place in the top ten. Converting annual grasses to perennial forms is one way to achieve higher yields, but also to preserve soil fertility without using up too many resources.
Perennial rice was first bred twenty years ago by crossing the cultivated Asian rice Oryza sativa with its African perennial relative Oryza longistaminata. But it took another two decades to achieve sufficient extraction from it. Chinese scientists began to study it in 2018, and this year they report their successes.
Their PR23 variety yields about the same amount of grain in the first year as regular annual rice, at the same planting and cultivation costs. And in the second, third and fourth years, the yield remains the same, falling only in the fifth year. This saves 77 man-days per hectare per season and cuts costs in half.
Neural networks - creators
2022 is the year that artificial intelligence (AI) technology enters fields that were once considered uniquely human, including art and scientific discovery. At first the entry of machines was slow, but this year it became an unstoppable colonizer of these new territories.
Last year, the editors of the journal Science recognized AI tools that predict the 3D structure of proteins from the sequence of their amino acid building blocks. Extending this work, researchers are now using AI to design entirely new proteins that could be used in vaccines, building materials or nanomachines. One technique, called "hallucination," starts with random sequences and mutates them to sequences that other AI tools are confident will fold into stable proteins.
But this year's edition celebrates the neural networks used to create images and videos.
The most impressive evidence - inevitably in social media - comes from so-called "text-to-image" patterns. They use machine learning to analyze pairings of text and images online, finding patterns that allow them to create new images based on new text.
Last year, the OpenAI research lab introduced a software system called DALL-E that, when asked about an "avocado-shaped armchair," could spit out several fascinating examples. This spring, OpenAI released a major upgrade, DALL-E 2. It implemented a machine learning technique called "diffusion," in which images emerge from "noise" guided by context or textual descriptions.
The method can effectively generate realistic and attractive pictures. Several diffusion models became available for public use this year, and an artist using one won a fine art competition, sparking both curiosity and denial.
In October, Google expanded Imagen's creative algorithms to video. Neural networks have now learned to generate videos based on text descriptions. A few days before, researchers from Meta presented a similar algorithm. A little later, Google researchers developed Imagic, a neural network model that edits images based on verbal instructions.
You can read about how such neural networks are already influencing the practice of artists and designers in the article "Is Lensa's artificial intelligence stealing from human art? Expert explains the controversy".
The biggest bacteria
In June of this year, biologists described the largest known bacterium. It is not just larger than all other bacteria, but larger than most of them by about 5000 times. Its cell can reach two centimeters in length. The bacterium was discovered in a mangrove swamp in the Caribbean and is called Thiomargarita magnifica.
Unlike larger, multicellular organisms—eukaryotes like us, which have membrane-enclosed organelles in their cells such as the nucleus—bacteria belong to a group of organisms called prokaryotes, which were traditionally thought to be just "bags of enzymes" without internal membranes to separate genetic material.
RSV vaccines
The editors of the journal Science cite clinical trials of two vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) as an important breakthrough.
According to studies by Pfizer and GSK, the new vaccines protect infants and the elderly, the groups most at risk from RSV. RSV usually causes only mild cold symptoms, but in infants it can affect the lower respiratory tract and cause bronchiolitis with acute respiratory failure, and in the elderly it can exacerbate heart disease.
Both vaccines prevent severe symptoms in people over the age of 60 without causing serious side effects. They also protect babies from RSV if their mothers are vaccinated late in pregnancy.
Development of RSV vaccines has been halted for decades since more than 50 years ago, during clinical trials of an inactivated vaccine, two children died and 80% of study participants were hospitalized. The scientists later identified the main reason why the vaccine virus was so dangerous to the test subjects: It induced the formation of relatively weak antibodies that not only failed to stop the virus, but through poorly understood mechanisms helped RSV damage the respiratory tract.
New vaccines solve this problem: now antibodies are formed more reliably and in higher concentrations.
The virus responsible for multiple sclerosis
Another breakthrough in 2022 was the discovery that the herpes simplex virus is a major factor in multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease in which the immune system attacks and damages the myelin sheath of neurons in the brain and spinal cord.
Analysis of a vast array of military medical records shows that multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease believed to be of unknown etiology, is a complication of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection.
Epstein-Barr virus, also known as human herpesvirus 4, is a member of the herpes virus family. It is one of the most common human viruses. EBV is found worldwide. Most people become infected with EBV at some point in their lives. EBV is most commonly spread through body fluids, primarily saliva.
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. The underlying cause of this disease is unknown, but the Epstein-Barr virus is thought to be the possible culprit. But most people infected with this common virus do not develop multiple sclerosis, and it is not possible to directly demonstrate the cause of this disease in humans.
Using data from more than ten million United States military personnel observed over a 20-year period, 955 of whom were diagnosed with MS during their service, Kjetil Bjornevik and colleagues tested the hypothesis that MS is caused by EBV. They found that the risk of developing MS in individuals who were EBV-negative increased 32-fold after EBV infection.
The findings could lead to new ways to treat or prevent the mysterious disease, which causes mild symptoms - including blurred vision, fatigue and numbness - in some 2.8 million sufferers worldwide, but gradually leaves others unable to speak or walk.
America's Climate Act
In 2016, the Paris Agreement was signed as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The signatories of the agreement recognize the need to contain the global increase in the average temperature of the planet within two degrees Celsius by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the laws of the signatory countries themselves prevent the achievement of this ambitious goal. In the US, for example, emissions reductions have not been regulated so far.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Joe Biden signed on August 16, 2022, is this year's breakthrough. This law should encourage the transition to clean energy and electric cars. Over the next 10 years, $369 billion will be used to finance clean energy sources. The authors of the law believe that by 2030 it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 40%.
The Science editorial notes that the Inflation Reduction Act is a necessary, though still insufficient, measure to meet the US's commitments under the Paris Agreement. In addition to federal law, state laws will also be needed. Similar laws are expected to be adopted soon in other countries that have signed the agreement.
The genetic imprint of the plague
In October, Nature published a paper showing how the Black Death - a plague pandemic in Europe in the 14th century - affected Europeans. After that, Europe's population declined significantly, and subsequent plague outbreaks were less deadly—whether the pathogen changed or the people. The work of geneticists at the University of Chicago shows that the plague changed Europeans quite dramatically.
Geneticists analyzed the DNA of people who died shortly before and after the pandemic and found loci that were most likely to have been under positive selection. It turns out that the Black Death most affected the development of the human immune system.
One of the loci discovered contains the ERAP2 gene, which is linked to the immune system. On the one hand, this can be considered an adaptation to infectious diseases, but changes in this locus also increase the risk of its owners developing autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
The deflection of an asteroid
Another breakthrough in 2022 is the success of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The mission began two years ago when NASA's DART spacecraft was launched into space -- specifically to collide with the 160-meter asteroid Dimorphos, which is not dangerous to Earth. The mission was intended to alter the asteroid's trajectory to test a controlled collision technique, one way to protect Earth from asteroids.
On September 27, 2022, at 02:14 Bulgarian time, a 550-kilogram probe hits Dimorphos at a speed of over 6 km per second.
A number of space and ground-based telescopes watched the collision to confirm that the asteroid's trajectory had changed. The results even beat scientists' expectations and model estimates: Dimorphos' rotation period around a larger asteroid from the same system changed by as much as 32 minutes - 26 times more than NASA predicted. These results allow scientists to verify the effectiveness of the kinetic deflection method. And also that their models will need to be refined.
An ancient ecosystem reconstructed from 2 million-year-old DNA
The latest breakthrough, which the editors of Science write about, is the discovery of fragments of the oldest DNA in the Kap København formation (Kap København from the Danish "Cape Copenhagen") in northern Greenland.
According to the analysis, the genetic material found is more than two million years old. It is twice as old as the previous record - DNA from a Siberian mammoth bone. Apart from the record age, the importance of the work lies in the fact that molecular biologists were able to recreate an entire ecosystem of multiple species of plants, animals and microorganisms, which at the time was experiencing a dramatic climate crisis, based on sequencing data.
Samples of the genetic material have been stored in a laboratory at the University of Copenhagen since 2006. The ancient DNA in these samples is relatively well preserved because it binds to the minerals in the clay. Thanks to this, modern sequencing methods have produced more than 16 billion records. The results were compared to existing databases of genomes of modern animals, plants and microorganisms, and the ecosystem of Cape Copenhagen two million years ago was recreated. At that time, poplars, birches, arctic grasses and bushes grew there, and mastodons walked among them, as well as the ancestors of modern rabbits, reindeer, rodents.
The Science editors note that genetic adaptations that allowed plants and animals to live in the far North at warmer temperatures than today can be found in these data. And this can be used - for example, to build into the genes of modern plants to adapt crops to a changing climate.
These are the achievements noted by the editors of the journal Science. Are they missing something important? Definitely.
