Similar to humans, science is ever-evolving! It is not just facts and formulas, it’s an ever-evolving story. With all its complexities in every turn, it shapes the way we live and the way we see the world!
Every year pushes this evolving of science even further, leaving behind a legacy. Science breakthroughs of this year are inspiring and challenging and leave us thirsty for more knowledge to explore in 2020!
1. Astronomers produce the first-ever image of a black hole
Date: April, 2019
Institution: Event Horizon Telescope
Massive, ubiquitous, and in some cases as big as our Solar System, black holes hide in plain sight. The effect of their gravity on objects around them and, lately, the gravitational waves emitted when they collide reveal their presence. But no one had ever seen one directly—until April. That’s when an international team of radio astronomers released a startling close-up image of a black hole’s “shadow,” showing a dark heart surrounded by a ring of light created by photons zipping around it. Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, a member of the team that produced the image, said the first glimpse felt like “looking at the gates of hell.” This image can indeed be considered the science Breakthrough of the Year.
2. Mystery solved: Denisovans, human relatives who went extinct 50,000 years ago looked like this
Date: September, 2019
Institution: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Have you ever heard of Denisovans? Nobody has! Not until about a decade ago, when some archeologists found unusual bone fragments inside a cave in Siberia. Scientists say Denisovans and Neanderthals descended from a common ancestor that had split from the lineage leading to modern humans. Even so, our species interbred with both and picked up genetic markers that are still detectable in some people today. Up to this day, scientists do not know why Denisovans went extinct. And until 2019, they did not know how they even looked. So far, the only Denisovan remains discovered are three teeth, a pinky bone and a lower jaw. The fragments found, made it possible for researches to do complex analysis of DNA, comparing it with that of modern humans, Neanderthals and chimpanzees.
3. Google attains quantum supremacy
Date: October, 2019
Institution: Google
In October 2019, the era of quantum computing dawned—maybe. Physicists with Google claimed they had used a quantum computer to calculate something no ordinary computer could, reaching a milestone known as quantum supremacy. Although a rival group disputed the claim, it was widely hailed as a major achievement. But a quantum computer that can solve practical problems could still remain decades away.
Google researchers say they have taken a key step toward a functioning quantum computer by achieving quantum supremacy with an abstract test problem. Using a chip containing 53 qubits made of tiny circuits of superconducting metal, they implemented a set of randomly chosen interactions and showed, essentially, that the machine would output the correct quantum state. For calculations requiring a few qubits, they checked the result with supercomputer simulations. For larger numbers of qubits, they employed a statistical measure to help confirm the result. The comparisons showed that the quantum computer calculated in 200 seconds something that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to figure out, the team says.
4. Microbes that combat malnourishment are stimulated by a supplement
Date: July, 2019
Institution: Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, Washington University School of Medicine
Each year, millions of severely malnourished children fail to recover completely, remaining stunted and sickly even after they are well fed. Ten years of research has pointed to a root cause: Their gut microbes do not mature. This year, an international team built on that research to come up with a low-cost, easy-to-obtain supplement that preferentially stimulates the growth of beneficial gut bacteria. The supplements performed well in a small trial, and larger-scale clinical trials are now underway to see how well the supplement works to prevent stunting.
The team first pinpointed 15 types of bacteria that characterize a mature gut microbiome. They also identified blood markers, including proteins, that signal a recovery from the effects of malnutrition. They then tested various combinations of food readily found in developing countries to see how the microbiome responded, first in mice, then in pigs, and finally in a small group of malnourished children. It worked!
5. A close-up look of a far-out object
Last year, it was just a tiny gray spot in the blackness of space; now, it is Arrokoth. On the first day of this year, NASA’s $800 million New Horizons spacecraft swept by 2014 MU69, a 36-kilometer-wide object some 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth, in a region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper belt. Astronomers have discovered thousands of objects lurking in the belt, which they believe harbors material little altered from the early years of the Solar System. But they have never had a close-up look, until in 2019.
While this is exciting news, much work remains to be done; the spacecraft will not even finish beaming back all its observations of Arrokoth until the end of 2020. Even then, its mission may not be over: The New Horizons team is now using the probe’s telescope to search for a new Kuiper belt target to visit, one too small for any telescope on Earth to see.
6. Artificial intelligence masters multiplayer poker
Date: August, 2019
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
This year, an artificial intelligence (AI) program beat some of the world’s best players in the most popular version of poker, no-limit Texas Hold ’em. The landmark result marks the first time AI has prevailed in a multiplayer contest in which players have only imperfect information about the state of the game.
AI has been trouncing humans in games at a spectacular rate. In 2007, computer scientists developed a program guaranteed not to lose at checkers. In 2016, another team developed an AI program that defeated the best humans at Go, a board game with vastly more configurations than checkers.
Now, AI has bested world-class players in the full multiplayer game, as computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, announced in August. By playing 1 trillion games against itself, their program, Pluribus, developed a basic strategy for various kinds of situations—say, playing for an inside straight. For each specific hand, it could also think through how the cards would likely play out. In 20,000 hands with six players it outperformed 15 top-level players, as measured by average winnings per hand.
7. Over 5.5 million miles from Earth, a Japanese spacecraft landed on the surface of an asteroid called Ryugu
Date: July, 2019
Institution: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
Another achievement is the landing of the Japanese spacecraft on the surface of the asteroid which is 5.5 million miles away from Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched its Hayabusa-2 probe in December 2014. Hayabusa-2 arrived at Ryugu in June 2018, but didn’t land on the asteroid’s surface until this year.
8. Climate researchers found that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting at unprecedented rates
Date: April, 2019
Institution: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
A study made in April revealed that the Greenland ice sheet is sloughing off an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year. Two decades ago, the annual average was just 50 billion.
Sources: ScienceMag, Business Insider
