Science is taking us to new advancements every year. Therefore, we bring you some selected significant accomplishments in science & technology for this year. Read on to know the research studies and discoveries that will blow your mind.
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January
At the start of the year itself, a team of
researchers and scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development
remarked that the Artificial Intelligence we are emphasizing right now, the
Superintelligence born with AI, will become uncontrollable. The team used
theoretical calculations to support their study. You can find the paper in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
Chinese have developed the world’s first and
largest integrated quantum communication network; they have created a stable
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) system with two ground-to-satellite links and
combining over 700 optical fibres and built a network, covering an area up to
~4,600 km with 150 users.
The team led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen,
Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei
selected four locations, Beijing, Jinan, Hefei and Shanghai, to develop the
most advanced quantum networking. You can find the research paper in Nature journal.
February
February 19, 2021, all space fans got a
notification from Twitter at 2:31 am, “Hello, world. My first look at my
forever home.” It was a tweet by NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover’s Twitter
handle, which confirmed the successful landing of “Perseverance” Rover
on Jezero Crater, one of the potential Martian landing sites.
With its sophisticated instruments and complex
programming, the rover has the potential to search for life on Mars. To date,
the rover gave scientists tons of data and satisfactory results for further
development. Perseverance’s accomplishments also include the production of
oxygen from carbon dioxide by MOXIE and several flights by ingenuity
helicopter. You can find more information here.
March
Exploring the deep ocean is a complicated task
for researchers due to its extremely high pressure. The following problem is
observed by Roboticist Guorui Li of Zhejiang University and his team in
Hangzhou, China. According to their paper published in Nature journal, they took
inspiration from the structure of a deep-sea snailfish, which can withstand the
extreme pressure of deep oceans, and devised an autonomous robot. The robot is
functional even in the deepest parts of the Mariana Trench, where they
field-tested the robot’s swimming capability in the different
depths.
1400"] CRISPR-Cas9 in Lipid
Nanoparticles (Image Credit: Ovarian Cancer News Today)
CRISPR genome editing, inspired by bacteria’s
natural immune process, has become a remarkable genome editing technique due to
its flexible and reliable for many applications. Scientists
at Tufts University and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT developed lipid
nanoparticles and used them to perform CRISPR genome editing in the liver of
mice. The technique can reduce the blood cholesterol level by 57%
for several months. With this, scientists are also aiming to use the CRISPR
technique to treat more liver diseases or disorders.
April
Researchers analyzed a genome from the skull
of a female fossil from Zlatý kůň, Czechia and found that her genome is nearly
3% Neanderthals, possessing similarities from Upper Palaeolithic
hunter-gatherers. And, her genome has become the oldest modern human
genome belonging to one of the earliest Eurasian hominin inhabitants,
Zlatý kůň. You can find the paper here.
For decades, paleoanthropologists believed
that brain structures had evolved soon after the emergence of Homo,
which happened nearly 2.8 million years ago. However, a recent study published in Science revealed
another story. According to them, when hominins left Africa to find shelters in
other places, anthropologists thought their developed brains made them move
out. However, studies of skulls of early Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia and
Sangiran, Indonesia, revealed those brains showed more resemblance to apes.
Furthermore, they stated that modern human brains may have emerged about some
1.7 million years ago.
If you want to know about human evolution in
general, then you find out our previously written article here.
May
China has become the second country to launch
its rover on the red planet. As a part of the Tianwen 1 mission, the Chinese
launched their six-wheeled rover Zhurong on Utopia Planitia, the northern
hemisphere landing site on Mars. They embedded laser tools to study the geology
and chemistry of the martian surface. The radar is also present to look for
water ice. Check out this blog for detailed information.
June
Chinese researcher is credited for discovering an ancient human skull, revealing the
existence of a new ancient species, Homo longi, a closely related
species to Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The species is commonly
called as ‘Dragon Man.’ The species belonged to East Asia and existed nearly
146,000 years ago. The discovery is significant because it is considered more
closely related to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals, and this
research can add a new chapter to the story of human evolution.
A team of researchers from the Wyss Institute
for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created face masks and embedded
lyophilized CRISPR sensors. The mask detects the presence of the SARS-CoV-2
virus in the patient’s breath within 90 minutes of activation.
The accuracy of detection is comparable to the
standard techniques such as RT-PCR. They used textile materials with
freeze-dried, cell-free synthetic circuits, including CRISPR-based tools,
performing a set of three reactions for detection. Find their work here.
July
A team of researchers has reported the discovery of long strands of extrachromosomal DNA in
the muddy wetlands of California; they call it ‘Borg’, which can incorporate a
host’s DNA (as per the research, the host organism is
archaea) into genes.
Borgs are different from other
extrachromosomal DNA due to their size (>600k to 1 million) and mysterious
nature with unique gene composition. One of the potentials that Borgs seem to
have is their ability to digest and destroy methane, as they found that Borgs
are linked to the Methanoperedens.
A new technique called Volumetric Imaging with
Synchronous on-the-fly-scan and Readout (VISoR) was developed by a Chinese
Academy of Sciences team in Beijing to study the brain of three 10-year-old
macaque monkeys. They successfully mapped the world’s first high-resolution 3D
images of the monkey's brain. With the findings you can find here, they may use this technique to map other
organs. Furthermore, studies of the monkey’s brain will broaden the research
aspects and contribute to the understanding of the human brain.
August
Michael Brown and Konstantin
Batygin of Caltech Institute were the ones who first hypothesized the existence
of planet 9 in 2016. At present, they re-examined the studies they published
back in 2016. Their calculations are still with the fact that Planet 9 exists,
and there might be around a 0.4% chance that it can be just a fluke. In
addition, they also mapped the supposed orbit to look for Planet 9. To know
more about the existence of planet 9, you can check out our previously written
article, PLANET 9: Is it Real or a Mirage?
September
CRISPR Cas system is an efficient genome
editing technique done with the help of Cas enzymes such as Cas9 or Cas12a. Not
only these two, but we also have other Cas enzyme systems. Therefore,
researchers have used the type V-F Cas12f (Cas14) system to develop the CasMINI system with half of the
currently used CRISPR systems. In addition, it is a robust and more efficient
system than Cas12, and it is functional in mammalian cells. CasMINI can be
expected to perform efficiently for cell engineering and gene therapy.
NASA successfully launched one of the crucial
satellites, Landsat 9, to monitor the Earth’s environment and land surfaces.
The satellite was launched at 2:12 pm EDT on September 27 from Vandenberg Space
Force Base in California. This mission is an extension of the Landsat mission of NASA in partnership
with the U.S. Geological Survey.
October
Some of the Scientists have been awarded Nobel Prize 2021 for their
extraordinary work in sciences that can revolutionize scientific perception and
humanity. You can check out the list here.
November
The presence of water and carbon
monoxide molecules has been detected in the galaxy SPT0311-58 with the observations
from Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The galaxy is known
to be the most massive of the early Universe and 12.88 billion light-years
distant from the Earth. The research findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The examination of data from the Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope to study the distribution of cosmic rays near the
galactic centre revealed some unexpected results. Xiaoyuan Huang
and his research colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the
density of cosmic rays is nearly constant outside the centre, but it dropped in
the central molecular zone (CMZ). With this, they stated that there is some
barrier (which can be magnetic fields in CMZ) that divides the density
distributions of areas outside and inside the CMZ.
December
You will be
amazed to know that palaeontologists from the University of Birmingham found 72
million years old preserved fossils of a dinosaur egg with an embryo inside it.
They named it ‘baby Yingliang’. The embryo belongs to oviraptorosaurs, a
species of toothless beaked theropod. More related information is here.
December 25, 2021, at 07:20 am EST, NASA
launched James Webb Space Telescope on an Ariane 5
rocket, one of the most reliable launch vehicles developed by the European
Space Agency (ESA). The Webb will be serving the data for the next decade to
unravel the history of the Universe, the first glow after the Big Bang, the
formation of our solar system, and the evolution of life on the Earth.
Comment down what you think about these
achievements. If you know some other major science breakout that should be
listed, let us know with the source, we will definitely check it out.
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