2022: The Year in Science
The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view. The pillars look like arches and spires rising out of a desert landscape, but are filled with semi-transparent gas and dust, and ever changing. This is a region where young stars are forming – or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).
The Year of Our Lord 2022 was … well, it an interesting one, that’s for sure. A major European war. A pandemic that doesn’t seem to quit. An election that turned out like no one expected. One of my favorite traditions around this time of years is Dave Barry’s year in review(gift link).
In economic news, inflation continues to worsen despite intensive efforts by the Biden administration to explain that it is caused by Vladimir Putin, corporate greed, covid, supply-chain issues, global climate change, the filibuster rule, the murder hornets and various other factors totally unrelated to any policies of the Biden administration. For its part, the Republican National Committee issues a formal statement declaring that “rampant inflation places a terrible financial burden on American working families, and we totally hope it stays bad until the midterm elections no wait we didn’t mean to say that last part out loud.”
But despite all the craziness, it was an amazing year in science. Breakthrough after breakthrough, milestone after milestone, human knowledge and achievement advanced at a dizzying pace. I’ve chronicled most of this on these pages. But just to put it all in one place, so we can appreciate how much happened this year, here are the ten biggest science stories of the year.
10. There’s a Monster at the Heart of This Galaxy. For the second time, we got direct images of a black holes, this time the one in the center of our own Milky Way.
The main panel of this graphic contains X-ray data from Chandra (blue) depicting hot gas that was blown away from massive stars near the black hole. Two images of infrared light at different wavelengths from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show stars (orange) and cool gas (purple). These images are seven light years across at the distance of Sgr A*. A pull-out shows the new EHT image, which is only about 1.8 x 10-5 light years across (0.000018 light years, or about 10 light minutes). (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR: NASA/HST/STScI. Inset: Radio (EHT Collaboration))
9. Cancer Vaccines Made Progress. I told you that mRNA vaccines were going to be a revolution. Well, it’s starting. There are now promising results for cancer vaccines. The efficacy is still not great but any progress will save lives. And we’re still in the early stages. And while we’re on the subject of mRNA vaccines …
8. Universal Flu Vaccines Show Promise. The first tests of universal flu vaccines are showing good progress. Every year, we have to guess what the flu strain is going to be. And this year, we’re getting hit very hard. The day may be coming where one shot in the fall will give you stiff resistance against both flu and COVID, no matter what mutations nature cooks up.
7. Nuclear Fusion Hit a Milestone As I noted in my post, we’re still a long long way away from practical reactors. But achieving ignition is a big step toward a brighter carbon-free future.
6. Malaria Vaccines Improve. 2021 saw the first ever vaccine for malaria. However, 2022 saw the first results of a new vaccine that hits the WHO’s goal of 75% effectiveness. If it passes Phase 3 trials, this could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
5. Artemis I Went to the Moon After numerous delays and big expenses, the Artemis mission successfully launched, circled the Moon and returned. If all goes according to plan, we should return to the surface by 2025.
Artist concept of an astronaut in the xEMU space suit setting up a science experiment on the lunar surface. (NASA)
4. Bivalent Vaccines And in the final entry for the mRNA revolution: new updated COVID-19 vaccines was deployed this year, which protect against two versions of the spike protein. New peer-reviewed research indicates that not only does it massively reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, it is effective against some of the new emerging variants.
Thanks to a combination of apathy and misinformation, update of the bivalents has been slow. But I suspect that will change if we get another surge.
3. The DART Mission Redirected An Asteroid In a remarkable achievement of navigation, NASA sent a probe to smash into an asteroid and change its trajectory. They didn’t do this just to see $300 million spacecraft go boom — although that was cool. It was the first step in creating a planetary defense system that might just prevent a global catastrophe. We’re still analyzing the data but it looks like DART redirected the asteroid way more than expected due to material “splashing” up from the surface.
Graphic by NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The next step is obvious: we need more data. Time to smash some more asteroids.
2. The Monkeypox Outbreak Was Contained In truth, there was probably not a big danger of a COVID-like explosion of monkeypox. But between vaccination, awareness and persuading people to curb irresponsible behavior, the outbreak was contained. We’re down to single-digit cases every day and of the 30,000 cases reported in the US, only 20 ended in death. This is how a pandemic response is supposed to go.
1. The James Webb Telescope Successfully Deployed Am I letting my astronomer bias show? Maaaybe. But since its launch, JWST has brought us stunning images of the cosmos. It had discovered the most distant galaxy known, pushing back the era at which galaxies formed. It has found water vapor in planets outside our Solar System.
The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view. The pillars look like arches and spires rising out of a desert landscape, but are filled with semi-transparent gas and dust, and ever changing. This is a region where young stars are forming – or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).
And this is just the beginning. JWST has been warming up so far, looking at targets we knew would be interesting, doing the small programs that yield quick results. Over the next few years, it’s really going to puts it shoulder into it. By the time it finishes its mission, assuming we don’t refuel, it will have traced the earliest epochs of the universe, witnessed the births of new stars and, I’ll speculate, provide evidence of Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System. A new golden age is upon us. And as someone who criticized the program for decades, crow has never tasted so good.
All in all … not a bad year. And the projects under way promise an even better future. If we care to claim it.
Re 4, 6, 8, and 9… 25 or so years ago the man I sat next to on a long airplane flight was a biologist who evaluated business proposals for one of the big venture capital firms. The human genome sequencing work had been in the news lately, and I asked him when that would lead to medical breakthroughs. “Think of it this way,” he told me. “We now have a (potential) list of all the proteins a human body can produce. We barely have the beginning of a catalog of how those proteins interact. Interaction is a hard question because, for example, some proteins have multiple functions depending on what other proteins are present, whether the protein is folded or not, etc. Things will get very interesting in about 25 years, after a whole lot of work. Stuff like vaccines based on whole new technologies.”
He was quite a bit older then I was at that time, but he could still be alive. Hope he is, so he has the opportunity to see that some of his predictions were right.Report
Re 5… I would have picked SpaceX doing 60 launches in a year rather than the SLS. SLS’s only contribution to Artemis is a very expensive taxi ride to lunar orbit every couple of years, with enough fuel to break orbit and return to Earth. All of the interesting bits of “return to the surface of the moon” are independent of SLS and so far, are scheduled to fly on SpaceX launchers and landers.Report
As science becomes capable of producing more and more effective vaccines, people are becoming less and less willing to use them.Report
We should probably take the microchips out of them then. Who’s got the tweezers?Report