Bengaluru: With Chandrayaan-3 becoming the first mission to land in the South Pole region of the Moon, followed by Aditya L-1’s journey to study the Sun, India established itself as a key player in space exploration in 2023.
But the year gone by has also seen many pivotal scientific moments, from solar beams to medical AI and even the resurrection of a zombie worm, that promise to change the paths of their fields forever.
ThePrint rounds up 10 of the biggest science moments from this year.
Earliest ‘written language’
In the very first month of the year, archaeologists found what is probably the earliest ‘written language’ discovered so far.
The earliest writing system has been traced back to the Sumerians, about 5,000 years ago. The new discovery, made in the UK, centres on a ‘proto-writing’ system, one where marks and signs are used to convey some information but not to record speech.
An amateur archaeologist in the UK, a furniture conservator by profession, analysed over 600 Ice Age European cave paintings dating back 20,000 years to discover that symbols on the art — like dots and the ‘Y’ sign — depicted the life cycle of the animal they were painted next to.
The oldest discovered was four dots drawn alongside a red ochre cave drawing of cattle in Spain, dating back 23,000 years.
He then teamed up with professors from Durham University and University College London to publish a paper.
A BBC report on the findings said the “‘proto-writing’ system the team uncovered pre-dates others thought to have emerged during the Near Eastern Neolithic by at least 10,000 years”.
A peek at cellular memory for ageing
Studying ageing and the associated processes has been an ongoing saga in science. The answers hold the key to understanding how diseases progress in the body, how changes occur, and how therapeutics and drugs can work better.
As cells divide, they lose some information each time, but remember their identity or the kind of cell they are supposed to become. This is called epigenetic memory, and scientists at the University of Copenhagen have just understood how this works. They describe it as similar to colourful post-its that tell molecules how to behave.
Fully understanding this mechanism will help scientists figure out how to stop the spread of diseases, and prevent cells from dividing and turning into cancerous ones.
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Quantum advances
The year was promising for quantum mechanics, with even the Chemistry Nobel going to scientists who created ‘quantum dots’.
Prominently, researchers demonstrated teleportation of energy from one location to another without violating any laws of physics.
In another development, researchers from Japan showed that energy created in one device can be “teleported” in a uniquely confusing quantum manner to another device at a microscopic level.
Improvements in planetary defence
It might sound like something out of a science fiction book, but planetary astronomers are working on protecting the Earth, not from alien attacks, but flying rocks.
Last year, NASA’s DART mission collided into Dimorphos, the moon of the far-away asteroid Didymos, to purposely change its orbit. This was a demonstration of how projectiles could be fired at large space rocks that might be hurtling towards Earth to deflect them from their path.
In May this year, astronomers mapped the path of potentially hazardous asteroids for the next 1,000 years, of which at least 28 could impact Earth.
Finding life’s ingredients in space
Astronomers found the basic ingredients and building blocks for life in multiple places this year.
The OSIRIS-REx mission from NASA brought back samples from the asteroid Bennu, becoming the third-ever mission to return asteroid material to humans. The pieces of the asteroid were found to contain carbon and water.
Analysis of samples from the asteroid Ryugu, brought to Earth by the Japanese Hayabusa 2 mission, also found uracil, one of the four nucleobases of RNA needed for life. So far, all the building blocks of life have been identified in asteroids.
Additionally, in June, an international tram of scientists reported detecting phosphates on Enceladus, the watery, icy ball of a moon orbiting Saturn, thus showing that all ingredients of life were present there.
Brain-recording converts thoughts to text
Voice to text is old news. What’s got everyone agog is thoughts to text. Scientists in the US built a decoder this May that could read thoughts in the brain through a brain-computer interface or BCI, and convert them to text or language. The system uses functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI signals to recognise patterns and translate them to language.
The decoder works on personalised data, understanding a person’s brain signals as they listen to a story, and then interprets these individual brain signals for subsequent brain activity. This slightly more private tech is expected to help aid those with communication disabilities.
Organoid Intelligence — new medical AI
‘Organoid Intelligence’, a multidisciplinary field that works with computers and stem-cell lab-brains, was announced this year.
This kind of study envisions using small clones of the human brain for supercomputing, instead of relying on digital AI.
These biological computing interfaces are made from stem cells grown into a lump of brain cells in a lab, and are thought to be more powerful than typical electronic devices. They are also projected to become highly useful for understanding disease progression and developing therapeutics.
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‘Sci-fi’ solar beam
For the first time, scientists and engineers in the US have managed to beam solar energy from space to Earth. The Space Solar Power Project, launched to orbit in January, is an array of solar panels that gather solar energy from space and transmit it wirelessly to Earth through microwaves.
This power is then harnessed on Earth, to be utilised irrespective of the time of day or the weather. Devices based on this model are expected to aid greatly in powering society in the near and far future, as the world’s energy grid slowly transitions away from fossil fuels.
High-energy secrets from the universe
An international team of scientists has detected an ‘ultra fast radio burst’ — fast radio bursts are radio signals emanating from high-energy events in space — that lasted just millionths of a second.
Astronomers have previously tracked a wide variety of fast radio bursts or FRBs, which are now a subject of nascent but active research.
In November, an international team of astronomers also detected the second-fastest cosmic ray ever measured, and named it ‘Amaterasu’, after the Sun goddess in Japanese mythology.
The cosmic ray, a particle, carries extremely high energy and was detected colliding with Earth. Amaterasu is the second most powerful cosmic ray detected, after the Oh-My-God particle detected in 1991.
Resurrection of a ‘zombie worm’
In July, a 46,000-year-old worm, a type of primitive and simple organism called nematode, was revived by Russian and German researchers after being frozen in ice for 46,000 years.
The species, previously undescribed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, has the ability to enter a dormant state called cryptobiosis by which it can survive extremely harsh conditions like freezing and desiccation.
The worm is believed to have frozen between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago, making this organism’s cryptobiosis the longest reported so far.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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