Post COVID-19 pandemic as the countries across the globe were coming to terms with the new realities of life, scientists/researchers dedicatedly made incredible discoveries providing use deeper understanding of the secrets of universe by capture images of ancient galaxies, reviving the dead, developing synthetic embryo and capturing images of black hole. The year also saw some mazing technological breakthroughs like simulating the wormhole, successful nuclear fusion, fastest exascale supercomputer and new high-precision navigation system and revolutionary efforts to save humanity from rogue asteroids and make Sanskrit language to be more computer-enabled.
As we look ahead at what’s going to come in 2023, we have shortlisted top 10 scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs of the past year as follows…
Fastest Supercomputer:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer crunches numbers with mind-blowing speed – 1.1 quintillion or 1018 calculations per second. As of June 2022, Frontier has emerged as the world’s fastest supercomputer with 2.5 times speed of the second ranking Japanese supercomputer – Fugaku. Frontier’s novel architecture is ideally suited for delivering unprecedented machine learning and data science and automations that could vastly improve our understanding of critical processes, from drug delivery to nuclear fusion to the global climate change.
The James Webb Telescope:
The Innovation of the year in aerospace technology, the James Webb Telescope (JWST) beamed down the first images in July, showing use jaw-dropping views of the cosmos. Unlike the Hubble space telescope, which scanned the heavens from low Earth orbit, the Webb telescope is camped hundreds of thousands of miles farther out, sitting in Earth’s shadow, where it is permanently blocked from sunlight. As a result, the $10 billion JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.
Organ Transplant reviving the dead:
A group of Yale scientists succeeded in reviving cells in the hearts, liver, kidneys and brains of pigs that had been lying dead in a lab for an hour. The researchers accomplished the feat by using a device much like a heart-lung machine to pump a custom-made solution, dubbed OrganEx, into the pigs’ bodies. The pigs’ hearts started beating and sent the solution through their veins. While the pigs weren’t revived, but their organs started functioning again. The researchers hope their breakthrough eventually will help increase the supply of human organs available for transplant by letting doctors get viable organs from bodies long after death. The technology also might be useful in limiting damage to hearts from heart attacks, and to brains from strokes.
Synthetic embryo made without sperm or eggs:
After 10 years of research, scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, created a synthetic mouse embryo that began forming organs without a sperm or egg inside a bioreactor. All it took was stem cells. It was the first time scientists ever managed to grow fully synthetic mouse embryos outside the womb. The mouse stem cells were grown into an artificial womb for eight days, where they developed a rudimentary brain, an intestinal tract and a beating heart. The experiment could be key in understanding how organs develop in the embryos and one-day help develop replacement organs for people who need a transplant. However, it also raises profound questions about whether other animals, including humans, might one day be cultured from stem cells in a lab.
Deflecting Asteroid Collision:
After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology mission has proved that it has the ability to deflect a giant space rock off a collision course with our planet. NASA sent the 1,100-pound DART spacecraft slamming into a 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, at 14,000 miles per hour to see whether the impact force would be enough to change its trajectory. Dimorphos, which didn’t actually threaten Earth, was orbiting around a larger parent asteroid, Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes before the crash. After DART slammed into Dimorphos on Sept. 26, astronomers clocked its orbit time at 11 hours and 23 minutes, 32 minutes shorter than before, signaling a significant change in its path.
New Navigation System with 10 centimeter accuracy:
Researcher of Delft University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and VSL have developed an alternative ‘positioning system’ that is more robust and accurate than the present GPS system and Galileo system. This new technology is important for the implementation of a wide range of advanced location-based applications, including autonomous vehicle, quantum communication and next-gen mobile communication system. For long, the existing positioning systems have been considered to be unreliable in the urban settings owing to their weak signals and inaccurate positioning because radio signals are reflected or blocked by buildings.
Nuclear fusion:
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved the long-elusive breakthrough in harnessing the process that fuels the sun. This milestone moves us one significant step closer to powering our society with zero-carbon fusion energy. Fusion involves pushing together two nuclei of a lightweight element at a colossal speed, forcing them to fuse. The leftover mass is converted into an enormous amount of energy, according to Einstein’s formula E = mc2. The nuclear fusion has the potential to produce limitless, carbon-free energy, displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. The achievement will pave way for in clean power technology, help tackle climate change and energy security.
Ancient Grammatical Puzzle Solved After 2,500 Years:
A grammatical problem that has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD student at St John’s College. Rishi Rajpopa made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by ‘the father of linguistics’, Paṇini. The discovery makes it possible to ‘derive’ any Sanskrit word – to construct millions of grammatically correct words including ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’ – using Panini’s revered ‘language machine’ which is widely considered to be one of the great intellectual achievements in history. Leading Sanskrit experts have described Rajpopat’s discovery as ‘revolutionary’ and it could now mean that Paṇini’s grammar can be taught to computers for the first time.
Wormhole created using a Quantum Computer: W
ormholes are a very common topic when it comes to science fiction. The proper definition of a wormhole is ‘a rupture in space and time’ which is regarded as a ‘bridge between two remote regions in the universe’. While they are not existent in physical space, a group of researchers of the California Institute of Technology claim that they have created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space. The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole.
First images of black hole in our galaxy:
Astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Although, one cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The view also captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. The black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from the Earth, and it appears as a donut in the sky.
-Team ScienceNow
