The ten biggest scientific advances in 2020 according to science

Advance of the year: vaccine against covid-19
It has been a year since Chinese authorities reported a cluster of mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan. A little over a week before the new year, it was established that it was a new coronavirus, from the same family as the sars virus but also the common cold virus. A few days later, a survey of the genome of the new virus was published publicly for everyone on the specialized site virological.org. It was the beginning of the race for a covid-19 vaccine.

There were no vaccines against other coronaviruses and new vaccines can take many years to develop. Pharmaceutical companies and research groups around the world used knowledge from other vaccine developments. Some also tried entirely new techniques for their potential vaccines. At best, it could take 12 to 18 months, experts said at the time.

But there were no guarantees. It is one thing to develop a vaccine in the laboratory, but it must also show that it is safe and effective when used by humans. It only took 42 days from the publication of the virus genome until the first candidate vaccine began to be tested in humans. Others were not far behind. The research steps ran in parallel, and during the fall, several candidate vaccines transitioned to phase 3, when investigating whether the vaccine works under real-world conditions.

Most expected a protective effect of at least 70 percent. When the vaccine results from Pfizer and Biontech were presented, the protective effect was an unmatched 95 percent. The modern vaccine was almost as effective, 94.1 percent. The Astra Zeneca and Oxford University vaccines appear to provide less protection, but there is still some ambiguity.

We now have a vaccine approved in the EU and more are on the way. It has gone faster than anyone would have expected. We still don’t know everything about the new vaccines. But this advance shows that it is possible to develop vaccines in a short time when researchers, pharmaceutical companies, authorities and governments collaborate. It can also help us with other disease outbreaks. Now the challenge is to produce doses and vaccinate all those in need around the world.

AI solves the mystery of proteins
Deepmind’s Alphafold 2 program solved one of the greatest challenges in biology: figuring out the shape of a protein. Proteins are chains of amino acids and the way the chain is folded determines how a protein works. It is expensive and can take years to measure the three-dimensional shape. In the CASP, Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction contest, Alphafold received an average of 92.4 on a 100 point scale, where a result of at least 90 is required for the program to be practically useful.

Read more: After 50 years: artificial intelligence solves the mystery of the shape of proteins

Crispr cures diseases
The Gene Saxon Crispr / Cas9 was named Science Breakthrough of the Year 2015 by Science, and this year it awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. Researchers from CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have now shown that the technology can be used to treat inherited blood diseases, beta-thalassemia and sickle cell anemia, which are due to a single gene mutation. After 17 months, patients have no symptoms. But the treatment is expensive: at least $ 1 million per patient.

Read more: Maria Gunther: In the end, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna received their well-deserved Nobel Prize

Most Reliable Predictions of Climate Change
Climate sensitivity indicates how much the earth’s average temperature increases if the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere doubles. If it is low, the soil heats up slowly. If it is high, the weather can disappear quickly. According to 1979 calculations, the climate sensitivity is between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees. This year, researchers from the World Climate Research Program have obtained a more exact value: between 2.6 and 3.9 degrees. Since the 19th century, the carbon dioxide content has increased from 280 to 415 parts per million. So we are halfway to a duplication.

Read more: How can we know that we are affecting the climate?

The source of the radio flashes revealed
Astronomers have recorded radio flashes (short, strong pulses of radio waves of unknown origin) since 2007. The mystery was solved when the Chime radio telescope saw a radio flash from a magnet, a neutron star with an unusually strong magnetic field. .

The oldest hunting scenes in the world.
In December 2019, researchers showed that paintings of hunting scenes and people with animal heads on cave walls on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are around 44,000 years old, based on deposits in the images. It is 4,000 years older than all previously known figurative art.

Read more: Karin Bojs: The cave paintings of Asia arrived before those of Europe

Diversity researcher
After a black bird watcher in New York’s Central Park in May asked a white woman to tie up her dog, she called police to say that “an African American man threatens my life,” it was only a few days before. researchers launched the hashtag # BlackBirdersWeek (Black Bird Week) on Twitter. Others, such as #BlackInAstro week, #BlackBotanistsWeek, #BlackInNeuro and #BlackInChem, followed to support each other and demonstrate that racism can also be a problem in the research world.

How Some People Cope With HIV
HIV is a so-called retrovirus: it builds its genome in the host cell’s DNA and hides from attacks by the immune system and antiviral drugs. There are 38 million people infected with HIV, and half of them can survive without drugs for years without having measurable levels of the virus in their blood. A study of 64 of these individuals shows why: in them, the genome of the HIV virus is integrated into chromosomal parts that are rarely used. Therefore, the virus cannot create copies of itself.

Superconductivity at room temperature
Superconductors conduct current completely without resistance. The effect was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, at 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius). Since the 1980s, researchers have achieved superconductivity at increasingly higher temperatures. This year, a research group managed to obtain a material of sulfur, hydrogen and carbon at very high pressure to become a superconductor at 14 degrees: almost room temperature. Superconductors are used, for example, for surveys with magnetic cameras and to distribute electricity without loss.

Smart birds
Birds may have greater mental abilities than we think. A group of researchers discovered that owl and pigeon brains are organized like our neocortex, the outermost part of the cerebral cortex where the most developed behaviors and cognitive abilities are found. Another research group measured the activity in the brains of black crows that performed a task on a certain signal. Brain activity existed regardless of whether the bird did what it was supposed to do. Researchers interpret it as birds creating a mental image, as a form of consciousness.