Great discoveries about our past, and breakthroughs crucial for our future: the decade that is ending has been rich in scientific terms. From the Higgs Boson to the first photo of a black hole, passing by the advances in gene therapy, an overview, not exhaustive, of landmark finds.
July 4, 2012: the Higgs Boson "flashed"
The first discovery is undoubtedly the most important, but also the most annoying, because the least understandable (and between us it is not very serious, because it has no impact on our daily lives): I I named the discovery in July 2012 of the Higgs Boson, a missing link in the standard theoretical model of formation ... of the Universe, just that. Concretely, if we can speak thus in particle physics, CERN scientists in Geneva (Switzerland) have managed, by reconstructing the exact conditions of the immediate after Big Bang, to "trap" THE basic particle , the one that has disintegrated into a set of energy particles, the one that is therefore responsible for the mass of everything around us. This experiment took place in the LHC, the great Hadron collider, which does not mean anything for those who know neither what a collider nor what a hadron: it is a gigantic 27 km circumference underground particle accelerator located between France and Switzerland. A large closed tube in the shape of a ring in which we bombard protons to generate and study absolutely titanic collisions that littered the beginnings of our Universe. This elementary particle, called "particle of God", was predicted in 1964 by several scientists, including the British Peter Higgs, but also the French Robert Brout, whose name did not remain in posterity…
August 17, 2012, birth of the CRISPR mechanism
Another crucial discovery, and again Cocorico. At the end of August 2012, French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier and her American colleague Jennifer Doudna describe in the journal Science a revolutionary new tool for modifying the genome. Called CRISPR-Cas9 (which is pronounced as it is written…), these are molecular scissors capable of cutting DNA at a very specific place, in order to make genetic modifications.
It is a revolution: we can now, much more simply than before and without incurring exorbitant costs, try to correct genetic mutations, and hope to treat rare diseases. A huge patent battle ensued with competing scientists, with billions of dollars behind.
November 12, 2014: we put a robot on a comet!
Never two without three: our third scientific feat of the decade still carries, among other things, the tricolor colors. This is not a discovery but a feat: after 10 years in space, the European probe Rosetta drops this November 12; before the eyes of the whole world, a little robot, Philae, on a comet! The operation is incredible, and the missed landing shortens the life of the robot, but it still has time to do essential drilling. Coupled with the gas samples taken by the probe, they will provide astronomical amounts of data on the origin of comets, bodies made of dust and ice that are suspected of being involved in the appearance of life on Earth. It was THE scientific breakthrough of 2014.
September 10, 2015: Homo Naledi, who are you?
Here is a discovery that poses more questions than it answers. Based on the study of the bones of 15 hominids found in a cave in South Africa, international researchers decided to "create" a new category in the Homo family: Homo naledi. This distant cousin would be 2 million years old and would therefore be at the junction between Australopithecus, of which it has the small brain, and the primate of the genus homo, our ancestor, of which it has hands and feet.
September 28, 2015: water on Mars?
What will NASA announce? This September 28, the whole world is suspended from a communication promised by the American space agency, which has just taken care to announce a few hours in advance the imminent officialization of a great discovery. At a press conference, NASA announces that it has discovered evidence of the presence of liquid water on the planet Mars. It was an observation satellite equipped with spectrometers which detected the traces of runoff left by this mixture of water and salts. The hypothesis, repeatedly reinforced by previous Martian missions - three years earlier, the Curiosity robot had fallen on pebbles, a mineral form that only exists in the event of runoff - would therefore be confirmed. New robots are about to be sent to the red planet to find out more. Because where there has been water, there has potentially been life.
February 11, 2016: gravitational waves caught up by the patrol
Decades of being suspected, guessed, tracked. And finally, at the beginning of 2016, a team of scientists announces a crucial news for physics: the first direct observation of gravitational waves, powerful waves generated by overpowering events and which cross the cosmos at the speed of light by contracting space-time, just like the fine lines generated by a jet of stone distort the surface of a body of water. But smaller. Much, much smaller. We are talking about infinitesimal distortions that we have been able to detect thanks to new infernal machines, the LIGO and the VIRGO, kinds of seismographs responsible for detecting - thanks to lasers traveling in long tubes - the slightest vibration from space . The small wavelets detected came from the collision of a black hole 1.4 billion years ago. Einstein, who predicted them 50 years earlier, was therefore right. And that's good, because all physics today is based on his theories ...
By the way, what are gravitational waves?
August 30, 2017, green light for CART-Cells
Difficult to give a precise date to this breakthrough: we choose by default that of the green light assigned to it by the American health administration. What are we talking about? From the CAR-T Cells technique, a treatment based on revolutionary immunotherapy to attack in particular cancerous tumors. The principle is to use the immune system, by modifying the genome, to prevent and treat a complex disease. But still? We use T lymphocytes from the organism, whose genetic code is modified in the laboratory in order to equip them with an antigen receptor, and we reinject them into the organism. Here they are armed to detect and kill cancer cells. This very promising type of allogeneic therapy has since also been authorized in Europe, and several treatments have been developed.
March 4, 2019: a fatal weapon against Ebola?
While the Ebola virus has still made thousands of deaths in Africa this decade, it concludes with an extremely promising news, announced in March 2019 in the journal Natural Structural and Molecular Biology: the discovery of an antibody capable of effectively fighting against the three strains of the virus affecting humans. Until then, a relatively effective experimental vaccine had been developed against one of these strains, the so-called "Zaire" strain, responsible for the majority of deaths in recent years. But this antibody, discovered in a survivor of the terrible epidemic that raged in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, is also effective against the two other strains transmissible to humans, rarer but extremely lethal. If it is confirmed that it is indeed the Achilles heel of the virus which was discovered, the way will then be opened to eradicate, via a vaccine, this evil which has killed 11,000 people in Africa.
April 10, 2019: click, click, here is a black hole
A dark circle floating in the middle of a flaming halo. And nothing around. Albert Einstein theorized their existence more than a century ago: since April 10, we finally know what a black hole looks like. Astronomers from all over the world, gathered in the Event Horizon Telescope project, have indeed unveiled the first "photo" of one of these phenomena. Why "photo" in quotes? Because these celestial objects exert a gravity such that nothing can escape from it, not even the particles of light. Event Horizon astronomers therefore bet on contrasts with the immediate environment of black holes, because matter emits light when it is absorbed by these monsters. Scientists had pointed eight telescopes around the world at the largest black holes seen from Earth. And it is the central black hole of the galaxy M87, about 50 million light years from Earth, which has proven to be the most photogenic. It took eight months to recover all the data, and a year more to transcribe this data into a photo. Which constitute at this stage the most solid proof of their existence…
April 10, 2019: the Homo family continues to grow
The news went unnoticed, overshadowed by the previous one, dated the same day. And yet, to identify two species of hominids in less than five years is not trivial. Four years after the discovery of Homo naledi, paleoanthropologists announced last spring in the journal Nature the discovery of a new human species, which lived on an island in the Philippines, more than 50,000 years ago. Baptized Homo luzonensis, this cousin, "identified" from 13 fossil remains, a mixture of primitive and modern characters, and would not be our direct ancestor. He could have lived with Homo Sapiens, whose first remains date back to less than 40,000 years.
