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Beyond the vaccine: the great scientific advances of the year that went unnoticed by the covid

2020-12-30T23:41:14.311Z


The solution to the enigma of extraterrestrial signals and the medical revolution against hereditary diseases are some of the discoveries of the year 2020


The desperate search for vaccines and treatments against covid has overshadowed the rest of the great scientific advances of 2020, now rescued by specialized journals such as

Nature

and

Science

.

Some of these achievements have already made a dent in

Matter

, such as the discovery of suspected signs of life on Venus, the launch of several robotic missions to Mars, the recovery of sand from an asteroid thanks to a Japanese probe and the prediction of the structure. of proteins, one of the most important problems in biology.

Other historic scientific advances, however, went more unnoticed.

Here are some of them.

No aliens behind the radio blasts

On April 28, 2020, a Canadian radio telescope detected a rapid radio burst, a type of phenomenon with high energy and a few milliseconds in duration that has puzzled scientists since their first observation in 2007. More than a hundred have already been reported. these outbursts, feeding in the collective imagination the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations are trying to communicate with Earth.

The actual explanation is less fanciful.

On November 4, an international science team linked the April blast to a magnetar, a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field.

Alberto Castro-Tirado and Youdong Hu, two researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, participated in the discovery.

There were no aliens behind the radio blasts.

A revolution against hereditary diseases

One of the main scientific news of the year was known just a few weeks ago and was overshadowed by the second wave of the covid pandemic.

The multinational companies CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex announced the success of the revolutionary CRISPR gene editing technique in the experimental treatment of a dozen people with inherited diseases.

The therapy, called CTX001, involves removing stem cells from a patient's blood, correcting genetic errors in the laboratory, and returning them to the body.

Seven of the patients treated have beta thalassemia, a blood disorder that causes the body to have less hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells.

The other three patients suffer from sickle cell anemia, a disease that deforms red blood cells.

All 10 people have responded well to the treatment, based on the pioneering research of the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the American Jennifer Doudna, winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Towards definitive HIV treatment

It is one of the great enigmas of medicine.

0.5% of the 38 million people living with the AIDS virus maintain undetectable levels of viral load without the need for treatment.

In August, a team of scientists from the US illuminated the molecular mechanisms of these people, known as elite controllers.

The researchers - led by virologist Xu Yu, of the Massachusetts General Hospital - even went so far as to speak of a "functional cure" for one of the women studied, Loreen Willenberg, diagnosed in 1992. Willenberg, 66, would be the first person known whose immune system naturally and completely controls HIV.

The study, published in the journal

Nature

, opens new avenues to seek a definitive treatment against the virus.

Superconducting at room temperature

Physicist Ranga Dias speaks of the "holy grail", of a material that could "change the world as we know it."

It is one of the great dreams of physics: to find a superconductor for electricity at room temperature, which would allow the design of ultra-efficient motors and transmission networks, without energy losses.

Dias's team has come this year closer than anyone before, with a material rich in hydrogen, sulfur and carbon, subjected to a pressure more than two million times greater than that exerted by the Earth's atmosphere at sea level.

The material is superconducting at around 14 degrees Celsius, but such high pressures are required that applications are still far away.

The trailer made the cover of the journal

Nature

in October.

The brain of birds

The common crow, a bird up to one meter in wingspan with metallic black plumage, is known to ornithologists for its extremely wide range of sounds, from the low kraar to the klok-klok-klok that it emits in flight.

This year, these corvids have been the protagonists of an experiment that, once again, tests human exceptionalism, the belief that people are the only animal species with certain capacities.

Neuroscientist Andreas Nieder and his colleagues at the University of Tübingen (Germany) trained two crows to move their heads when they saw a certain sequence of lights on a screen.

Electrodes attached to their brains suggested a kind of "sensory awareness," a rudimentary form of human self-awareness, according to the scientists, whose discovery made the cover of the journal

Science

.

The climate future of the planet

More than 40 years ago, in 1979, a team of scientists met in the American town of Woods Hole to try to predict the future of planet Earth.

His forecast has been repeated since then: if CO2 emissions double compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature will rise between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees.

This year, another group of scientists has refined the prediction with the knowledge accumulated in recent decades: the temperature would rise between 2.6 and 3.9 degrees in this scenario of uncontrolled gases, according to the new analysis, coordinated by the World Program for Climate Investigations.

If emissions continue their trajectory, the moment of doubling could come in about 70 years, according to the organization.

The temperature has already risen 1.2 degrees from the times before the Industrial Revolution.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-12-30

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