From vaccines to climate change, from brain-computer interfaces to solar system exploration, science played an instrumental role in 2021 as we continued to fight COVID-19 and came together to break down boundaries and address common challenges faced by all human beings. The Innovation editorial team summarizes the following scientific events that have helped shape 2021, which gave us hopes, tears, or a glimpse into the future.
Combating COVID-19
It remained a top priority for the global scientific community to help combat COVID-19 in 2021. The World Health Organization reported in November that five million lives had been lost to the novel coronavirus, making it one of the deadliest viruses in history. Into the second year of the pandemic, a number of variants emerged as mutations of the original SARS-CoV-2 strain. Among them, the Delta variant became the most prevalent and led to more infections and more serious illnesses, joined later by the Omicron variant, which proved to be even more infectious than Delta. Researchers have developed mRNA, inactivated, recombinant, and other types of vaccines, neutralizing antibodies, as well as oral antivirus drugs to effectively reduce severe illnesses, hospitalization, and death rates. More rigorous efforts are needed in 2022 to end the pandemic and get life back on track.
Sampling the solar system
The three probes to Mars—the United States’ Mars 2020, China’s Tianwen-1, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter—arrived at the red planet earlier this year. As China became the world’s second country to land on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover started collecting samples to be returned to Earth in a decade from now. Rocks brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 mission from the moon revealed that there were still volcanic activities on our nearest neighbor 2 billion years ago, a time by which scientists previously thought it should have cooled off. After preliminary analyses of samples returned by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft from a near-Earth asteroid named Ryugu, scientists believed they were among the most primordial materials available to laboratories on Earth. The Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to touch the sun: it entered the sun’s upper atmosphere in April and sampled particles and magnetic fields from there for the first time in human history.
Climate change conundrum
2021 was a year of weather extremes across the globe, from megafires and tornadoes in the United States to deadly floods in western Europe and China. Climate researchers continued to find solid and highly alarming facts about global warming. The Arctic temperature has been rising four times as fast as the planet as a whole, and our Earth is likely to reach the crucial 1.5°C warming limit in the early 2030s. At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the two-week-long negotiations over emissions commitments, carbon trading, and reparations for climate damage did not seem to be enough to put the world on track to avert a climate crisis. Looking ahead, key climate solutions include developing technologies for higher energy efficiency, wider renewable energy use, and innovative pathways for carbon neutrality. Mitigation measures beyond the technical realm are also much needed.
Predicting protein structures
Software driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can now solve and predict the accurate structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Researchers from the UK-based company DeepMind reported that they had used AlphaFold to precisely predict the structure of about 200,000 human proteomes (98.5% of human proteins). AlphaFold and alternative software, such as RoseTTAFold, led by scientists from the University of Washington in Seattle, are also working to predict which of the proteins work together and how they interact. Compared with the traditional practice of months-long laboratory experiments for cracking a protein’s structure, AI is revolutionizing the landscape of medicine and drug discovery. Both AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold have made their databases publicly available to accelerate research discovery and innovation around the world.
Turning waste into wealth
Scientists from China reported a new route to convert carbon dioxide, a typical greenhouse gas, to starch. Using a “building block strategy” based on chemical and biological catalytic modules, researchers created artificial starch with significantly less steps compared with the starch naturally produced in crops via photosynthesis, and the team did so eight times more efficiently than nature can. The researchers claimed that the technology is up for scale production at the industrial level, which could have major implications for food security, farmland conservation, and climate change, given the essential role starch plays in industrial manufacturing and our daily life.
Fusion for future
The year 2021 witnessed major breakthroughs in nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion can be achieved by either magnetic confinement or inertial confinement, but both routes face the ignition challenge: reactions must produce more energy than they need to get started, so they become self-sustaining. In May, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak set a new record after it ran at 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, four times longer than the previous record holder in South Korea. In August, the US National Ignition Facility used 1.9-megajoule lasers to achieve a landmark energy production of 1.3 megajoule, the highest ever recorded with the inertial confinement route. Scientists believed that enough heat was generated in the reactions to spread through the compressed fuel in this experiment. These advances are yet another important step toward delivering the promise of nuclear fusion as an ultimate solution to energy problems on Earth.
Big telescopes for big science
Three decades in the making, the 10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope finally lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana on December 25 to look for the first lights in the universe. With China joining the campaign to build large science facilities for fundamental research, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) on the Tibetan Plateau captured the highest energy light particle ever, arriving from a star-forming region 4,600 light years away. LHAASO also detected cosmic particle accelerators that are hundreds of times more powerful than the ones physicists have built on Earth. Meanwhile, from a basin in southwest China, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope (the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Apherical radio Telescope, FAST) observed an episode of more than a thousand fast radio bursts, offering new insights into one of the most mysterious phenomena in the radio sky.
Dragon Man mystery
The skull of Homo longi, or Dragon Man, recovered from Harbin in northeast China once again shook up the human family tree. As one of the most complete early human fossils ever known, it featured large eye sockets, thick brow ridges, and oversized teeth, belonging to a male that died at least 146 thousand years ago. Though scientists still need to agree on where to fit it on the branches of the human family tree, those involved in the study believed that Dragon Man may be more closely related to Homo sapiens (our species) than it is to Neanderthals, making it one of the closest relatives of modern humans.
Brain-computer interfaces
The brain-computer interface (BCI) technology made significant progress in the past year, especially for invasive BCIs that directly place micro-electrode arrays inside a brain. A video released by Neuralink showed a monkey playing video games with his mind—and a microchip implanted in his brain. Also with a brain implant, a team led by Stanford University enabled a paralyzed man to write texts just by thinking of the letters. While BCI technologies will bring us great convenience in the future, researchers need to better understand how the brain works, improve recording and decoding technologies, develop highly integrated chips, and, very importantly, figure out how to make the technologies ethical and responsible.
Open access and beyond
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that the free and immediate access to all publications and data has never been more important. In 2021, more organizations moved toward Open Access (OA). The European Commission launched its own platform Open Research Europe in March to facilitate the publication of research funded under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe across all subject areas. Starting January 1, 2022, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US will officially join Plan S and require all laboratory heads to publish their research papers and make the papers freely available on the publication date. This past year also marked the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which defined OA for the first time.
Published Online: January 1, 2022