Like all of us, science has had a tough few years. The coronavirus pandemic has swamped the news, and the most pressing scientific discoveries have become subjects of political controversy. There didn’t seem to be much to celebrate or even think about outside of the pandemic. But researchers in hundreds of fields continued their life’s work. And now that the cloud cast by COVID-19 over daily life has started to lift somewhat, it’s clear that there have been some pretty amazing scientific discoveries this year.
They’ve changed our understanding of everything from prehistoric history to our future in space, to why humans age, what the brain is capable of, and why the toll of climate change is even worse than we realize. currently believe so. Read on to learn more about the 10 most amazing scientific discoveries of 2022 so far.
When miners in Canada discovered an animal frozen in the permafrost, they quickly called in experts. None of them were prepared for what emerged: University of Calgary researchers were stunned when it was determined to be a baby female woolly mammoth, around 30,000 years old, with perfectly preserved nails, skin, trunk and hair – the best preserved woolly mammoth. never found in North America.
“It’s as close as you can get to meeting a living mammoth,” the school said. in a press release. “It was amazing to think that it was an animal that died so long ago, but here it is, so well preserved that it still has hair on it. Frankly, it was mind-blowing,” said Dr. Dan Shugar, science teacher. at University. He called it “the most exciting science thing I’ve ever been involved in.”
A study published in August found that scientists had found 88 fossilized footprints belonging to adults and children, probably dating back 12,000 years, in shallow riverbeds in Utah. This is only the second set of human Ice Age traces to be identified in the United States (the first was in 2021).
They suggest that humans occupied the area 7,500 years earlier than previously thought, which could upend our current understanding of human evolution. “Now that we have this human element, the history of the first peoples becomes more real,” David Madsen, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada-Reno, told CNN. “There is more funding available, there is more interest, there will be more recovery.”
NASA crashed a spacecraft, known as the DART, directly onto an asteroid in September. Their goal: to see if such a collision could knock the asteroid out of orbit, something that could protect Earth from an apocalyptic asteroid strike, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. The $325 million craft – the size of a vending machine – was headed for the asteroid Dimorphos, about 6.8 million kilometers from Earth.
It slammed into space rock at 14,000 miles per hour and was destroyed instantly. The mission appears to have succeeded, pushing Dimorphos out of its previous orbit. “As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” said Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), after the interview. ‘impact. “I think Earthlings should sleep better. Absolutely, I will.”
Australian researchers say they grew brain cells in a lab that learned to play the vintage video game Pong. The “mini-brains” they created can sense and react to their environment. Dr Brett Kagan said his team had created the first lab-grown “sentient” brain. “We couldn’t find a better term to describe the device,” he said. “It is able to take information from an external source, process it, and then respond to it in real time.”
In the experiment, the researchers grew human brain cells from mouse stem cells and embryos into a mini-brain made up of 800,000 cells. They connected the mini-brain to Pong via electrodes that indicated which side the ball was on and how far from the racket it was. By “watching” the video game, the cells produced electrical activity, the scientists said, which told the cells whether they were hitting the ball or not.
The mini-brain learned to play the game in five minutes, the researchers said. He frequently missed the ball, but his connect rate was higher than chance.
This is called “hidden consciousness”, a state in which the brain reacts to the outside world with some understanding, but the body remains unresponsive. American Scientist reported that up to 15-20% of patients who appear to be in a coma exhibit this type of internal awareness when monitored with technology capable of measuring brain activity. This changes scientists’ understanding of comas and other unresponsive states.
Studies have shown that people whose Secret Awareness is detected early have a greater chance of full and functional recovery. “It’s very important for the field,” one neuroscientist said of the first major study of the phenomenon. “The understanding that as the brain recovers, one in seven people could be aware and aware, very aware, of what is being said about them, and that this applies every day, in every care unit intensive, it’s gigantic.”
The world’s second-largest ice cap, also known as Greenland, appears to be disappearing faster than scientists thought. Warming ocean waters and rising air temperatures have accelerated the melting of Arctic lands. According to a study published in the journal nature geoscienceGreenland loses about 250 billion metric tons of ice each year.
These losses accelerate over time. The warm air melts the surface of the ice sheet and the runoff is deposited in the oceans. Scientists say this stirs up the waters, causing the oceans to heat up and further warm the waters that touch the ice. This causes glaciers to melt faster. It “could raise ocean levels to the point that even New York and San Francisco will have to prepare for a new normal,” MarketWatch reported. “
Scientists are particularly concerned about the effects that melting ice caps could have on some coastal cities in the United States, such as New York; Washington D.C.; San Francisco; and New Orleans. These popular metropolitan areas could become underwater cities if the ice caps melt enough to raise sea levels significantly.”
The European Space Agency says there are more than 30,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the solar system. They are space rocks, sometimes enormous, which revolve around the sun on trajectories relatively close to Earth’s orbit. And 1,425 of them have a “non-zero chance” of hitting the ground.
Of the 30,039 NEAs, approximately 10,000 are over 460 feet in diameter and 1,000 are over 3,280 feet in diameter. The 1,425 that have a “non-zero chance of impact” are being watched closely by astronomers. Perhaps comforting: On average, Earth is hit by a large asteroid every 5,000 years and a civilization-ending asteroid every one million years, according to NASA.
In October, CBS News reported that one billion crabs had disappeared from Alaska in the past two years, and experts aren’t sure why. This represents 90% of their population. The decline is so severe that fish and game officials have canceled the upcoming winter crab season for the first time in state history, and the economy is set to take a $200 million hit. . Moreover, scientists fear that this is a worrying sign for the global ecosystem.
Illness is a potential explanation. Climate change is another. NOAA says Alaska is the fastest warming US state and crabs need cold water to survive. Miranda Westphal, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said that between 2018 and 2019 the Bering Sea “was extremely warm and the snow crab population kind of huddled together in the sea.” freshest water she could find,” she said. When the water heats up, their metabolism increases, prompting them to eat more. “They probably starved to death and there wasn’t enough food.”
In a study published in the journal Nature Last October, scientists injected human nerve cells into the brains of rats. They discovered that these neurons continued to grow, forming connections with their host’s brain cells and guiding their behavior. These cells eventually grew to make up one-sixth of animal brains.
“The ultimate goal of this work is to begin to understand the characteristics of complex illnesses like schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder,” Harvard neuroscientist Paola Arlotta told NPR. But some scientists are nervous. When does a rat implanted with human cells stop being a rat? And could the process create, swallow, highly capable “super rats”? “This raises the possibility that you’re creating an enhanced rat that might have higher cognitive abilities than a regular rat,” said Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist at the National University of Singapore.
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Scientists say they have found evidence that men age faster than women and that men are biologically four years older than women when they turn 50. This “aging gap” also exists between men and women in their twenties. Finnish researchers examined 2,240 twins in two age groups: those aged 21 to 42 and those aged 50 to 76. Using the epigenetic clock, a biochemical test used to measure age, the scientists compared each person’s chronological age to their age. the epigenetic clock says they are biologically.
Using the clocks, the researchers found that men were biologically older than women, and the difference increased with calendar age, even when controlling for lifestyle. The study author said that when comparing male-female twins, the man was about a year older biologically than his sister in her 20s and four years older in her 50s. “These couples grew up in the same environment and share half of their genes,” she said. “The difference may be explained, for example, by sex differences in genetic factors and the beneficial effects of estrogen, a female sex hormone, on health.”
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