Top 10 Biggest Scientific Discoveries of 2022
#10: Brain Cells Playing Video Games
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We’ve come a long way in manufacturing human organs in the lab. And that includes brain cells. Scientists at Cortical Labs in Melbourne created a mini-brain by growing human and mouse brain cells, and connected it to a game of Pong via electrodes. The ‘brain’ was provided with information as to where the ball was in relation to the paddles. In 5 minutes it had learned how to play - albeit not very well. Its rate of contact was much better than just random chance though. Cortical has called it the first ''sentient'' lab-grown brain. Insert your own Skynet joke here.
#9: A New Galaxy
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On April 7th, 2022 astronomers at the University of Tokyo reported the discovery of high-redshift galaxy HD1. Based on the galaxy’s redshift, HD1 is estimated to have formed some 13.787 billion years ago and currently sits at a present proper distance of 33.288 billion light-years from earth. This makes HD1 one of the oldest and farthest galaxies in our observable universe. And we all know what that means. Whatever has happened in HD1, it would have occurred a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
#8: 30,000-Year-Old Baby Woolly Mammoth
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For most of us, the last baby woolly mammoth we saw was Peaches in the third installment of the “Ice Age” series. Unless, of course, you’re miner Travis Delawski who, while mining for gold, came across a mummified animal in the permafrost of Canada’s Yukon territory. The animal was later confirmed to be a 30,000 year old baby woolly mammoth - so well preserved that it still had identifiable toenails, hair, skin and a trunk. While the find is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of 2022, for Dr. Dan Shugar, a science professor involved in the research, it was “the most exciting scientific thing I have ever been a part of”.
#7: Human Brain Cells Transplanted into Rats
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Rats feature in many experiments, surprisingly because of their intelligence and physiological similarities to humans! Those similarities just became even stronger. An article published in Nature in October of 2022 announced that scientists had successfully transplanted human neurons into the brains of newborn rats. Scientists monitored the rats and saw the human cells grow, connect with the rat’s brain cells and actually begin to lead and guide their actions. Researchers are using these experiments in an attempt to learn more about various disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
#6: Footprints from the Ice Age
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Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are thought to have arrived in North America via a land bridge from Asia, and by between 12,000 to 14,000 years ago had spread out across North and South America. In the summer of 2022 scientists announced the discovery of 88 fossilized footprints in Utah riverbeds, dating back 12,000 years. This places the people who left the footprints at the end of the last ice age. Even more significantly, it means that they were in the region over 7,500 years earlier than we had previously thought. These were only the second ever ice age human prints found in the United States - the first ones were discovered in 2021.
#5: The First Image of Our Own Galaxy’s Black Hole
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In 2019, we got our first image of a black hole, located in the Messier 87 galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth. Only on May 12th 2022, however, did we get to see the black hole in the center of our own galaxy. Astronomers produced the image using the Event Horizon Telescope, and it confirms what they had already believed: that the object Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole. It shows the light that’s bent by gravity around the black hole that our own solar system is spinning around with many others.
#4: Can We Knock an Asteroid Off Its Orbit?
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There are two ways to stop a large asteroid from hitting earth and causing a mass-extinction event. The most obvious is of course to find a team of deep core drillers, train them to be astronauts, and send them to plant a nuclear bomb inside. But if they aren’t available, there is another way to save the planet. In September, NASA executed their Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART - smashing a small spacecraft into Dimorphos, the minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos, altering its orbit. As the mission’s system engineer put it, “our first planetary defense test was a success.”
#3: A Lot of CO2
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The Earth has a natural climate cycle. But this isn’t it. The planet is warming at a rate not seen in at least 10,000 years. The sudden increase corresponds to industrialization, which has released an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, trapping heat. In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that there is now 50% more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than in pre-industrial times - an amount not seen since the Pliocene Climatic Optimum over 4 million years ago. We’re seeing the effects in places like Greenland, where scientists have reported that warmer ocean waters are causing the territory to lose 250 billion metric tons of ice yearly.
#2: The Structure of Everything
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Acquired by Google in 2014, DeepMind is a British AI company and research lab. You might remember them as the company who created the AlphaGo program that defeated one of the best professional Go players in the world in 2016. While impressive, that’s nothing compared to what their AlphaFold program has done. Protein folding is essentially the prediction of protein structures using the sequence of its amino acids, and yes, it’s as complicated as it sounds. But, in July of 2022 DeepMind let it be known that AlphaFold had derived the structures of over 200 million proteins. If you think that sounds like a lot, it is. In fact, it's pretty much every protein we know of.
#1: A Detailed View of the Distant Universe
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Just seven months after the James Webb Telescope was launched into space, the first images were released. And they were amazing. The telescope revealed new details in known structures, such as The Pillars of Creation. It also peered deep into the cosmos, presenting the highest resolution image of the early universe ever taken. The images allowed scientists to view galaxies over 13 billion years old, including what may be the earliest and most distant galaxy ever observed, CEERS-93316. It also detected water in the spectrum of one gas giant exoplanet, WASP-96b, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of another, WASP 39b - the first confirmed detection of carbon dioxide on a planet outside our Solar System.
