Great scientific advances of 2020 beyond the fight against the pandemic

By 16/01/2021 Portal

The year 2020, the year without hugs, was not sterile in terms of scientific advances. Although the scientific community focused its technological efforts on controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, it also facilitated true scientific revolutions in other fields. We review some of them.

The year had not yet taken off when American scientists created living machines (biobots) for the first time, made from animal cells and capable of performing very simple tasks. A type of gadget that belongs to a new generation, since strictly speaking they are neither robots nor living beings. To develop them, the researchers used two types of cells from the African clawed frog as bricks, those from its heart and those from its skin.

When we found ourselves at the halfway point of 2020, there was a spectacular advance in artificial intelligence, a dystopian and futuristic mix somewhere between The Matrix and Terminator. A mathematical model was created called GPT-3 that, among other things, was capable of programming basic code as if it were a developer and translating English texts into legal language, without needing to be given any pattern to do so.

Polio-free Africa
During the summer holidays, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Africa was officially free of wild polio, a campaign against the poliovirus that began three decades ago.

Thanks to this titanic effort, at this time there are only cases of this infectious disease in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If polio were eradicated in these geographical areas, it would become, after smallpox, the second human infection to be eradicated.

While the world was facing the pandemic, two groups of researchers, independently, surprised public opinion by developing a computer capable of performing quantum operations at temperatures up to fifteen times higher than those achieved up to that point. This milestone laid the foundations for quantum chips to work together with the electronic systems that control them, since until then it was only possible to carry out quantum operations at temperatures close to absolute zero (273 degrees below zero).

From artificial meat to a brain implant
At the end of last year, the sale of artificial meat became a reality when the American company Eat Just was authorized to sell "chicken sandwiches" manufactured in a laboratory. Despite this important technological advance, the texture and flavor of a good cooked steak is still far from being achieved.

Also in December, scientists from the Dutch Institute of Neuroscience (NIN) announced with great fanfare that they had managed to develop a technology capable of restoring sight to the blind.

This group of experts built an implant that has worked so far only in monkeys and that is capable of detecting artificially induced patterns in the brain from phosphenes and artificial pixels. Thanks to this technology, animals were able to distinguish points and lines in movements and even letters of the alphabet.

It was also last year when a golden ribbon was put on one of the greatest mysteries of biology: how to predict the three-dimensional shape that a protein acquires. This work was carried out by the London artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind and with it it will be possible, for example, to develop new drugs.

As the year 2020 entered its final stretch, the Japanese space agency confirmed that its space probe, Hayabusa 2, had brought back to Earth a time capsule, remains of the asteroid Ryugu that had remained almost intact since the formation of the solar system. now about 4.5 billion years ago.

The sand from this asteroid has become the most primitive material known to date and opens a new window to knowledge of the universe.

M. Jara

Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at the El Escorial Hospital (Madrid) and author of several popular books.