Versatile AI, artisan gene editing and a Martian cryptocurrency — 2018 looks to be a blazing year for science
With this year’s predicted breakthroughs building on the achievements of last year, we’re likely to see a leap forward in areas of space exploration, AI with human-like emotions, and even a new contender to steal Bitcoin’s crypto-crown, so fasten your seatbelts for a paradigm-blowing year!
Welcome to 2018! 🎉
Gene-editing trials for rare medical conditions
CRISPR genome editing has showed enormous promise ever since its inception five years ago, but its role in breakthrough scientific advances last year indicates that it has a lot more work to do in 2018. We may even see new techniques eclipsing CRISPR to make any DNA change with higher precision and efficiency.
In 2018, the stage is set for gene-editing clinical trials tackling a number of rare and tricky medical conditions including sickle cell anaemia and eye disease: in fact, US-based company Spark Therapeutics has just announced its launch of a one-time gene therapy to cure blindness caused by a rare retinal disease. If moves like these are successful, the next big challenge may not be faced by researchers but by the US healthcare system’s economic model. Given its reliance on the lifetime financial input of individuals suffering from chronic conditions requiring continuous medication, says Dr. Eric Topol, it, may not take kindly to the prospect of single-use, curative therapies.
Read the Sparrho Insight about the chemical hack that targets blindness.
AI adds more strings to its bow
Where 2017 saw strides in AI, 2018 will see leaps and bounds. Up until now, top-tier AI has remained highly specialised — a bot designed to beat humans at poker, for example, could do no other task nearly as well without being manually reconfigured.
However, Dr. Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, envisions the development of multipurpose AI systems able to win games, detect security threats, and converse with humans (though perhaps not all at the same time).
The march of the ‘caring robots’ begins
Dr. Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, predicts that 2018 will see robots able to pass the Turing Test for the first time:
“Robots have always seemed like the cavalry that’s called in to do the jobs that put the human body in danger,” she says. “But we have long had the fantasy that they would do more: that they would be our caring companions. And now our dream comes true. In 2018, sociable robots will be able to convince us that they are able to be empathetic by passing an emotional version of the Turing Test, a behavioral test we have taken as a measure of machine intelligence.”
Read our Insight about AI achieving emotional intelligence.
Private sector space race takes off
This year will see a new type of space race, as both Boeing and SpaceX compete to be the first commercial company to launch crewed flights up to the International Space Station from American soil. Both companies have been awarded Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contracts by NASA, which state that each must launch an uncrewed craft as a test run before sending their first crew into space. SpaceX’s first crewed launch date is in June, with Boeing following close behind in August — but the likelihood of technical setbacks will likely push launches further into the year.
Another one goes to Mars
Speaking of space, NASA is launching another spacecraft to Mars in May. Named InSight (that’s ‘Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport’), the lander will take a closer look at the geological evolution of the red planet by studying the composition of Mars’ core, mantle and crust, as well as watching out for ‘Marsquakes’ which could offer clues about the planet’s still-unknown internal geography.
And since they named it so, read our Insight about what it would take humanity to survive in space.
Milky Way gets 3D-mapped
Not to be outdone,the European Space Agency’s Gaia Mission — with a goal to three-dimensionally map our galaxy — will release its second catalogue charting our local stellar environment this April. Including precise distances to over a billion nearby stars, and the velocities of several million of them, the catalogue will give an update on what is already the most detailed picture of the Milky Way ever created, providing the data needed to tackle long-standing problems relating to its origin, structure and evolutionary history.
Check out our pinboard about 3D mapping the Earth’s geology.
And… new cryptos to de-throne Bitcoin?
If 2017 was the year of Bitcoin, 2018 will be the year of — every other cryptocurrency, it seems. That’s the prediction of business and emerging markets expert Kenneth Rapoza, who predicts that currently unknown, cheap currencies like Tron and NEO are only going to continue their rise into the stratosphere currently inhabited by the big names in crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ex-NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao goes one step further in his predictions, suggesting that Bitcoin or one of its successors could likely be the currency of choice on a human-inhabited Moon or Mars.
To recap: what were the major science stories of 2017? 🤔
LIGO picks up gravitational waves, October 2017
You couldn’t have missed it: the pioneering detection of gravitational waves rocked the world earlier this year, conclusively proving Einstein’s prediction that collisions between objects with huge masses would distort space-time itself. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that its detectors had picked up a gravitational echo of an 11-billion-year-old neutron star merger from 130 million light years away, a collision so great it birthed heavy metals like gold and platinum.
Read our very own Sparrho Hero Dr Miguel Zumalacarregui’s explanation of this awesome discovery.
CRISPR continued to push boundaries, Summer 2017
CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology — based on a natural defense mechanism of some very special bacteria — exploded back onto the headlines in 2017 after human embryos were genetically edited for the first time in history to remove a mutation. Although the technology’s other achievements may not have made headline news, they’re no less noteworthy: among others, scientists successfully used gene editing to completely extract HIV from a living organism, slowed the growth of cancerous cells by targeting a vital protein in cell division, and edited out Huntington’s disease from mice. And it looks like 2018 looks will be an even brighter year for CRISPR — read our prediction below.
Oldest ice core ever surfaced, August 2017
The record for the oldest ice ever drilled was smashed in 2017 by over 1.5 million years. A 2.7 million year old ice core extracted from the Allan Hills of Antarctica contained greenhouse gases from Earth’s ancient atmosphere, which can help point scientists towards the trigger for the early Ice Ages. When analysed, the precious sample revealed levels of carbon dioxide under 300 parts per million, findings that seem to contradict levels measured in fossils from shallow oceans. Should the results from the new sample hold up, “we have some work to do,” says Dr Yige Zhang, a paleoclimatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.
Ciao to Cassini, September 2017
In 2017 we said farewell to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a probe which orbited Saturn for 13 years before it finally plunged into the gas giant in September. Its death dive was intentional — scientists didn’t want to risk a collision with one of Saturn’s potentially habitable moons. Cassini not only provided us with stunning new images of Saturn, but also discovered jets of water erupting from the moon Enceladus, as well as locating alien oceans on Titan.
AI defeats humans at poker, March 2017
In a landmark achievement for artificial intelligence (AI), the “poker bot” DeepStack has, for the first time, defeated professional poker players in one-on-one games using an approach that researchers have likened to “gut feeling”. DeepStack is built on a new way to fine-tune its algorithms to avoid misleading data, allowing the bot to better learn from its mistakes — and thereby offering a “scalable way of dealing with complex information” that could one day help humans deal with imperfect information scenarios from house price negotiations to security challenges.
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