The landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars, the launch of a mission to hit an asteroid, and the discovery of almost 200 new planets outside the solar system were some of the big stories of the year. William Shatner, who played Captain James T Kirk in the television show "The Star Trek", made a flight to outside the edge of Earth's atmosphere in October 2021.
The New Shepard rocket was named after the first American in space, John Shepard, and operated by Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos was the first billionaire to make a space flight when he took off in a Virgin Galactic rocket nine days before New Shepard. A back-and-forth argument about whether or not he had been into space has been going on ever since. The Krmn line is 100 km above the surface that marks the edge of space. Bezos flew.
Why should we care about people who can afford their own spaceships?
Monica.
These voyages are significant technological developments. Why should we care about a few people who have been taken into space by wealthy individuals who can afford their own spaceship? What this represents for the future is the importance. Over the last decade or so, we have seen the development of individual private companies building satellites. Companies like Musk's SpaceX have their own rocket programmes and have won contracts from government agencies to carry out launches. The International Space Station has been carried out by the company.
Private enterprise taking this forward as long as it is monitored and regulated appropriately is a natural next step in space exploration. These flights are significant. Before space travel can move from government control to the private sector, there are a lot of new issues to be addressed.
The UN's International Civil Aviation Organisation oversees policies to ensure safe, secure, effective and fair access to the skies. The UN has an Office for Outer Space Affairs that is responsible for applying the Outer Space Treaty. The Outer Space Treaty, which came into force in 1967, is almost solely concerned with the activities of governments, not private individuals or companies, and so should be reexamined as a matter of urgent importance.
There was a much more exciting first in the history of spaceflight that occurred in 2021. The first flight on another planet was the flight of Ingenuity. That is an achievement to be proud of. Monica.
Monica is a professor at the Open University.
There are biases in the healthcare system.
The healthcare industry was exposed to racial biases. Grace Cary is pictured.
In the year 2021, it became widely known that institutional racism was a part of the reason why black and Asian people are less likely to get good health outcomes.
It was a year when many people bought pulse oximeters believing that a finger-tip reading would alert them to seek medical assistance if they became ill with Covid-19. Black and Asian people found out that their pulse oximeters were more likely to miss low oxygen levels in dark skin. Sajid Javid is the health secretary and he launched an investigation in November. It became clear that black and Asian people were more likely to die from Co, as platitudes that "we are all in the same boat" quickly gave way to a reality of "we are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat". Technical biases do not help.
We are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat.
Ann Phoenix.
Black and Asian women were found to be four and two times more likely to die in childbirth, and to have more stillborn infants than white women. The institutional biases were not recorded in national statistics until reported by MBRRACE. The Office for National Statistics, which has convened an Inclusive Data Taskforce to ensure that everyone is counted, will produce figures in the future.
The oximeter and childbirth examples don't mention much about professional practices and discrimination. The apology from the Division of Educational and Child Psychology was made after the airing of a documentary, Subnormal: A British Scandal, in May 2021. The Inner London Education Authority documented that many were not normal.
The examples point to a healthcare system where black and Asian people have questions about whether they will get equal treatment. No one can be sure that they are safe unless we are pulled into the same boat. It is necessary to build trust that vaccines are designed with black and white people in mind. It is hoped that 2021, will be a landmark year when enough people recognize the importance of building genuine equality in the healthcare system. Ann Phoenix.
University College London has a professor named Ann Phoenix.
There is time to act.
There was a protest in London. Andy Rain.
The big beast in the background of every other scientific development this century is global heating. There were some big science accomplishments this year.
In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the first part of its Sixth Assessment Report, which covered the state of our knowledge about the climate system and what science can tell us about what will happen next. The Fifth Assessment Report in 2014 was the same as the one in 2015, but it was clear that things are bad and that drastic action is required to keep the worst consequences at bay. Even though progress on the "action" part is still too slow, there has been a significant shift this year from hand-wringing to action.
The media focus on events at Cop26 rather than the climate science itself is a good thing, as more science will always be important, but we already have more than enough science to act. Money, political and humanitarian priorities, and the messy business of global collaboration are the next steps. Predicting the consequences of our actions will be kept honest by robust science, and those predictions must motivate us all. Helen Czerski is a woman.
University College London has a physicist named Helen Czerski.
New understanding could lead to treatments for Fibromyalgia.
Scientists have found the role that antibodies play in chronic pain conditions. The image is Dr_Microbe.
One in 40 people, mostly women, is affected by Fibromyalgia, which has no known cause or cure. It is considered a functional neurological disorder, best explained by differences in how the brain processes and attends to pain signals. The current treatments have limited effectiveness.
The study published in 2021 may change that. The researchers found that the mice had difficulties with the patients' symptoms, such as reduced movement, grip weakness, and increased sensitivity to cold and pressure. These problems were not developed by mice injected with healthy adults' antibodies.
The authors think that Fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disorder. This finding would change the way chronic pain is diagnosed and treated. The hope is that treatments that reduce the amount of antibodies in the body will end the misery of Fibromyalgia for millions of people around the world. The person is Francesca Happé.
King's College London has a professor of cognitive neuroscience.
There is a boom in the prediction of the structure of the genes.
The database created by DeepMind's AlphaFold is 99% of human proteins. The picture is Deepmind/PA.
More than 60 years after the first detailed structure of aProtein was determined at atomic resolution by X-ray crystallography, a series of increasingly powerful experimental techniques had resulted in structural elucidation for over a third of the human genome A major gap in our efforts to make sense of the genome sequence information was caused by a large part of the proteins being intractable for traditional laboratory methods. Major advances have been made in overcoming this limitation, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence.
In July, the second generation of AlphaFold was used by DeepMind to create a comprehensive atlas of the structures of almost 99% of all human proteins, including tens of thousands of structures for critically important components of the human body that had evaded previous experimental characterisation. The Alphafold Database is hosted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge and is free to use.
In August, a group at the University of Washington in Seattle took AlphaFold's approach to the next level. In a living cell, a complex dance of interactions between the different parts of the cell are guided by the interplay of the different parts of the cell's genes. The enhanced algorithm was able to accurately predict the details of these interactions, taking us an important step towards understanding the dynamics of human cell physiology.
The rapid deployment of these new computational tools for predicting the detailed three-dimensional structure of the cellular machinery, combined with the massive acceleration of genome sequencing, is enabling new strategies for drug discovery and making sense of the function of the human body. The story of artificial intelligence applications in biology is not over. In 2022. watch this space. Takano was named afterEriko.
The University of Manchester has a professor named Takano.
Extreme weather gets more extreme.
Extreme weather events around the world illustrated the dangers of global heating. Adam Berry is pictured.
Climate scientists have been anticipating the last year for a long time, with the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report finally released. The inability of governments to properly prepare for nature has provided the reality check of climate risk in 2021.
The heat dome that sat over North America this summer made climate scientists go crazy. The fact that temperature records were completely obliterated across Canada and the US was the first sign of something new. The academic oddity became frightening when the heat turned to fire and destroyed millions of acres of forest.
The first sign that something new was happening was the fact that the temperature records were completely destroyed.
Hannah Cloke.
The effect of heat waves and fires in the eastern Mediterranean was similar to that of Australia, which had suffered years of fire and dry weather. The floods that killed more than 200 people in the world's most developed region around the Rhine showed that money and democracy are not enough to protect nature. They showed that advances in weather and flood forecasting are useless unless authorities act quickly. Hannah Cloke.
The University of Reading has a professor named Hannah Cloke.
There are record numbers of children living with Obesity.
In deprived areas, one in four 10-year-olds is now obese. The images are from the same source.
The most significant story of the year was a setback. The National Child Measurement Programme revealed in November that the number of primary school children in England who are obese has risen from 20% to 25% in a single year. More shocking is the fact that 34% of children in the most deprived neighbourhoods are obese.
The trends have been worsened by the Pandemic, but they were already there. Poverty and environments that make healthy eating and physical activity difficult are factors that drive Obesity. Fast food outlets, junk food adverts, pedestrian injuries and air pollution are more common in the poorer neighbourhoods. Evidence shows that the environments are getting better.
Creating healthier towns and cities is difficult and resisted by powerful commercial interests. It would improve children's mental health, reduce adult Obesity, and cause many diseases. Re-greening our urban environments would contribute to a net zero world. The breakthrough story, protecting us all and our planet, could be created by reversing this setback for children's health through science-led policies. Theresa Marteau is a person.
Theresa Marteau is a behavioural scientist at the University of Cambridge.
A meteorite is a gift from space.
A meteorite landed on a driveway. It was suggested that it was near an object near Jupiter. The trustees of the Natural History Museum.
There were more than 1,000 reports of a light show in the sky of the UK on February 28, 2021. The UK Fireball Alliance had cameras that picked up the signal and were busy estimating a landing site. The fireball was a remnant of our early solar system that hurtled through our atmosphere at a high rate of speed.
A meteorite is more than just a sight; we can back-track its trajectory through the dark to find out where it came from and also predict where it will land. Multiple pieces were found in a family driveway and a sheep field. The meteorite was the first of its kind recovered in the UK for 30 years and was a primitive carbonaceous chondrite.
It's unusual to recover an uncontaminated primitive meteorite, which allows us to learn about the basic building blocks of planets and how the Earth came to possess the resources required to sustain life. The analysis shows that the meteorite comes from an object near Jupiter which has water and ice and has a chemical makeup similar to our Sun.
Scientists spend a lot of time looking up and out at space. The Hayabusa2 and Osiris-Rex missions were sent to asteroids with the purpose of returning samples to Earth, and the recently launched Nasa Dart mission aims to test the technology required to divert larger and more threatening space rocks heading our way. The meteorite that landed on our doorstep was a gift from the universe and it was a sample of the early solar system that we could use. Emma Bunce.
Prof Emma Bunce is the head of physics and astronomy at the University of Leicester.
For some at least, the rescue will be aided by the FattyRNA particles.
The benefits of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and Moderna were felt around the globe. The picture is of Sumaya Hisham.
The first vaccine made from genes was approved in December of last year, but we learned how effective the Pfizer jab was in the real world in 2021. The idea is that the ribonucleic acid is transported into the cells where it is used to make the immunity from disease and death. In theory, the vaccines could be changed to respond to new variations.
There are two things that make the vaccine remarkable. It took 10 months from sequence to vaccine approval, a remarkable sprint when it normally takes a decade. The vaccines introduced tiny particles into healthcare. When it comes to gettingRNA into the cells, the shuttle buses are absolutely essential.
Two other issues have been highlighted by this excellent science. We will need to stop transmission in future Pandemics if we want to prevent serious disease. Our economies depend on this. The Omicron variant makes a mockery of international vaccination efforts. The African continent's vaccination rate is just over 4%, which is similar to the UK's. Ijeoma F Uchegbu.
Ijeoma F Uchegbu is a professor at University College London.
Nature's role in tackling global heating is finally acknowledged.
The world leaders at Cop26 agreed to end the practice of depredation. Alamy.
This year, a huge scientific effort paid off in policy terms. The United Nations climate conference held in Glasgow has been dubbed "Nature's COP" because of the high profile given to preserving and restoring natural ecosystems, in particular forests, as a way of tackling global warming. On the second day, world leaders pledged to end the practice of depredation by the year 2030.
Data showing the importance of forests to the planet's carbon balance has been very difficult to prove. Thousands of scientists have been measuring tree growth, tree death, and emissions from thousands of forest plots. The work done by Collaborations such as ForestPlots.net, RainFor and the Global Ecosystems Monitoring network has been incredible. The data has shown that the role of intact tropical forests in soaking up carbon emissions is starting to reverse, and have allowed calculations of the potential contribution natural climate solutions could make to tackling the climate crisis.
Similar pledges in the past have spectacularly failed, and there is widespread scepticism about the extent to which the Glasgow leaders can deliver. Clear recognition that there is no path to net zero without nature is a very positive step. Julia Jones is a female.
Julia Jones is a professor at Bangor University.
