Macromoltek’s Top 10 Favorite Scientific Breakthroughs of 2020
2020 was an indescribable year for many around the world. The international community had to adapt to a new era of nearly total virtual collaboration. In-person work was minimized to the most fundamental parts of society and organizations had to make the best out of the time they got at their work facilities. Here at Macromoltek, we are no exception. You can check out our blog post about how we navigated these changes here.
Despite all the difficulties, scientists all around the world slowly but surely continued their paths to discovery and innovation. There were many breakthroughs in 2020, and to celebrate, we will share our team’s top 10 favorites.
10. New Record For Smallest Measurement of Time: The Zeptosecond
Bees flap their wings 230 times every second, neural tissue can fire impulses in a millisecond (10−3 s), 1 GHz microprocessors take one nanosecond (10−9 s) to execute one machine instruction, and chemical bond formation and breakup happen in femtoseconds (10−15 s). Recently, scientists at Goethe University in Germany have measured zeptoseconds, a trillionth of a billionth of a second (10−21 s). Utilizing a particle accelerator, X-rays were shot with the objective of having a single photon (the most basic unit of light) knock two electrons out of a hydrogen molecule. While observing the interference pattern caused by this interaction (imagine the waves caused by two pebbles being dropped in a pond) they found that it takes about 247 zeptoseconds for a photon to travel across a hydrogen molecule. This is the shortest time span of an occurring natural phenomenon ever measured!
09. The Total Amount of Matter In The Universe Is Measured
A group of scientists led by Gillian Wilson from the University of California, Riverside, determined the total amount of matter and energy in the universe. The group first developed a tool called GalWeight to determine the mass of galaxy clusters and applied it to publicly available sky maps (SDSS), resulting in a catalog of weighted galaxy clusters (GalWeight19). Their findings are in agreement with those obtained with different non-cluster techniques and are not the result of statistical projections. Their conclusion states that the universe consists of 31.5±1.3% of matter, of which only 20% is regular matter. This agrees well with previous measurements such as those made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which measured the universe to be about 31% matter, 18% of which is regular matter.
08. Launch of Multiple Mars Missions
Earth and Mars orbit the sun at different distances and speeds: at the largest separation there is a distance of 401,000,000 km (that’s near 250,000,000 miles) between the two planets, while at the shortest distance, they are roughly 60,000,000 km (~37,000,000 miles) apart. This close alignment happens every 2 years. From mid-July to mid-August 2020, Earth and Mars reached their shortest interplanetary alignment, making it an ideal (but short) window to launch missions to Mars. Here are the probes launched in 2020 despite the pandemic, and their respective objectives:
- Explore a geologically diverse landing site
- Assess ancient habitability
- Seek signs of ancient life (particularly in specific categories of rocks)
- Gather rock and soil samples that could be returned to Earth
- Demonstrate technology for future robotic and human exploration
Tianwen-1 (Heavenly Questions-1)
- Map morphology and geological structure
- Investigate surface soil characteristics and water-ice distribution
- Analyze surface material composition
- Measure the ionosphere and the characteristics of the Martian climate and environment at the surface
- Perceive the physical fields (electromagnetic, gravitational) and internal structure of Mars.
- Characterize the lower atmosphere
- Characterize the exosphere
- Analyze the martian weather dynamics, the structure and variability of oxygen and hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, and how hydrogen and oxygen escape the planet.
07. Codex DNA Synthesizer Announced
Codex has created one of the main technological innovations of 2020: a DNA synthesizer. One of the earliest rate-limiting steps for biological research and technological development is the process of synthesizing large DNA fragments. Codex tackled this problem and created a tabletop ‘DNA printer’, BioXp™ 3250 system, which will have a massive impact by providing individual laboratories with the capability to create their own DNA molecules in-house, speeding the process by weeks at a time. It has been announced that they intend to further extend the application to ‘vaccine printing’ on demand.
06. Superconductivity Achieved at Room Temp
The conductive materials we use in our everyday life — copper, aluminium, gold, and many others — aren’t perfect conductors. That is, despite allowing electrical current to flow through, they still exhibit some resistance. Electrical resistance, even when it’s small, causes inefficiencies in our electronics by allowing power to dissipate in the form of heat. For many applications this isn’t much of a problem — a good cooling system is the fix. But for many others, such as at the Large Hadron Collider, this can cause severe operational errors.
Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance. This means greater magnetic fields can be generated and electrical current flow is much more efficient. Superconductors have all sorts of interesting potential uses, including increasing speed of digital circuits, improving the capabilities of medical devices, and even making magnetic levitation based transportation a possibility. Though scientists have discovered a range of superconductive materials over decades, they generally all exist at extremely low temperatures that approach absolute zero (-273.15°C or -459.4°F) which limits their real world applications. Recently, however, scientists at the University of Rochester created a new material that behaves like a superconductor at near room temperature (15°C or ~60°F), which could have a huge impact on all technology we use today. This new material was created by mixing carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen, pressurizing it at about 267 gigapascals (for reference, the center of the earth is pressurized at ~300 GPa), and then photo activating it (which is a fancy way of saying “shooting it with lasers’’). The downside is that this material only exists under this high-pressure condition, so more work is needed before we have access to floating cars!
05. Cryo-EM Reaches Atomic Resolution
Cryogenic electron microscopy, or Cryo-EM, is a protein structure determination technique that works by imaging frozen samples of large molecules using powerful electron microscopes. This method was recognized with a Nobel prize in 2017 for allowing structure determination of large multiprotein complexes, while circumventing the need for a protein crystallization — a tedious process, which is oftentimes not guaranteed to succeed.
Cryo-EM was long limited to an average resolution of 30–20 angstroms — compared to X-ray crystallography’s much more accurate 3–0.5 angstrom range — but has been slowly improving over time. 2020 saw the method hit an important milestone: 1.25 angstrom resolution — high enough to discriminate between single atoms! This achievement officially allowed Cryo-EM to reach a comparable resolution level to X-ray crystallography. Thanks to cryo-EM, we’ve come closer than ever before to literally being able to “see” biological molecules.
04. Plastic Eating Super Enzymes
Every year, 300 million tons of plastic materials are produced. Of this, nearly half is expected to end up in the ocean, where it will take centuries to break down. Even then, plastics do not truly biodegrade, but rather form microplastics — small shards of plastic that pollute the environment and are ingested by living organisms, including humans. A collaboration between the Center for Enzyme Innovation and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has come to fruition in the form of a plastic-eating super enzyme that can degrade polyethylene terephthalate plastics into their constituent components. The naturally-occurring plastic-degrading enzymes PETase and MHETase were first discovered in 2016 in a bacterium at a Japanese recycling facility. Researchers found these enzymes work synergistically. Therefore, they created a molecular chimera, joining PETase and MHETase genes with a peptidic string to create a super enzyme capable of breaking down a plastic bottle in just a few days. Scientists expect that such super enzymes will be used to recycle plastics on an industrial scale within the next few years.
03. AI Detects Breast Cancer Perfectly
Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States,with new breast cancer cases comprising 15.3% of all new cancer cases. As with all cancers, early detection is pivotal for a hopeful prognosis. Reading X-ray images from mammograms — one of the primary methods to initially identify breast cancer — has a high false-positive and false-negative rate, which can lead to misdiagnosis or delayed treatment. In 2020, Google published a paper detailing the results of an AI system that can detect breast cancer more efficiently than human expert oncologists. In two different studies in the UK and US, the AI system reduced false positives by 1.2% and 5.7%, and false negatives by 2.7% and 9.4%, respectively. Additionally, the system outperformed six different oncology experts on a series of identification tasks. While more testing is necessary, this technology has the potential to not only detect cancer, but also differentiate between cancer stages. It may also be able to serve as a reliable and consistent diagnostic method that is independent of human availability and training.
02. Alpha Fold 2
One of our favorite innovations last year was the announcement of Alpha Fold 2. In fact, we dedicated an entire blog post for it here.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Folding_funnel_schematic.svg
Briefly, Alpha Fold 2 is a new machine-learning algorithm developed by Google that has leaped into finding a solution to an all-time biology problem: protein folding. Experimental protein structure determination methods — like X-ray crystallography, NMR, and Cryo-EM — are often expensive, time-consuming, and require a high degree of training and expertise. They are also limited by the characteristics of the proteins; if a protein can’t be expressed or purified, then it is likely not suitable for experimental structure determination. Computational structure prediction methods like Alpha Fold 2 allow us to guess at how a protein works while removing the constraints of wet-lab experimentation. While there is still a long road ahead, the implications for medicine and biotechnological advances are definitely groundbreaking.
And our top pick for the number 1 breakthrough of 2020 is so incredible we’ve dedicated an entire blog post to honor it! Click here to learn why this is so revolutionary and which technologies were necessary in order for this to be possible. Can you guess what it is?
