By Amogh Aryah

Mangaluru, Dec 31: Progress in science is unavoidable; in fact, it is the agent of progress itself. Ever since man first set out on a quest to understand Nature’s workings, equipped with only his intelligence and imagination and later the tools he developed along the way that helped in making much more detailed and accurate studies of not just himself and the world around him but of the universe itself, progress has never stalled. And it never will. For, if there is one thing that is constant, it is progress itself.

The year 2019 was a year that had its share of exciting progress in science. From the first ever image of (the silhouette of) a black hole to the first-ever tests in gene editing on cancer patients, advancements were indeed far-ranging and epoch making. But they were not the only science stories that made headlines this year.

For all the progress that we’ve made over the years, reports on deteriorating climatic conditions of our planet - with warnings of a bleak future for Earth’s oceans and frozen regions as a result of increasing temperature levels - slowly awakened us to the harsh reality that we have been turning a blind eye to but no longer can afford to. The year 2019 witnessed the highest-ever participation of people from around the world in climate activism; which, given the context, is also, undeniably, a sign of progress.

So, with that said, here are the top five science stories that made headlines in 2019; the year of the first-evers.

1. The first-ever image of a black hole

In April of 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope, an Earth scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes - spread from Hawaii to Antartica - peered into the depths of M87 galaxy and obtained the first ever image of a black hole; that which was released to the public on April 10, 2019.

The image showed the silhouette, or the shadow, of the black hole, called Sagittarius A*, at the center of Messier 87 galaxy - a supergiant elliptical galaxy 55 million light years from Earth - against a brightly glowing ringlike background known as the accretion disk of the black hole.

A black hole is a region in space where the gravitational force is so strong that nothing - not even light - can escape from inside it and since no light is emitted by a black hole, it is essentially invisible. The image obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope is not that of the black hole, per se, but of its shadow and the glowing ring around it is due to the heating up of gas and other material that are drawn into the black hole.

The image of the black hole, now named Powehi, not only made it possible for us to see 'what we thought was unseeable', as Dr Sheperd Doeleman, the Director of the Event Horizon Telescope Project, put it, it also validated Einstein’s general theory of relativity and, more importantly, it epitomized the talent and hard work of a team of scientists from all around the globe in achieving a seemingly impossible feat.

2. The first-ever image of a Kuiper Belt object 4 billion miles away from Earth

On the day of the New Year, the New Horizons spacecraft sent a special gift to the scientists at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory from a distance of 4 billion miles from home. The gift was a close-up image of a 21-mile-long Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69, also called Ultima Thule, but which was later named, Arrokoth.

After New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto and its moon Charon in 2015, scientists were on the lookout for another cosmic object to explore. After weighing in the options, the scientists settled for an object one billion miles beyond Pluto and four billion miles away from Earth; thus making the object, 2014 MU69, the farthest object in the solar system explored till date.

The New Horizons spacecraft, hurtling through space at a speed of about 32,000 miles per hour, approached 2014 MU69 up to a distance of 2,200 miles from the object and six hours later, in the morning of New Year’s Day, it beamed the first ever image of the Kuiper Belt object to Earth.

The image revealed 2014 MU69 to be a 'reddish, pockmarked, two-tired snowman' thus making it a contact binary; a single object composed of two once-separated rocks that gravitated towards each other and fused into one. The data gleaned from the image could provide a definitive understanding of the formation of not just the planets in our solar system but of the origin of life on Earth itself.

With enough power and fuel the New Horizons spacecraft can hurtle thorough space at the same speed for the next ten years and, if all goes well, the New Horizons can keep expanding its horizons and bring us much closer to our distant cosmic neighbors.

3. The first-ever CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing clinical trials carried out on cancer patients

In November of 2018, at the International Human Genome Editing Summit, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China, announced that he had performed 'gene surgery' on embryos created from a HIV-positive father’s sperm and mother’s eggs to protect the babies from HIV and the twin girls born, he claimed, were healthy and well. The announcement caused uproar in the scientific community. The experiment was widely criticized as premature and highly unethical. Following a series of investigations into the experiment, He Jiankui was fired from SUSTech.

While He’s experiment might not have ended well, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia used the same technique employed by He to treat two cancer patients – one with myeloma and other with sarcoma – and have had positive results. The gene-editing technique used, known as, CRISPR-Cas9, is modeled according to a naturally occurring genome editing system in bacteria.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) - Cas9 system consists of two components. The Cas9 protein that can cut DNA and a guide RNA that can recognize the sequence of DNA to be edited.

In this technique, the sequence of the human genome that is causing a health problem is first identified. Scientists then create a specific guide RNA that can recognize that particular sequence in the DNA. The guide RNA is attached to Cas9 and this complex is introduced into the target cells. It locates the target sequence and cuts the DNA. Now the scientists can edit the existing genome by either modifying, deleting or introducing new sequences.

In case of the trails conducted by the researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, immune system cells were removed from a patient’s body and with its DNA edited using CRISPR-Cas9, the cells were infused back into the body. These cells, the researchers hypothesized, will target the cancerous cells and destroy them.

A similar study sponsored by Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is aimed at treating Leber congenital amaurosis - an inherited form of blindness - by editing the genes while they are inside the human body; making it the first-of-its-kind.

While the tests are being currently carried out on a small scale, researchers are hopeful that further developments will lead to widespread ethical use of CRISPR-Cas9 technique for cancer and other treatments in the future.

4. The first-ever world-wide climate activism with the highest participation

The year 2019, according to reports, broke several all-time records of summer temperatures. Australia recorded its 'hottest day ever' just one day after its previous record. Climate change-driven drought and high temperatures caused wildfires in San Francisco, Portugal and the Amazon.

AUN report authored by nearly 150 scientists from 50 nations warned that over one million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction at an accelerating rate which, they said, 'means [that] grave impacts on people around the world are now likely'. Another report from the UN predicted that carbon emissions will climb in the future, thereby increasing the chances, dramatically, of the planet warming beyond the 2 degree celsius above pre-industrial level threshold.

However, the rise in temperatures across the world (with nearly 400 all-time high temperature records set in 29 countries in the Northern Hemisphere) along with wildfires and hurricanes propelled people to take notice of climate change and to rise to the occasion. Climate strikes and protests that were long overdue broke out all around the world.

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old Swedish climate activist, with her #FridaysforFuture movement struck a chord among the youth that inspired a coordinated climate strike on March 15 with over 1.6 million students from 120 countries raising their concerns and demanding necessary action from governments and companies towards curbing climate change. A record-breaking participation of 7.6 million people in a global climate strike coincided with the September Climate Action Summit; an unprecedented event in the history of climate activism.

5. The first-ever quantum processor computation claim by Google

One of the intriguing possibilities that could transform the future is the possibility of harnessing the strange behavior of subatomic particles to solve complex problems really, really, quickly. How quick? To take an example: In October, Google claimed to have achieved “quantum supremacy” by building a quantum computer that can solve a problem which the IBM’s Summit - the world’s most powerful supercomputer - would take 10,000 years, in just 200 seconds. Yes, that quick.

Traditional computers store information in the form of “bits” that can each be either a 0 or a 1, but never both. Therefore the traditional computers can perform one task at a time. Quantum computers on the other hand make use of qubits, which are typically subatomic particles such as electrons and photons that have certain quantum mechanical properties such as entanglement and superposition.

Qubits can represent numerous possible combinations of 1 and 0 at the same time. What this does is that instead of going through each of the potential solutions for a given problem one by one as in a traditional computer, all the solutions can be computed at the same time. The unique functionality of quantum computers can prove to be boon for database searches, computational chemistry, codebreaking and machine learning among others.

That said, building a quantum computer isn’t easy. A quantum state – that which the qubits exists in - is extremely fragile and any interaction of the qubits with the environment can result in significant errors. This hasn’t deterred the hopes of the researchers in attaining quantum supremacy: a point at which a quantum computer can complete a mathematical calculation that is beyond the scope of the most powerful supercomputer. Something that Google claimed to have achieved with its quantum computer, Sycamore.

IBM reacted to Google’s claim saying that IBM’s Summit, with an improved supercomputing technique could, theoretically, perform the same task as Sycamore in just 2.5 days and not 10,000 years as Google, wrongly, predicted. They also pointed out that Google’s program cannot correct its own errors and that Summit would have accomplished the task with more accuracy. They also said that Google’s Sycamore was not a final and absolute dominance over classical computers.

Google is however optimistic about Sycamore’s achievement. “It’s these milestones that drive progress in the field,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, is reported to have said. “That’s how humanity makes progress.”

About the author

Amogh Aryah is a Mangaluru-based science educator and writer. His recent article appeared in the Science Reporter. He can be reached out through social media platforms with the handle @amogharyah.