Established 1961 21 Lifestyle Decade in Review Wednesday, January 1, 2020

This Feb 3, 2009 image obtained from NASA shows the Hazardous Processing Facility at Astrotech in Titusville, Florida, as NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is placed on a stand for fueling. — AFP photos

rom finding the building blocks for life on Mars to breakthroughs in gene edit- Fing and the rise of artificial intelligence, here are six major scientific discoveries that shaped the 2010s - and what leading experts say could come next.

Are we alone? We don’t yet know whether there was ever life on Mars - but thanks to a small, six- wheeled robot, we do know the Red Planet was habitable. Shortly after landing on August 6, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover dis- covered rounded pebbles - new evidence that rivers flowed there billions of years ago. The proof has since multiplied, showing there was in fact a lot of water on Mars - the surface was covered in hot springs, lakes, and maybe even oceans. Curiosity also discovered what NASA calls the building blocks of life, complex organic molecules, in 2014. And so the hunt continues for signs that Earth-based life is not (or wasn’t always) alone. Two new rovers will be launched next year - America’s Mars In this file photo taken on May 15, 2019, an AI robot titled “Alter 3: Offloaded Agency,” is pic- In this image obtained from NASA, the Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie on May 12, 2019 2020 and Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rovers, tured during a photocall to promote the forthcoming exhibition entitled “AI: More than (the 2,405th Martian day, or sol, of the mission). To the lower-left of the rover are its two looking for ancient microbes. “Going into the Human”, at the Barbican Centre in London. recent drill holes, at targets called “Aberlady” and “Kilmarie”. coming decade, Mars research will shift from the question ‘Was Mars habitable?’ to ‘Did (or does) Mars support life?’” said Emily this year’s Nobel prize in physics. could bring new immunotherapies that are species found in the Philippines: A small- ers everything from voice assistants to rec- Lakdawalla, a geologist at The Planetary “better and cheaper” than what we have now. sized hominin called Homo luzonensis. ommendations on Netflix and Facebook. So- Society. Welcome to the CRISPR era Advances in DNA testing have led to a called “deep learning” takes this process Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Meet the relatives revolution in our ability to sequence genetic even further and begins to mimic some of Einstein was right (again) Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) - a family of The decade began with a major new addi- material tens of thousands of years old, the complexity of a human brain. We had long thought of the little corner DNA sequences - is a phrase that doesn’t tion to the human family tree: Denisovans, helping unravel ancient migrations, like that It is the technology behind some of the of the universe that we call home as unique, exactly roll off the tongue. But the field of named after the Denisova Cave in the Altai of the Bronze Age herders who left the most eye-catching breakthroughs of the but observations made thanks to the Kepler biomedicine can now be divided into two Mountains of Siberia. Scientists sequenced steppes 5,000 years ago, spreading Indo- decade: from Google’s AlphaGo, which beat space telescope blew apart those preten- eras, one defined during the past decade: the DNA of a female juvenile’s finger bone in European languages to Europe and Asia. the world champion of the fiendishly difficult sions. Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission Before and after CRISPR-Cas9 (or CRISPR 2010, finding it was distinct both from genet- “This discovery has led to a revolution in our game Go in 2017, to the advent of real-time helped identify more than 2,600 planets for short), the basis for a gene editing tech- ically modern humans and Neanderthals, our ability to study human evolution and how we voice translations and advanced facial outside of our solar system, also known as nology. “CRISPR-based gene editing stands most famous ancient cousins who lived came to be in a way never possible before,” recognition on Facebook. In 2016, for exam- exoplanets - and astronomers believe each above all the others,” William Kaelin, a 2019 alongside us until around 40,000 years ago. said Vagheesh Narasimhan, a geneticist at ple, Google Translate - launched a decade star has a planet, meaning there are billions Nobel prize winner for medicine, told AFP. The mysterious hominin species is thought to Harvard Medical School. earlier - transformed from a service that out there. Kepler’s successor TESS was In 2012, Emmanuelle Charpentier and have ranged from Siberia to Indonesia, but One exciting new avenue for the next provided results that were stilted at best, launched by NASA in 2018, as we scope out Jennifer Doudna reported that they had the only remains have been found in the Altai decade is paleoproteomics, which allows nonsensical at worst, to one that offered the potential for extraterrestrial life. developed the new tool that exploits the region and Tibet. scientists to analyze bones millions of years translations that were far more natural and Expect more detailed analysis of the immune defense system of bacteria to edit We also learned that, unlike previously old. “Using this technique, it will be possible accurate. chemical composition of these planets’ the genes of other organisms. It is much sim- assumed, Homo sapiens bred extensively to sort out many fossils whose evolutionary At times, the results even seemed pol- atmospheres in the 2020s, said Tim Swindle, pler than preceding technology, cheaper and with Neanderthals - and our relatives were position is unclear,” said Aida Gomez- ished. “Certainly the biggest breakthrough in an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona. easy to use in small labs. Charpentier and not the brutish simpletons previously Robles, an anthropologist at University the 2010s was deep learning - the discovery We also got our first glimpse of a black hole Doudna were showered in awards. but the assumed but were responsible for artworks, College London. that artificial neural networks could be this year thanks to the groundbreaking work technique is also far from perfect and can such as the handprints in a Spanish cave scaled up to many real-world tasks,” said of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. create unintended mutations. they were credited for crafting in 2018. They AI levels up Henry Kautz, a computer science professor “What I predict is that by the end of the next Experts believe this may have happened also wore jewelry, and buried their dead Machine learning - what we most com- at the University of Rochester. “In applied decade, we will be making high quality real- to Chinese twins born in 2018 as a result of with flowers - just like we do. Next came monly mean when talking about “artificial research, I think AI has the potential to pow- time movies of black holes that reveal not edits performed by a researcher who was Homo naledi, remains of which were discov- intelligence” - came into its own in the er new methods for scientific discovery,” just how they look, but how they act on the widely criticized for ignoring scientific and ered in South Africa in 2015, while this year, 2010s. Using statistics to identify patterns in from enhancing the strength of materials to cosmic stage,” Shep Doeleman, the project’s ethical norms. Still, CRISPR remains one of paleontologists classified yet another vast datasets, machine learning today pow- discovering new drugs and even making director, told AFP. the biggest science stories of recent years, breakthroughs in physics, Kautz said. But one event from the decade undoubt- with Kaelin predicting an “explosion” in its For Max Jaderberg, a research scientist at edly stood above the rest: The detection for use to combat human disease. DeepMind, owned by Google’s parent com- the first time on Sept 14, 2015 of gravitation- pany Alphabet, the next big leap will come al waves, ripples in the fabric of the universe. Immunotherapy to the fore via “algorithms that can learn to discover The collision of two black holes 1.3 billion For decades, doctors had three main information, and rapidly adapt and internal- years earlier was so powerful it spread weapons to fight cancer: surgery, ize and act on this new knowledge”, as waves throughout the cosmos that bend chemotherapy drugs, and radiation. The opposed to depending on humans to feed space and travel at the speed of light. That 2010s saw the rise of a fourth, one that was them the correct data. That could eventually morning, they finally reached the Earth. The long doubted: Immunotherapy, or leveraging pave the way to “artificial general intelli- phenomenon had been predicted by Albert the body’s own immune system to target gence,” or a machine capable of performing Einstein in his theory of relativity, and here tumor cells. One of the most advanced tech- any tasks humans can, rather than excelling was proof he was right all along. niques is known as CAR T-cell therapy, in at a single function. — AFP Three Americans won the Nobel prize in which a patient’s T-cells - part of their physics in 2017 for their work on the project, immune system - are collected from their and there have been many more gravitation- blood, modified and reinfused into the body. al waves detected since. Cosmologists A wave of drugs have hit the market since meanwhile continue to debate the origin and the mid-2010s for more and more types of In this file photo taken on March 8, 2019, a lab composition of the universe. The invisible cancer including melanomas, lymphomas, tech handles blood after it passed through a lab- dark matter that makes up its vast majority leukemias and lung cancers - heralding what oratory centrifuge before genetically modifying a remains one of the greatest puzzles to solve. some oncologists hope could be a golden era. patient’s immune cells at a production laborato- “We’re dying to know what it might be,” For William Cance, scientific director of the ry unit of the Paoli-Calmettes Institute (IPC) said cosmologist James Peebles, who won American Cancer Society, the next decade overall cancer care center in Marseille, France.