Artificial Intelligence and Science: What will we learn from the rise of chatbots, GPT-5, Gemini, AlphaFold, and other AI tools?
The rise of ChatGPT had a profound effect on science this year. The next generation of the Artificial Intelligence model that underpins the chatbot is expected to be released late next year. GPT-5 will likely show more advanced capabilities than GPT-4 did. Scientists are also watching the rollout of Gemini, Google’s GPT-4 competitor. The large language model can process text, computer code, images, audio and video.
A new version of Google DeepMind’s AI tool AlphaFold, which researchers have used to predict the 3D shapes of proteins with high accuracy, is also due to be released next year. New possibilities in drug design and discovery could be opened up by the ability of the artificial intelligence to model interactions betweenmolecules with atomic precision.
It’s not possible to predict what innovations will look like 100 years from now. But it is safe to say that the world’s societies, economies and environment will once again have changed, possibly beyond recognition. The international community needs to continue coordinating regulatory responses to new inventions, because they could cause more harm than good.
The Science Events to Watch for in 2024: The World Mosquito Program, Vaccines, and the WHO WHO COVID-19 Anomaly
Also in Chile, the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert will be complete in mid-2024. This experiment will look at the microwaves in the background to see if there were any signs of primordial gravitational waves. Its telescopes will be equipped with as many as 50,000 light-collecting detectors, ten times more than similar projects currently under way.
New ground-based telescope data could be ruined because of the increased number of satellites in the night sky.
In Brazil, the World Mosquito Program will start producing disease-fighting mosquitoes. It’s possible for the mosquitos to protect 70 million people from diseases like Dengue and Zika because of a strain ofBacterial that prevents them from transmitting Viruses. The non-profit organization will produce five billion mosquitoes over the next decade.
As the world moves past the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government is funding trials of three next-generation vaccines, two of which are intranasal vaccines that aim to prevent infection by generating immunity in airway tissues. The third vaccine has promise to provide protection against a broad range of variant of the disease.
The World Health Organization is due to unveil its final draft of a treaty to deal with a global outbreak of disease in May. The accord seeks to better equip governments worldwide to prevent and manage future pandemics. The WHO member states will decide whether or not any provisions of the accord will be legally binding. Negotiating to ensure equitable access to the tools that are needed to prevent pandemics is at the center of the negotiations.
Source: The science events to watch for in 2024
The science events to watch for in 2024: NASA’s lunar mission, Baby IAXO’s solar telescope, and the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment
For the first time since the 1970s, NASA is launching a crewed lunar mission. Artemis II could launch as soon as November 2015, and will carry four astronauts for a ten day mission to the Moon. Artemis II will lay the groundwork for the subsequent Artemis III mission, which will land the first woman and next man on the Moon. China is also preparing to launch its Chang’e-6 lunar sample-return mission in 2024. The first to collect samples from the far side of the Moon will be the mission.
Missions to explore moons in the outer Solar System include NASA’s Clipper craft, which will set off for Jupiter’s moon Europa next October. It is trying to determine if the moon’s underground ocean could hold life. Japan will send a mission to visit Mars’s moons, Phombo and Deimos. It will land on Phobos and collect surface samples for return to Earth in 2029.
The results of the experiment will show light in a few years. The Sun is thought to emit axons that are converted into light, but they have not yet been observed because they require sensitive detection and strong magnetic fields. The experiment BabyIAXO at the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg is using a solar telescope made of a 10-metre-long magnet and ultra-sensitive noise-free X-ray detectors to track the centre of the Sun for 12 hours per day, to capture the conversion of axions into photons.
And 2024 could be the year that scientists nail down the mass of the neutrino — the most mysterious particle in the standard model of particle physics. Results of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment in 2022 showed that neutrinos had a maximum mass of 0.8 electron volts. The data will be collected in 2020 and the measurement of the particles will be done in 2024.
Source: The science events to watch for in 2024
Next year is shaping the neural basis of consciousness: Experiments and simulations of human heart and brain, and the UN environmental treaty in the early 2024
Next year could bring new insights into the neural basis of consciousness. A large project that is testing two theories of consciousness through a series of adversarial experiments is expected to release the results of its second experiment by the end of 2024. Both theories failed to align with brain-imaging data, ending a 25-year bet in favor of philosophy. Neuroscience will be closer to figuring out the subjective experience if the second round is any indication.
In the second half of 2024, the International Court of Justice in the Hague could give an opinion on nations’ legal obligations to combat climate change, and rule on legal consequences for those deemed to be damaging the climate. The court can push countries to improve their climate goals and be cited in domestic legal cases because of its clout.
Negotiations for the UN plastics treaty, which seeks to establish a binding international agreement to eliminate plastic pollution, will wrap up next year. The world has produced 10 billion tons of plastic since the 1950s, but 7 billion of that is now waste. But there is growing concern among researchers that the UN negotiations, which started last year, are advancing too slowly and will not accomplish the intended goals.
Early next year, researchers will switch on Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. Each second, the machine can perform one quintillion computations. Researchers will use the machine to create ‘digital twin’ models of the human heart and brain for medical purposes, and to run high-resolution simulations of Earth’s climate.
Researchers in the United States will install two exascale machines in 2024: The Aurora and El Capitan are located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Scientists will use Aurora to create maps of the brain’s neural circuits, and El Capitan to simulate the effects of nuclear-weapon explosions.
From Einstein to AI: how 100 years have shaped science? A snapshot of what scientists have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson
Baekeland has life-changing plastics that are now the subject of talks to limit their pollution. The process for producing ammonia is controlled by at least two international conventions. The first intends to limit, or reduce the risks of, greenhouse-gas emissions from production of this chemical. The second is a treaty to eliminate chemical weapons, an application of Haber’s invention that he supported during the First World War.
Society has changed in other ways as well. The past century has taught researchers a lot about the risks of innovations such as plastics and artificial fertilizers. In response, countries have established legally binding agreements through the United Nations to limit the harms of scientific and technological innovations.
Fundamental physicists discovered the Higgs boson9,10 in 2012, nearly 50 years after its prediction. The first detection of the waves was made in 2015, more than 100 years after the theory of general relativity came to light.
It is hard to argue that some of the discoveries of the twenty-first century have not been very disruptive in terms of changing science. Through global collaborations and with help of multinational funding, scientists produced the first draft sequence of the whole human genome7 in 2001 and found a way8 to edit genes efficiently in 2012. Researchers were able to rapidly develop a vaccine for the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Nature published a paper that stated that science is getting less disruptive. Looking back a century might seem to support that idea. A revolution in physics was the start of the twentieth century. In 1900, Max Planck laid the foundation for quantum theory. This was followed by Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis: in 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect2, Brownian motion3, the special theory of relativity4 and the mass–energy relationship5 described by his famous formula, E = mc2. Subsequent decades saw the establishment of the general theory of relativity and that of the field of quantum mechanics.
Source: From Einstein to AI: how 100 years have shaped science
Molecular genetics of the germs: from chemist Leo Baekeland to an anthropologist William Dart to explorers Africa and the birth of humankind
A method for producing ammonia was discovered in 1909 by a German chemist, and was patented in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Their process of manufacturing ammonia by fixing nitrogen from the air became the basis of the fertilizers that remain crucial to global food security today.
More scientific breakthrough would affect people’s lives in practical ways. In 1907, Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland commercialized an invention that he called bakelite — the forerunner of today’s plastics. The material was made up of long, unbreakable chains of hydrocarbon molecules. It didn’t conduct electricity, was mouldable, heat resistant and rather easy on the eye when dyed.
Other scientific areas did the same thing. In 1910, US geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan used the fruit fly Drosophila to show how genes reside on chromosomes — a crucial step on the path to modern genetics. That same year, Marie Curie successfully isolated pure radium (element 88 in the periodic table). And, in 1925, Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart’s description of an Australopithecus africanus skull provided the first evidence that Africa is the cradle of humankind6.