2020 Breakthroughs

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In 2020 the race to space changed gear. The May launch of the SpaceX vehicle Crew Dragon was the first time a private vehicle had delivered astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). It was deeply impressive, but also featureless… sleek, white inner walls replaced the complex instrument panels of old, and it was clear that the two test pilots on board were mostly passengers, with no direct control over the flight. In November, Crew Dragon became the first private spacecraft fully certified by Nasa to transport humans to the ISS and later that month delivered four astronauts to the orbiting station. This taxi may not be cheap, but it’s here to stay and it’s a game-changer. 

Protein predictors

Imagine reading sheet music, and knowing what a tune sounds like, but not having much of a clue how to play the instruments. That’s where we were in biology, until last month, when artificial intelligence company DeepMindswooped in and, by sheer computational force, crunched an otherwise intractable problem.

The sheet music here is the basics of genetics. Genes are made of DNA, and encode proteins, and all life is made of or by proteins. We can read the genetic code easily, and we can translate a gene into the basic protein. But proteins work in three dimensions, precisely folded up into clumps and blobs. These are the enzymes that digest, the structures that build bone and muscle and brain – that is the performance. This crucial step is the one we struggled with – understanding how you craft a 2D protein into its 3D functional version. DeepMind’s AlphaFold program was validated in November, beating all other known techniques for predicting protein structures hands down

Previously discovered dinosaur eggs were all hard-shelled. But fossilized eggs from two dino species in the Gobi Desert had soft shells, a June study revealed.

"I've been excavating in Mongolia for 20 years now, and we find a lot of dinosaur eggs. But these clutches tell us something very different from what we knew before," Mark Norell, the lead author of the study and a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, previously told Business Insider.

Of the more than a dozen eggs Norell's team found, some came from Protoceratops, a 75-million-year-old, sheep-sized herbivore. The rest belonged to Mussaurus, a 20-foot, long-necked herbivore that lived at least 200 million years ago. The finding suggests hard-shelled eggs — an advantageous evolutionary milestone that allowed the animals to flourish — cropped up much later in the dinosaur fossil record than scientists previously thought.