If 2016 felt rather cruel, 2017 has, for many people, been downright traumatic, with frequent news coverage of a climate in crisis, political and economic turmoil and an increasingly visible division between the world's wealthiest and most powerful individuals and everyone else.
Fortunately, there has been some good news on themes ranging from conservation, to genetic medicine and the development of artificial intelligence that may one day exhibit better decision-making powers than we have lately.
Animals & conservation
In November, Mexico designated the largest marine reserve in the Pacific, measuring 150,000 square kilometres. The Revillagigedo Archipelago National Park surrounds the uninhabited volcanic islands of Claríon, Roca Partida, Socorro and San Benedicto and is 390km southwest of the Baja California peninsula. The region is home to four species of sea turtle, 344 species of fish and 37 different sharks and rays. It was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016.
Read more at Scientific American.
Two species of New Zealand's iconic kiwi bird have been taken off the endangered list. The flightless birds were severely threatened by introduced predators including cats, dogs and especially stoats. The birds' fortunes have been reversed by a 30-year egg-rearing programme, the creation of kiwi sanctuaries and the control of predators. There are now an estimated 450 adult Okarito Kiwis (Rowis) and 17,700 Northern Brown Kiwis.
Read more at Birdlife.
The snow leopard has been reclassified from endangered to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list. The reasoning behind the decision was that the rarely-seen species' numbers were originally underestimated as below 2,500 individuals.
The wild snow leopard population is now thought to be somewhere between 7,367 and 7,884 mature individuals and is still in decline due to loss of habitat, despite a reduction in poaching in recent years. However, many experts feel that the status change is unjustified and, as the Snow Leopard Trust warns, may rely on unscientific counting methodologies to estimate the big cat's population.
Read more at Science Alert.
Health
In Bochum, Germany, a small boy called Hassan had a severe case of a rare genetic skin disease known as junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB). The five-year-old's skin was so fragile he was covered in wounds, blisters and recurrent infections that were largely untreatable.
But in Italy, at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Bologna, doctor Michele de Luca told the Bochum team that he could grow Hassan enough skin inside his lab to replace the 80 per cent of that he had lost, using a four-centimetre-square biopsy from an unaffected part of Hassan's skin.
In a paper published in November, de Luca, plastic surgeon Tobias Hirsch and their colleagues have detailed the transplant process that saw Hassan, now seven, go from death's door to a typical childhood of school, football and family life.
Read more at WIRED.
In May, Brazil's health ministry announced a formal end to the Zika virus crisis, 18 months after the mosquito-borne disease came to global attention.
The virus, which typically produces mild symptoms in healthy adults but can cause severe birth defects if infection takes place during pregnancy, produced 95 per cent fewer cases between January and mid-April than in the same period of 2016. The health ministry reports that a mosquito eradication programme was key to bringing rates of Zika infection under control.
Read more at The Guardian.
2017 saw the publication of a wealth of gene editing research, much – but by no means all – of it involving the CRISPR/Cas9 'DNA scissors', which can be directed to cut out a specific DNA and then close the cut or even replace it with a new sequence of DNA.
While CRISPR has been getting attention with a newly developed variant that can trigger epigenetic switches to cure genetic diseases (in mice, so far) without editing the DNA itself and a forthcoming human trial in a genetic treatment for beta thalassemia, another gene cutting technique – zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) – was used in the first in-vivo human gene therapy trial. The patient has been injected with the gene-editing tools to treat Hunter syndrome, a debilitating genetic disease. Doctors expect to know how successful the treatment was early in 2018.
Read more at Science News.
A meta review of studies into the effects of coffee, published in November, has confirmed previous correlative observations of health benefits associated with consumption of the drink.
Compared to people who drink no coffee, those who consume three to four cups a day were at a decreased risk of premature death, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, dementia and some cancers. However, the study does not recommend that non-coffee-drinkers begin using the drug for health reasons.
In July, two studies found a correlative link between both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee drinking, more robust health and lower overall mortality, with the effect being more pronounced among participants who drank the greatest amount of coffee.
Read more at The Guardian.
Space
On October 18, the first body to enter our solar system from interstellar space was detected. Named ‘Oumuamua (after the Hawaiian word for 'messenger'), the rocky body is thought to be a strange, elongated cigar shape. It's now on its way out of our solar system, having passed within 15 million miles of Earth on October 15, and researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project are turning a radio telescope ear to it just in case it might be an interstellar spacecraft. (It pretty certainly isn't, but the observations will be fascinating either way.)
Read more at WIRED.
On September 15, 2017, just a month shy of 20 years after it left Earth, Nasa's Cassini spacecraft made its final dive into Saturn's atmosphere, beaming back data in a live stream as it went. During its mission, Cassini sent back thousands of and ground-breaking data about Saturn and its moons.
Read more at Nasa.
In March, SpaceX proved that its plan of launching previously flown rockets really did have legs. On March 30, the company flew – and landed – a "flight-proven" Falcon 9 first stage rocket, bearing an SES telecommunications satellite into orbit. Now even Nasa has taken the spaceflight firm up on its pre-used boosters for cargo shipments to the ISS.
For its part, reusable rocket rival, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, again reflew its New Shepard suborbital vehicle, this time with a space tourist test dummy aboard.
Read more at The Verge.
In July, images from Nasa's Juno spacecraft revealed the gas giant in unprecedented detail, showing its Red Spot to be "a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval." Since it arrived at the planet in July 2016 Juno has taken thousands of photographs and used eight onboard sensors to capture detailed readings about how it formed and its chemical composition. Its mission ends is February 2018 with a drive into Jupiter's atmosphere.
Read more at .
Technology
In October, electricity production began at the world's first floating wind farm, Hywind, located off the coast of Peterhead, in Scotland. Built by Statoil, a Norwegian firm that began its life building deep sea oil rigs, the Hywind farm has the capacity to generate 30 MW of electricity – powering roughly 22,000 households.
Read more at WIRED.
As more of the world commits to electric cars and renewable energy, new battery technologies are being developed to meet the incipient demand. Toyota is reported to be in the "production engineering" stage for a revolutionary solid-state electric vehicle battery with fast charge times and a long range, while Dyson is also developing solid-state battery tech.
On a larger scale Alphabet is developing a new kind of molten salt battery for large-scale power generators, Harvard University researchers have developed an efficient electrolyte battery for similar applications and new polymer batteries are said to be "two to three years" away from general availability.
Read more at Ars Technica.
This May AI firm, DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated the world's top-ranked Go player, Ke Jie, with two straight wins in a best-of-three tournament. The victory, at DeepMind's Future of Go summit in China, marked the AI's last tournament against human players.
The Alphabet-owned company has since developed AlphaGo Zero, which proved capable of learning the game without being trained on data from human games, and AlphaZero, which can teach itself to become a champion at three different games: chess, Go, or Shogi.
Read more at WIRED.
Politics
A group of European members of Parliament proposed new legislation that would require end-to-end encryption be used across all digital communications. The Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs put forward the plans as part of a bid to ensure messages sent between people cannot be hacked by governments or other malicious groups.
In October, new electronic communications proposals were passed including a requirement for strong encryption, and a November trade proposal seeks to remove cryptographic tools from a list of export items categorised as controlled technology with military uses, making it easier for member nations to develop and trade in encryption tech.
Read more at WIRED.
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube created a new group dedicated to making their platforms "hostile" to terrorists and extremists. Dubbed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, the organisation has three main aims: to develop 'tech solutions' to oppose terrorism online, research relevant issues, and share information as much as possible. Meanwhile, domain, hosting and anti-DDOS services around the world united in their refusal to provide online services to neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer
Read more at WIRED.
The government has committed to ban new diesel and petrol cars and vans from UK roads by 2040 in a bid to steer road users towards electric and hybrid vehicles. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said: "We are taking bold action and want nearly every car and van on UK roads to be zero emission by 2050 which is why we’ve committed to investing more than £600m in the development, manufacture and use of ultra-low emission vehicles by 2020." France and China have both also stated that they plan to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars before the middle of the century.
Read more at WIRED.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK