In 2024, science and technology witnessed groundbreaking advancements. Notable achievements included the successful launch of space missions to Mars and beyond, as well as major strides in artificial intelligence, with AI models becoming more integrated into everyday life. The field of medicine saw revolutionary gene-editing techniques that promise to treat previously untreatable diseases. Renewable energy technologies progressed significantly, with new breakthroughs in solar and fusion power. Quantum computing made strides toward practical applications. Additionally, climate change research garnered global attention, with innovative solutions emerging to combat its effects, marking a transformative year for science.
1. Scientists unveiled the first-ever complete map of an adult fruit fly’s brain
Understanding how the brain works requires mapping the connections between the neurons within it. In recent years, this has been done for parts of brains from various model organisms, such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. But understanding brain function more globally requires mapping the entire brain.
FlyWire, a consortium of dozens of research labs from around the world, set out to produce a neuronal wiring diagram of a whole adult fruit fly brain. Fruit flies are ideal for brain studies because they show a range of behaviors, yet their brains are small compared to people’s. A description of the work, which was partly funded by NIH, and various related findings appeared in a nine-paper package in Nature on October 2, 2024.
The researchers identified connections between individual neurons from electron microscope images. The resulting wiring diagram, or connectome, consists of nearly 140,000 neurons and the more than 50 million synapses (where neurons connect) between them. This is the largest and most complex connectome produced to date.
About 85% of neurons in the fruit fly connectome are intrinsic to the brain, meaning that they synapse only with other brain neurons. Thus, the brain communicates primarily with itself. Intrinsic neurons varied in length from less than 0.2 mm to almost 20 mm, and in volume from 16 to more than 3,000 μm3.
2. 2024 marked the hottest year on record
The WMO State of the Climate 2024 Update once again issues a Red Alert at the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation, turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record; the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rise and ocean heating are accelerating; and extreme weather is wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the world.
The January – September 2024 global mean surface air temperature was 1.54 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.13°C) above the pre-industrial average, boosted by a warming El Niño event, according to an analysis of six international datasets used by WMO.
3. Building world's 1st pyramid
In a preprint study published this summer, researchers proposed that ancient Egyptians built the world's first pyramid — the 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid of Djoser, which sits on Egypt's Saqqara plateau — using a "modern hydraulic system" powered by a long-gone branch of the Nile River. The system comprised a dam, a water treatment plant and a hydraulic freight elevator, the researchers suggested, enabling workers to deliver heavy construction materials to the pyramid building site.
The proposed infrastructure addresses long-standing questions about how ancient Egyptians erected the Step Pyramid of Djoser, which contains 11.6 million cubic feet (330,400 cubic meters) of stone and clay, before the advent of large machinery like bulldozers and cranes.
4. AI fingerprint-matching tool
A new technique to match fingerprints from separate digits belonging to the same person sparked controversy at the beginning of 2024. It's long been suspected that connecting prints from different digits could help solve criminal cases, but forensic methods so far haven't been able to do so accurately, only reliably linking fingerprints from the same digit.
Researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a tool that can connect different fingerprints left by the same person 77% of the time, based on similarities between the angles of arches, whorls and loops on each finger. The study in which they detailed their methods was rejected by several journals but was eventually published, receiving mixed reactions from other experts.
5. A drug that prevents HIV
After nearly 40 years of failed attempts to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS, scientists found a drug that blocks infection if injected just twice a year. A clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda that wrapped up in 2024 showed 100% efficacy among 2,134 women and girls. In the control group, girls and young women were given existing prevention drugs, also known as PrEP, which need to be taken as a daily pill. While PrEP has nearly eliminated new cases of HIV in San Francisco, stigma in Africa makes it hard for women to take the drug regularly.
6. CRISPR Goes Mainstream
For 13 years, gene-editing therapies have been tantalizingly close with the development of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR. This tech edits the genome and DNA to combat genetic diseases. In December 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the very first CRISPR treatment in the U.S. for sickle cell disease, and the acceptance of CRISPR therapies will broaden in 2024. The FDA is expected to approve another CRISPR therapy targeting beta thalassemia, a blood disease that affects the production of beta globin (a building block of the very important hemoglobin), in March 2024. And other similar FDA approvals—which experts say have generally recovered from the COVID-19 slump—could be on the horizon.
7. X-59 Quiet Supersonic Aircraft First Flight
The dream of commercial supersonic flight has been largely abandoned since the Concorde’s final flight in 2003. Because of the pesky sonic booms that accompany objects breaking the sound barrier, supersonic flight has just never really made it to the masses. But in 2024, NASA hopes its demonstration of the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) will show that this faster-than-sound dream is alive and well.
Built by Lockheed Martin, this next-gen supersonic aircraft uses the landing gear of an F-16 and the life-support system of an F-15 all packed inside an airframe that—according to NASA—transforms a sonic boom into a mere “thump.”
8. Aging spurts at 44 and 60
If it’s ever felt like everything in your body is breaking down at once, that might not be your imagination. A new Stanford Medicine study shows that many of our molecules and microorganisms dramatically rise or fall in number during our 40s and 60s.
Researchers assessed many thousands of different molecules in people from age 25 to 75, as well as their microbiomes the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live inside us and on our skin and found that the abundance of most molecules and microbes do not shift in a gradual, chronological fashion. Rather, we undergo two periods of rapid change during our life span, averaging around age 44 and age 60. A paper describing these findings was published in the journal Nature Aging .
9. The James Webb telescope recalculates universal expansion
New aspects of our distant universe came into view this year thanks to the James Webb Telescope, also known as JWST. Trained on distant galaxies, it showed stars “popping out” where the Hubble showed faint smudges, said astronomer Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago. That’s allowed her to recalculate the rate at which the universe is expanding.
10 Weakening Earth's magnetic field
Defunct satellites that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere could be releasing dust that interferes with the planet's magnetic field, according to a preprint study that attracted criticism this year. Metal pollution from falling space junk may theoretically create an invisible conductive shell around Earth, weakening the magnetosphere — the bullet-shaped field around Earth that stretches roughly 39,800 miles (64,000 kilometers) above our planet's surface.