Science and technology 2014: Breaking small steps

Will Ebola virus be defeated? Can people respond to climate change effectively? Those are just some of the biggest science quizzes of last year.

>>>10 outstanding science and technology events 2014
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Will the answers be available next year, the next five years or the next 50 years?

Unlike in sci-fi novels, with time machines appearing after a night, scientific innovations were small breakthroughs, and 2014 saw so many breakthroughs.

The western part of Antarctica is melting rapidly because of global warming - (photo: huffpost.com)

Space science and space

Thanks in part to the controversial, colorful shirt of scientist Matt Taylor, people have known a great scientific mission, and it is obviously much more important than the unnecessary debate about women. rights related to Taylor's shirt.

In early August, Europe's most ambitious space science mission ever - Rosetta, a space exploration robot built and launched by the European Space Agency to conduct a detailed study of comets. - successfully landed on comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko, farther than Mars.

With photos taken from this comet, scientists hope to find out how life began in Earth, and a new era of comet research has also been opened.

Rosetta spacecraft approaches comets 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko - (Photo: esa.int)

But last year's space missions not only have good news. On October 31, Virgin Galatic's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft exploded during a test flight causing one pilot to die and the other seriously injured. This is considered a major step backwards with the efforts of private companies involved in the exploration of the universe.

Virgin Galatic spacecraft remains after the failed flight test - (Photo: zenfs.com)

Virgin Galatic is just one of many private companies investing in aviation technology and space in the context of a new era of aviation is about to open up, with unmanned aerial drones upgraded. in 2014, not only for military or scientific discovery purposes, but also for life applications.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the end of the year announced its preliminary regulation of the use of unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds (US 25kg) in US airspace, ie including the majority of unmanned aircraft models for commercial purposes.

The popularity of 'drones' is so large that six test areas, which will soon be formalized, have been set up throughout the United States to assess the safety of aircraft put into operation. future.

The FAA will be cautious in its original guidelines: the draft includes requiring aircraft to appear continuously on the pilots' screens and maximum allowable height of 400 feet (121.9m). The future of these flying systems is endless.

An unmanned aerial photograph taken from the air - (Photo: bostonmagazine.com)

Kyle Snyder, director of the NextGen Air Transportation Center at North Carolina State University, said the drone's operations had never been as busy as 2014.

This will be great news for big farms, real estate brokers, cartographers, forwarders and many other industries.

Biochemistry and medicine

Along with space science, special biochemical and biological fields have achieved many breakthroughs in the past year. In May, the Harvard Stem Cell Research Institute announced that it had successfully "replaced blood" for old mice.

By using the blood of young rats, scientists have 'resuscitated' the muscles and brains of old mice, opening up the prospect of a more realistic, or life-like, life at the moment. Older people struggle with their abusive diseases simply because of the aging process.

Ebola epidemic is the focus of the world health industry in 2014 - (Photo: time.com)

Also in health and biochemistry, the genetic code in human DNA, which is built on four basic nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (A, T, G and C), is now supplemented with two more X and Y, a pair of nucleotides completely synthesized from the laboratory and then transplanted into the host cell (in the experiment, E.Coli virus, experiments with yeast cells and mammals being done at the beginning).

This process can help scientists synthesize new future drug treatments that are compatible with each individual.

In the fight with these kinds of diseases, it is impossible not to mention Ebola virus in a year that this deadly disease draws attention worldwide.

To date, nearly 7,400 people have been killed by the evil virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), while a search for vaccines and drugs is still underway.

The fight against climate change

A German town mainly uses solar energy - (Photo: badische-zeitung.de)

The past year has seen a lot of severe warning climate change reports, including three reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

According to reports, people are slowly turning drought and other harsh weather conditions in sub-Saharan, Amazon, Southern Europe, many habitable areas and other farming become normal in the second half of the century. this.

In Antarctica, the biggest science news of 2014 is the disappearance of the Antarctic western ice, the smaller part of the continent.

In the Arctic, global warming has caused Greenland ice to melt at twice the normal rate in the last five years.

Human-induced climate change is no longer controversial. Peter Stott, director of the UK climate change office, explains: 'Our studies show that global warming is currently highly unlikely to occur in a world without people'. .

More significantly, in a comprehensive report, the IPCC pointed out that the cost to avoid climate disasters accounts for only 0.06% of global economic growth, ie if a joint effort is achieved billions people will be freed from the risk of rising sea levels and harsh climatic conditions for decades to come.

Moreover, efforts to protect the environment also bring great economic benefits in the future. The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates that 'investment in clean energy sources is likely to help the global economy grow by another $ 18,000 billion by 2035'.

Also in the report, the IEA said green buildings could provide health benefits for residents and reduce medical costs 'equivalent to 75% of total health spending today'.

In the context of the gloomy global economy and bad news about climate change, the good news of 2014 is that continuous technological innovations have made solar panels approach very close to efficiency levels. economics of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.

New semiconductor devices, new materials to design panels are at the heart of new technology. The panels are made of cadmium telluridge, a material that requires far less fuel than silicon, leading the revolution.

The most radical scientists believe that a future of solar energy that completely replaces fossil energy is not far away.

Some funny findings of science

Dogs can recognize the owner voice

In a reverse experiment of a group of Hungarian scientists, the brain imaging technology used by humans was applied to dogs and found that dogs understood a lot of human words and were one in very few animals understand the actions and gestures.

Octopus holds eggs for four years

Photo: nationalgeographic.com

Can you imagine sitting quietly in the darkness and the cold at a depth of more than 1km below the surface in 53 months? A mother octopus kept its eggs for more than four years.

The process posed to scientists at Churchill University (UK), who discovered this type of octopus, many interesting questions: Does such a long-term feeding increase the likelihood of survival. their remnants? How does the octopus's metabolic process when it stays like that for four years, does not eat and hardly moves?

The oldest cave painting

Scientists have discovered prehistoric paintings in a cave in Sulawesi Island, Indonesia with a life of at least 40,000 years, surpassing the cave drawings found earlier in Europe. This finding may rewrite the history of human development and spread throughout the world.