The Atlantic’s top 10 breakthroughs of 2022

It’s been an amazing year in science, medicine, technology. The Atlantic has an article on what one writer thinks will be very important. Many of these have not really made the news (partly because many of these are the beginnings of breakthroughs and not yet available). Categories:

The Generative-AI Eruption
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, can answer complex questions, spit out bespoke Wikipedia articles in seconds, write song lyrics, and even conjure—admittedly mediocre—essays in the style of well-known writers. ((This has been getting a lot of attention in the past month.))
The Power to Reverse Death (Kind Of)
By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. … If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?
The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)
This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. … Using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain.
The Vaccine Cavalry Is Coming
In September, a new malaria vaccine developed by Oxford University scientists was found to be extremely effective… In November, an experimental flu vaccine was found to induce a protective immune response against all known types of flu in animals. ((Italics mine.))
A Snapshot of the Beginning of Time
The exquisite photos could lead us to new discoveries in cosmology…. Behind those lush and dreamy images might lie evidence of what actually happened during, or just after, the Big Bang…. The James Webb Telescope is so much more than the solar system’s most sophisticated camera-zoom function. It is also history’s greatest time machine.
‘Unheard of’ Advances in Fighting Cancer
In a trial with 18 rectal-cancer patients who were prescribed a novel immunotherapy, researchers found that the cancer vanished in every single patient. No, not receded. Vanished. … Months later, a trial of a new metastatic-breast-cancer drug delivered similarly miraculous results.
The Obesity-Therapy Surge
In the 2010s, patients on the diabetes medication semaglutide noticed something interesting: They were losing a ton of weight. And that side effect wasn’t a fluke. Last year, the FDA approved injectable semaglutide for weight loss under a new name: Wegovy. And it’s not the only medication in the pipeline that helps people lose weight without suffering major side effects.
Cracking the Case of Multiple Sclerosis
This year, a team of scientists… reported strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus, best known for causing mononucleosis, is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis. Infection with EBV raised the odds of developing multiple sclerosis, or MS, by more than thirtyfold.
Legal Lab Meat
Some breakthroughs are about new rules, not just new technology. This year, the FDA cleared a California company, Upside Foods, to produce lab-grown chicken. It is the first-ever cultivated-meat product to pass this key regulatory hurdle.
New Toys for the Green-Energy Revolution
Fighting climate change will require the deployment of technologies already invented, such as solar panels and wind turbines. But it will also require new inventions in fields like nuclear and geothermal technology. This year, we edged closer to breakthroughs in both categories.

About 2,900 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/technology-medicine-law-ai-10-breakthroughs-2022/672390/.

CRISPR versus AIDS

AIDS is a particularly difficult infection to treat because it actually infiltrates, and becomes part of, the patient’s own DNA. It’s not easy to edit our own genetic blueprint. But we have new techniques…

In 2019, researchers at Temple University and the University of Nebraska found that using Crispr to delete those regions eliminated HIV from the genomes of rats and mice. A year later, the Temple group also showed that the approach safely removed viral DNA from macaques with SIV, the monkey version of HIV…

The Excision trial will eventually enroll nine participants and test three dosage amounts to determine which is most effective.

Layperson-friendly article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/a-bold-effort-to-cure-hiv-using-crispr/.

Detailed report: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19821-7.

By the way, CRISPR techniques (CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) are something we learned by studying bacteria, which can be attacked by viruses. They evolved a way to recognize and destroy viral genetic codes, a crude immune system. Researchers first discovered the repeats in 1987 (see Wikipedia), and studied these for years, eventually resulting in a Nobel Chemistry Prize in 2020 for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

The Quest for Fuel in World War II

An interesting (to me, at least) overview of how vital oil was in all theaters of WWII.

Millions of pages have been written about the tactics and strategies of World War II, but relatively little about how almost every major decision of that conflict was conditioned by the need for one commodity without which no modern army can operate – oil.

You may not be aware of these tidbits (emphasis mine):

Though it varied from campaign to campaign and unit to unit, as much as 70 percent of German supply transport remained horse-drawn throughout the war. There were 5,375 horses assigned to each infantry division. In fact, as the war dragged on and petroleum became even more critical, horses became more important to the German war effort rather than less.
…
An appropriate postscript to Japan’s defeated drive for oil occurred shortly after its surrender, when a detachment of U.S. sailors went to arrest Gen. Hideki Tojo for war crimes. He attempted suicide, and it took two hours to find an ambulance with enough fuel to take him to a hospital.

http://www.eiaonline.com/history/bloodforoil.htm. 4,900 words. (By the way, this appears to me in very tiny print. Use the “+” button a few times to enlarge.)

How not to launch

The preliminary report of the investigation indicated that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors, responsible for yaw control, were installed in an incorrect orientation. As the error affected the redundant sensors as well as the primary ones, the rocket was left with no yaw control, which resulted in the failure. Telemetry data also indicated that a pad umbilical had detached prematurely, suggesting that the Proton may have launched several tenths of a second early, before the engines reached full thrust.

Realtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhK5vnSigo (1 minute)

Slo-mo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW0LEcTAYg (2 minutes)

Bellingcat: Why Ukraine is winning the information war

Partly due to “open-source intelligence (OSINT)”:

In 2014 (Eliot) Higgins used Kickstarter to found Bellingcat (the name refers to resourceful mice tying a bell to a cat), a nonprofit, online collective dedicated to “a new field, one that connects journalism and rights advocacy and crime investigation.” Three days after its launch, a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down over the part of Ukraine held by Russian troops. Bellingcat proved the culprit was a Russian surface-to-air missile, by using largely the same array of tools—including Google Earth, the social media posts of Russian soldiers, and the passion of Eastern European drivers for posting dashcam videos—that hundreds of volunteer sleuths are now using to document the Russian invasion of Ukraine in granular detail….

In Ukraine, Russia has been outflanked. Its attempts to establish a pretext for invasion by circulating video evidence of purported “atrocities” by Ukraine were exposed as frauds within hours by Bellingcat, fellow OSINT volunteers, and legacy news media outlets that have picked up reporting tools the open-source crowd hands around.

https://time.com/6155869/bellingcat-eliot-higgins-ukraine-open-source-intelligence/. About 3,500 words.

Cure for leukemia?

From February 2022:

Two people with leukemia achieved remission over a decade after being infused with CAR-T cells, immune cells that had been modified in a lab, according to a new study. The findings suggest that this approach could be a long-term therapy for leukemia — and some researchers describe it as a possible cure.
Chimeric antigen receptor or CAR-T cell therapy may be a “curative regimen” for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, according to the researchers, who announced their findings in a news briefing this week. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia accounts for about a quarter of new cases of leukemia.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/health/cancer-t-cell-therapy-remission-study/index.html

and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192209.

How to reduce Facebook tracking

Let’s face it. You’re not paying for Facebook, right? Therefore you are not the customer. You are the product.

Facebook even tracks you when you are on non-Facebook sites so they can sell your information to advertisers.

Here are seven steps to stop Facebook tracking, starting with the nuclear option. ((Each step has details in the article.))
1. Quit Facebook and Instagram
2. Change these Facebook privacy settings
3. Limit app tracking on your phone
4. Bolster your Web browser
5. Block more app trackers
6. Obscure your email
7. Tell companies to stop selling your data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/29/stop-facebook-tracking/. About 1,400 words.

Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence programs can modify video to show actors speaking a fluent foreign language…

This AI makes Robert De Niro perform lines in flawless German

…The technology has been used to create fake celebrity porn and damaging revenge-porn clips targeting women. Experts worry that deepfakes showing a famous person in a compromising situation might spread misinformation and sway an election.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/robert-de-niro-speaks-fluent-german-in-taxi-driver-thanks-to-ai/.

Why battery costs have plunged

The average cost of lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars and other products fell by 6 percent (adjusted for inflation) since last year. Since 2010, these costs have declined by an amazing 89 percent.
…Until recently, the high cost of batteries made battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) much more expensive than conventional gasoline-powered cars. But when batteries cost less than $100 per kWh, unsubsidized BEVs will start to be cheaper than conventional cars. At that point, BEVs could start to rapidly gain market share from conventional cars.

Why this has happened, does demand make prices go up or down, upcoming battery technologies, and related points:

https://fullstackeconomics.com/untitled-2/

Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts

That’s twenty trillion. You have no idea how much goes into making a modern microchip.

Long Answer: If a company wants to make the most advanced chips in the world, they need to purchase an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool from ASML, which has a monopoly…
One EUV tool requires:
5,000 suppliers provide 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and 2 kilometers of hosing. The tool weighs about 180,000 kilograms (200 tonnes), and ships in 40 containers spread over 20 trucks and three cargo planes…. That is just one tool. To make a chip, a factory needs 200+ tools… The mirrors guiding this light are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimeter.

https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reverse-engineer. (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)