Conflict and political upheaval around the world make it easy to overlook the progress we are making to improve life on our fragile planet. Technological advances, including but certainly not restricted to artificial intelligence, have opened an era of expanding and accelerating research discovery. The urgent task is to harness these for the wider benefit of humanity and the natural world — and to hold gathering anti-science forces at bay.
It has been a year of cosmic wonder, spanning decades of astronomical ventures. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day three years ago, is revealing a stream of new insights about the universe and its origins. Incredibly, scientists re-established lost contact with the Voyager 1 satellite, which was launched in 1977 and is now in interstellar space.
We are learning more about the human body and the spectacular mechanics of the complex structures that make it up. This year saw the first phase results of the global cell atlas project, to build what was been branded a Google Maps for the body. Another international collaboration unveiled the first map of the brain of a fruit fly, offering the prospect of new insights into neurological diseases.