Coronavirus vaccines became available for,a relief to parents as much of the world returned to a new normal. todo more to help poor nations cope with climate disasters. And major scientific breakthroughs brought us a tad closer to long-held ambitious such as nuclear fusion power andcuring cancer.
Even as the world faces many challenges,there are reasons to be hopeful about 2023 and beyond,so we continue the tradition of highlighting the most promising developments of the year.
We’re a little closer to a new source of clean energy. Aftera major breakthrough in nuclear fusion this month,investors are pouring money into companies that want to harness the type of energy that powers the sun and stars. Fusion,if it could be deployed on a large scale,would offer a nearly limitless pollution-free energy source. But until this year, that produced more energy than it consumed. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California finally reached that milestone this month. While it could still be decades before fusion becomes a practical power source,the accomplishment is a big step towards that goal.
Wall Street and venture capitalists are bullish,too. In his year-end letter,Bill Gates notes that climate-related research and development have grown nearly one-third since the 2015 Paris accords. Private capital investment in the sector is on the upswing too,with $US70 billion ($140 billion) spent over the past two years. From that,new technologies to address climate issues are continuing to emerge. At theNew York Times’ DealBook Summit in November,Larry Fink,CEO of BlackRock,predicted that venture funding would flow more into startups using hard science to tackle the planet’s biggest problems. “I believe we will be seeing a transformation of where the money goes,” Fink said. “It’s not going to go to all this stuff that provided us good utility to get food quicker or find a taxi sooner.”
Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears that technology will replace human workers are as old as technology,and they were raised once again in November when a company called OpenAI released. But AI experts have long insisted that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release:A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.
Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty in the US. The number of children living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 per cent since 1993. As theTimes′ Jason DeParle reported in September,“child poverty has fallen in every state,and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white,black,Hispanic and Asian,living with one parent or two,and in native or immigrant households”. The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families,and changes to welfare laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for assistance programs.
. Researchers have long thought that it was possible to immunise individuals at high risk of cancer,or even cure cancer in those who were showing signs of it. Until recently,they had made little progress,but now promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors new hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in mid-stage trials. It and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.
New ways of working are becoming commonplace. Hybrid arrangements are well-established at many companies (even as some CEOs are finding success getting staff back to the office more regularly). But another experiment is gaining traction:Not one of 33 companies that piloted for six months as part of a large-scale study this year said they would return to a standard schedule. The firms,which together have more than 900 employees,also reported higher revenue and employee productivity. The non-profit advocacy group that coordinated the pilot programs,called 4 Day Week Global,has signed up dozens of companies to participate in studies next year.
Here are some more innovations and milestones,some long in the making,that happened this year:
The James Webb Space Telescope for the first time – and,oh,what a view!
The age of electric-powered aviation got a little bit closer.
Mycotecture,the growing field of making things out of mycelium (a material derived from the root structure of mushrooms),kept growing and growing. One startup called MycroWorks specialises infungi-based leather. Designers at Hermès are sold.
Wooden skyscrapers and went up in cities across Europe and North America. Both types of structures are quicker and cheaper to build and produce less building waste and fewer emissions.
A giant fan is sucking tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the sky in Iceland. The Department of Energy and a bevy of investors are racing to bring the technology,called,to other parts of the world.
- with Bernhard Warner,Sarah Kessler,Stephen Gandel,Michael J. de la Merced,Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
This article originally appeared in.
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