Astronomy had a great year while AI made great strides
Last year astronomers made hundreds if not thousands of discoveries. The biggest discovery was the detection of gravity waves. Albert Einstein predicted their existence 100 years ago and scientists have searched vainly for them ever since.
Luckily, early last year, astronomers picked up on these waves rippling out of two colliding neutron stars whose light took 130 million years to reach us.
Astronomers round the world were alerted to the collision and focused all their fancy telescopes on the event – one of the universe’s most spectacular fireworks displays. Exactly 3674 astronomers from 953 institutions contributed to a single paper summarising their findings about the gravity waves.
They say the discovery was like that of the Rosetta Stone, as it resolved many puzzles, opened up fresh insights into fundamental physics, the evolution of the universe, and the cosmic origins of gold, platinum and uranium. The discovery led to three leading scientists winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.
Over the past 10 years, more than 3000 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars outside our solar system. Last year, the Kepler space telescope detected another 219. Last June, another telescope discovered seven earthlike rocky planets circling an ultra-cool star 255 trillion miles away.
These seven planets in the socalled ‘‘goldilocks zone’’ may harbour liquid water. Two new moons were discovered last year orbiting the planet Jupiter, and another small curious one circling the planet Saturn. Named Pan, it was shaped like a flying saucer.
Last year, artificial intelligence research made great strides. In the third of three matches in China, an AI program beat the world champion at Go – a fearsomely more complex game than chess while, last March, Carnegie Mellon University’s Libratus AI program beat humans at poker for the first time.
Another computer took only four hours to teach itself chess well enough to beat the best human chess masters. Researchers at the University of Calgary built a robotic brain surgeon, which performs complex cranial surgery in 2.5 minutes instead of five hours needed by a team of doctors. Soft robots, looking like jelly or octopuses, were trialled last year, including one that fits around the hearts of patients with heart failure.
On the spooky side, a large Japanese health insurance firm replaced 34 staff with IBM’s Watson computer and, at a meeting in June, 353 robotic specialists calculated that artificial intelligence will out-perform humans in 50 per cent of their jobs within 45 years, and will outperform us in all jobs in 120 years.
Also making a lot of news last year was Crispr, a new genetic technique for snipping or rearranging the DNA of bacteria, plants, animals or humans with pinpoint accuracy. For the first time Crispr has been used to cure inborn genetic disorders in mice and humans.
Among the thousands of discoveries last year was the earliest fossil of Homo sapiens. Found in Morocco, the specimen pushed the origin of humanity back another 100,000 years, rewriting the history of our species.