The Biggest Science Discoveries of 2023
As we ring in the New Year of 2024, it’s important to take a moment and reflect on the significant scientific advancements and discoveries from 2023. The year brought about some groundbreaking revelations that have the potential to shape the future of science and human life.
One of the most noteworthy achievements of 2023 was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). After its launch in 2021, the telescope spent its first full year of operation in 2023, making several remarkable discoveries. From detecting a key organic molecule, methyl cation, in a protoplanetary disc to uncovering ancient galaxies with supermassive black holes, JWST has been at the forefront of unraveling mysteries of the universe.
In addition to space exploration, 2023 also marked a significant milestone in medicine with the return of samples from the asteroid Bennu by the Osiris-Rex mission. The samples revealed the presence of carbon and water, providing profound insights into the origins of our solar system. These findings have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
Furthermore, 2023 saw promising developments in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, with over 140 drugs in clinical trials. This offers hope to the millions of people affected by the disease and their caregivers.
As we move forward into 2024, the impact of these discoveries will continue to unfold, paving the way for new avenues of research and exploration. The scientific achievements of 2023 have set the stage for a future filled with groundbreaking advancements and possibilities. Let’s raise a toast to the incredible discoveries of 2023 and the exciting journey that lies ahead in the world of science. Cheers to a new year of endless possibilities!
Watch the video by Joe Scott
Video Transcript
Happy New Year everyone welcome to 2024 the year we’ve been waiting for 2024 years in the making or I guess actually there were there were years before that so the year 13.8 billion years in the making give or take and while New Year’s Day is all about looking forward not
Backwards I’m going to look backwards yeah this video really should have come out last week but oh well it comes out when it comes out but today let’s let’s all the Lang Z and take a look back at 2023 and all the all the scientific advancements and discoveries that came along the
Way here we Go all right listen um we all had our fun last night and that’s fine but I think um yeah I think maybe we should take a little bit light today just Maybe not maybe today’s not a good day for the big thinky brain type video so um let’s just
Take this one easy peasy you know just nothing weird does that sound good just just cozy in fact if we’re doing cozy let’s do cozy all right this is more like it hey Shameless self-promotion what yeah yeah all right so 2023 was a huge year for science um in fact it it
Might take a while for us to fully understand just how big of a year it was these things take time sometimes jwst has been all over the news uh mostly due to its annoying habit of challenging our existing theories and pushing back the boundaries of known science in non-space
Science news we’ve seen significant progress on two fronts that will have a direct impact on human life one story has to do with medicine I’ll get to that in a second the other is um hang on sorry um let me check chat gbt real quick big science story 2023
I don’t know I’ll I’ll think of it later so let’s start with our headliner of the James web Space Telescope so as we all know it launched on Christmas day of 2021 it took a six-month journey to get out to the L2 lrange point and to open
Up its mirrors and to get all functional and all that kind of stuff so uh at the that was that was in 2022 it was really 2023 that was the first full year of James web Space Telescope discoveries and it feels like a lot of the news
Coming out of jwst this year had to do with protoplanets and some some very very old galaxies so in June of 2023 uh it made its first ever detection of a methyl cation molecule in a protoplanetary disc if you don’t know what a methyl cion is well that makes
Two of us before I looked into this but it goes by ch3 plus and it’s a key component in organic molecules like you’re full of them the problem is they get broken down by UV radiation so scientists have been kind of struggling for a while to understand how these
Compounds could exist in a solar system that is bombarded with UV radiation all the time but the JW T found out that uh or according to jwst data anyway apparently UV radiation can actually help create ch3 Plus what’s exciting about this is that it helps to explain
Why some uh solar systems can develop life really early on kind of like our solar system did right here on Earth that happen really quickly so uh that’s really exciting so we’re talking about new stuff let’s talk about old stuff now because jbst also discovered like a lot
Of ancient galaxies how many uh 717 in one month of observation so clearly that’s not the full list but some of these ancient galaxies formed a mere 600 million years after the big bang uh many of them were hidden by dust that we couldn’t see before but now that uh JW
Can see through the dust we got them now another thing that’s even crazier about some of these old galaxies is that many of them had super massive black holes in the middle of them which is fantastic except we didn’t think that those kinds of black holes could form that early in
The universe and this is why you might have seen a lot of headlines flowing around this year that were saying that jwst has broken physics or you know disproven you know known physics and that kind of thing that’s not quite the case it’s it’s new stuff that we’re
Working on and figuring out and they are figuring it out but uh yeah jwst had a hell of a year and uh let’s let’s raise a coffee to jwst in fact I heard somebody say that um this year was really just a warmup like like 2020 to
Jwsd you know unfolded it got out there it saw first light and all that was great and then it was just kind of testing and looking at different things to see what it could see and then 2023 was like the year that they were like really doing the scientific stuff with
Jwst but it was still in its early stages it’s still we’re still in the warm-up phase of the James web Space Telescope so what’s going to be coming in the next few years is like super exciting next up we’ve got Osiris Rex so I talked about Osiris Rex early on in
The Channel I think I think one of the first years that I really got started going is when it went up to uh eventually get to the asteroid benu it was a really exciting Mission because it was going to be the first like asteroid return Mission it was going to return
Samples from benu and this year we got those samples back okay so yeah it launched in September of 2016 it traveled 177,000 km uh got there in 2018 and in 2020 it actually tapped the asteroid with its robot arm it collected dust put it in a little sample or return
Capsule sent it back towards Earth and yeah it landed in September 2023 it was an almost perfect Landing Apparently one of the parachutes failed to open uh but it still landed softly and it it was okay uh by the way if you want to see another video about uh parachute
Failures there’s a there’s a video I did about uh animals that went up into space and how apparently well most of them died and probably mostly because we had parachute problems I didn’t know that parachutes were the biggest problem in the space race in the early days but anyway back
To Osiris Rex uh NASA studied the samples and they found carbon and water now that might not sound that crazy to those of us who are made up of the stuff but considering where it was found yeah that’s it’s pretty exciting yeah principal investigator for the Osiris
Rex team a guy named Dante Loretta he he claimed that the benu sample is basically like a time capsule and it offers quote a profound insight into the origins of our solar system unquote and if uh you’re interested in seeing them for yourself you actually can uh there’s
A sample of it at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC so let’s go back to Earth for a second and talk about Alzheimer’s disease because there’s some really exciting Alzheimer’s news that has come out this year so Alzheimer’s disease affects a lot of people there’s actually
55 million people worldwide that have Alzheimer’s disease but in the United States it’s estimated that even twice that number of people are um Caregivers for people who have Alzheimer’s so you can do the math it’s it it affects a lot of people not to even mention that it’s a horrible disease that’s debilitating
And awful and considered pretty much around the world as one of the worst ways to go so in 2023 more than 140 drugs were in clinical trials to treat Alzheimer’s that alone is pretty epic that there’s that much going on but there’s three specific ones that show a
Special amount of promise and one of them was actually just approved by the FDA this July it’s called lanam mob and I think I’m going to be pronouncing these right I will probably not be but anyway um they did a third stage clinical trial with this drug and they
Show that it actually reduced the um thinking and memory problems by 27% and it does this by removing amalo plaque from the brain and one thing that’s a big deal about this is that the whole amalloy plaque theory around uh Alzheimer’s really has just kind of been
That it’s just kind of been a theory and finding a drug that can actually reduce the amalo plaqu and then showing that it actually reduces the symptoms of Alzheimer’s as well is kind of a proof of that theory and if you’re interested or have a loved one that could benefit
From this Len map is actually being marketed in the US as LMI so I’ll mentioned that there were three drugs that were being tested this year the other two one of them also targets ID plaque it’s called dmab Uh it completed its first clinical trial this year and
The third one that’s I think it also targets the amid plaques but it’s called Rog remg I think uh anyway it’s expected to finish its clinical trials in 2025 so that’s a huge advancement in uh in this disease and there’s like I said there’s more on the way they did 140 test total
So uh who knows which one of those might actually move on to more trials in the coming years it would be amazing if in the next decade or two we could actually find some kind of solution to alzheimer’s that’s that’s a big one that would be great to cure um without any
Kind of intervention it’s expected that nearly 150 million people could have Alzheimer’s by 2050 we also have an aging population which is more susceptible to Alzheimer’s so getting this fixed would be a huge deal in 2023 was a big year for that 2023 was also the year that we discovered the
Gravitational wave background so jwst and Osiris Rex big space stories but this one is another space story that might be bigger than both of them combined we’ll see but it’s a it’s a huge Discovery so as many of you who follow space stuff know just a few years ago the ligo gravitational wave
Observatory uh found gravitational waves which are ripples in the fabric of SpaceTime uh for the first time and we’ve actually been able to use that to discover a few different um black hole and neutron star collisions that have happened through triangulating these gravitational waves well this year they found the cosmic gravitational wave
Background so to slightly change the subject a little bit you’ve probably heard about the cosmic microwave background uh radiation it was actually discovered 1965 uh so a couple of astronomers just detected this radio signal that they couldn’t find the source for and the more they looked at
It they realized that the source was everywhere which means that the CMB as it’s kind of be known it was basically the artifact an artifact of the Big Bang some of the earliest light in the universe that’s been stretched by Cosmic inflation okay so the gravitational wave
Background is the same thing but for gravitational waves when the Big Bang happened it created this giant gravitational wave that is still sort of fluctuating throughout the gravitational waves of the universe now like I said the earlier gravitational wave uh discoveries were made by ligo which is a an observatory that’s underground big
Complicated thing this wasn’t actually discovered by ligo though this was done by looking at pulsars data from pulsars which are radio emitting neutron stars multiple sources of data were analyzed including one Pulsar survey that took 15 years of observation and covered it all together uh this was an international
Effort it used scientists from the US Europe Australia and China and kind of just like the discovery of gravitational waves in the first place kind of open up a whole new field of astronomy uh being able to use and access this gravitational wave background also cracks open a whole lot of new
Opportunities like astronomers can now sort of explore the universe with gravitational ripples not to mention that analyzing this background radiation gives us a lot of information about the very early universe so there’s probably a lot of breakthroughs that are going to come out of this I mean just some of the
Things that might come out of this is getting some evidence for stream Theory getting some inside into the Big Bang Gathering evidence for early Galaxy formation and maybe learning a little something about Dark Matter so yeah when I was saying that this is one of those years that we’ll be learning more about
And we’ll realize what a big year it was further on in the future the gravitational weight background is kind of what I was talking about although one thing that did get a major boost this year and we will definitely be talking about it a lot more in the future is of
Course AI chat GPT tell me about AI oh that’s what it was all you have to do is browse through times list of best of conventions this year to get an idea of what all has happened with AI in 2023 they’ve got chat GPT Dolly meta’s Master
Translator those all made big news AI has gotten infused into our mobile devices I talked about the end of the smartphone in a video earlier this year um that talked about the AI pin from Humane that has officially been announced and out and uh we’ll see
Whether or not people are ready for that just yet but yeah I mean the conversation that just you know ate up this entire year was all about chat GPT and and other high-tech chat Bots how dangerous they are how helpful they are AI art has made its way into literally
Everything in fact I downloaded an image the other day from the Adobe stock library for a thumbnail and I didn’t even realize until I opened it up you know full size that it was an AI thing like all the little like the hand had six fingers and there were all these
Little weird things in there I didn’t even notice it like so much of the Adobe stock thing is just AI art now which is kind of driving me nuts but that’s kind of where we’ve gotten the AI art has gotten so good in a lot of ways that
You can’t really tell what’s real and what’s not and that’s kind of the future that a lot of people were really worried about and it’s just in time for a big election year so that’s fun yeah we’re already seeing examples of uh celebrities voices being imitated by Ai
And the the face stuff making it look like they’re doing that they’re I’ve seen stuff on Tik Tok with Joe Rogan sponsoring something and it’s very clearly not him but um it’s getting better to the point that it’s not immediately recognizable that it’s fake over time my voice will
Get closer and closer to the real thing but for now I’m going to point out that no matter how I sound this is all some crazy that is going down and um we’re going to be seeing this with politicians left and right and I’m just kind of telling you guys right now we
Got to be Super Hyper Vigilant about what we’re looking at and whether or not we can believe in it it’s just that’s the world that we now officially live in so this coming year be smart listen I’m not I’m not anti- aai AI is an accelerator I just
Did a video on accelerationism it’s kind of a different thing but AI is something that just accelerates everything bad as I just talked about but also some good stuff for example in February of 2023 scientists at the University of Washington revealed how they used AI to to design 3d proteins that work in
Living cells like folding proteins is a is a big thing like when the different ways that you fold proteins makes the proteins uh function in different ways and if we can take proteins and make them exactly what we want them to do then there’s all kinds of medicine that
We can create out of that all kinds of treatments that wouldn’t be possible before and one specific example of how that’s being used is they’ve created proteins that can bind to light emitting enzymes which makes things stand out in tissue scans so basically you can inject somebody with these types of proteins
And they’ll attach themselves to whatever it is you’re trying to see and it will pop up and basically glow in um in CAT scans and whatnot and then you can see the problem more clearly people are also working on creating proteins that can block the flu that can just be
Taken in a nasal spray like you can literally just take some afrine and it will prevent the flu from taking hold because it can block the flu by its folded proteins that was made possible only by Ai and here’s the cool thing about all of these discoveries and
Things that happened in 2023 they don’t end in 2023 we build on that in 2024 and 2025 and Beyond so all of these things are big news but they’re just the beginning of the big news so as I’ve been looking back through 2023 as we’re going into 2024 we can look forward into
2024 and say that like all this stuff that we discovered in 2023 is only going to grow in the coming year so that’s what we had to look forward to in the next year oh another one big one the ver rubben telescope will see its first
Light it’s a a total Skys scanning uh telescope that should be able to find all kinds of asteroids and maybe exoplanets okay back to reality I feel like I should add to this that all of these advancements that we’ve seen this year are just because of people hardworking people who have spent
Their entire lives educating themselves on these topics and then innovating on current Technologies and if you want to be one of the people that will change the world in 2024 and Beyond great place to start is brilliant brilliant is a different kind of learning platform because you learn by
Solving problems and playing games through interactive lessons that are fun don’t feel like work and then the things that you learn actually stick in your head because you figured it out yourself you put the pieces together you worked it out in a way that makes sense to your particular
Brain then you can build on that next thing you know you’re doing competition level Math and Science and the whole world makes sense for the first time in your life or you can just start learning about something that you find interesting like you know I just I talked about
Gravitational waves well there’s a gravitational Physics course that’ll teach you everything from orbital Dynamics to Red shifting and a whole lot more or if the AI thing is more interesting to you they’ve got a course on neural networks and a brand spanking new one on large language model so you can be more
Intelligent on artificial intelligence and there are more courses than you can shake a telescope at covering mathematics data science physics computer science all interactive all fun and all available offline if you’re on the go and if you never tried it you can get 30 days for free if you go to
Brilliant.org anwers withth Joe and the first 200 people to sign up for the premium subscription will get 20% off the annual plan so go to brilliant.org anwers withth Joe and see how fun learning can be there’s a link in the description all right so this was just a quick fun video I just
Kind of wanted to talk about some of the things that happened this last year as a bit of a wrap up but uh I hope you guys had a good 2023 um we always act so battered by the end of the year but uh you know some years are better some
Years are worse but let’s hope the 2024 is a better year for all of us but I think I’m going to just go ahead and wrap this up this is going to be a little cozy just going to keep the Cozy Vibe going here and say I hope you guys
Have a good uh New Year’s Day stay cozy with your family and your friends and uh let’s welcome 2024 on a good note so I’ll be back next week with a more normal Style video not so whatever this is and and I have a lot of fun stuff on the
Way for 2024 and I can’t wait to share it with you guys and I want to thank you guys for being here and I look forward to spending this next year with you so all right have a good one love you guys take care
Video “The Biggest Science Discoveries of 2023” was uploaded on 01/01/2024 to Youtube Channel Joe Scott
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