“What Scientific Breakthrough Are We Closer To Than Most People Realize?” (29 Answers)
Article created by: Viktorija Ošikaitė
Science is awesome. It helps cure diseases, prolong our lifespans, and improve our quality of life. Just recently, surgeons in the U.S. transplanted a pig kidney into a man. Last year, scientists finally successfully sequenced the Y chromosome, which could potentially help solve numerous health issues, including infertility in men.
Perhaps inspired by how fast science is moving, one person decided to enquire about other discoveries that humanity might be able to celebrate soon. “What scientific breakthrough are we closer to than most people realize?” they asked. So, if you’re in need of some positivity in your life and want to see what the human mind is capable of, check out what these people shared below!
I have a lot of family that works in different pharma companies. We were recently discussing that there is a very promising treatment for Alzheimers in the works that could stop the progression of the disease and maybe reverse some of the brain damage. It’s still in testing phase and wouldn’t be on the market for years but it’s something that would be awesome to be able to use.
A cure for symptomatic rabies! Using monoclonal antibodies, scientists were able to alter the immune response in rats CNS significantly into infection. This is awesome because before this treatment, once you showed symptoms you were essentially dead. Rabies is also a lot more common in Asia and Africa, with roughly 56k cases a year.
Earthquake warning system up to 2 hours.
Permanent GPS antennas are located all over the world and more densely at fault zones. About a year ago geologists found that if they stacked all historical GPS data proximal to large earthquakes, they saw there is a very small acceleration of the surface about two hours before the actual earthquake.
We are literally only missing the technology to make even more precise GPS measures, so we can do this in real time on singular regions. It is proven that this is an actual thing that happens and we can literally warn of earthquakes with a significant time span.
> And the land movement is so subtle that only by lumping all the data together did the precursor stand out, Bletery says. “If you just remove one or two quakes, you still see it,” he says. “But if you remove half, it’s hard to see.”
This is not a solution or has saved any lives, but it is an absolutely staggering discovery that will have an insane focus in the upcoming years.
https://www.science.org/content/article/warning-signs-detected-hours-ahead-big-earthquakes
Large scale water desalinization
It may seem trivial to most people, but access to fresh water and water purification are the largest problems on the planet. Desalinization has been extremely expensive for years and never has the investment needed to break the scalability barrier.
Well, our friends in the Middle East claim to have made some huge accomplishments over the last few years thanks to graphene and access to abundant power. Their new plants should be coming online next year.
Not having to worry about access to clean water would mean massive jumps in agriculture, industrialization and population
Targeted cures for neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS etc). I’m currently doing my PhD in a new style of vaccine for AD and the advancements that have been made in the last few years are incredible. Immunotherapies really are the next major step aside from gene editing.
Edit to clarify wording: as several replies to this comment have stated, “cure” is a strong word. There has been a big shift in recent years towards a more preventative approach in treatment research, rather than reactive treatments. Unfortunately with neurodegenerative diseases, by the time you’re seeing the symptoms, it may be too late to effectively treat the condition (as is the case with AD and Parkinson’s, I won’t comment too much on MS as it is admittedly a bit out of my field, though the general principles are similar in terms of *my* research). So rather than “curing” the condition after it has already manifested and presented symptoms, we (and other researchers) are hoping to develop treatments that don’t necessarily halt disease progression, but work to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Sorry for any confusion, hope this clarifies things.
Semaglutide (ozempic, wegovy) in pill form at a greatly reduced price. Wegovy also has been proven to reduce cardiovascular disease in particular and make recurring cardiac events less likely for patients who’ve already experienced a cardiac event. Some independent pharmacies are already creating semaglutide pills.
Psychedelics as a treatment for mental illness. We are going to improve our ability to actually help people instead of offering them meds and crossing our fingers.
Understanding how hormones and mental illness are linked, especially in women who previously were diagnosed with mental illness but who had endocrine disorders. And to add, menopause! In response to the Lancet’s awful claim of “over medicalization” scores of researchers the world over have doubled down to learn more!
Geothermal energy. People have figured out how to reuse all the drilling technology developed for fracking to dig geothermal wells [almost anywhere.]
Geothermal has the benefits of nuclear — reliable baseband power — without the downsides. The footprint is smaller, and unlike nuclear power, you can turn it on and off pretty quickly which is important for filling the gaps in green energy when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind stops blowing. The US government [just cleared out almost all the red tape] for digging geothermal wells on public land too, basically it is now as easy to dig a geothermal well as it is to dig an oil well. They are even looking at using geothermal wells [like batteries] by pumping water into them and pressurizing them. So when there is an excess of solar or wind electricity, it can be stored in the geothermal wells.
To not be able to trust any digital images, videos, or audio you see anywhere. Politics are going to go straight into a dumpster fire among countless other scandals, relationships, and virtually everything.
Get ready.
Last week we had a major breakthrough.. the creation of goldene . A single atom thick layer of gold (like the carbon / graphite variant created a few years back). But this one can reverlutionise the electronics industry
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01118-0
Artificial wombs. Already have “bio bag” wombs used on premature sheep and pigs. Soon to go to human trial for premature babies in the USA. Probs eventually will be able to support a Fetus earlier and earlier in gestation over time. Cool stuff 😎
Genetic editing. I think we’ll soon see news of “experimental gene therapy” treatments for cancer, diabetes and, perhaps, Alzhemiers. CRSPR-9 and all. The next logical step would be designer babies.
With the ~~LIGO~~ JWST space telescope, we are learning far more about our universe that the Hubble’s visible-light telescope could not capture. It is not like what we thought in enormous ways. These changes will matter.
I expect a lot more cancer vaccines coming out. If cancer numbers are reduced, the need for therapies are reduced, too.
This is rather an engineering issue, but a lot of scientists are working on this as well; RGB microLED displays. We can currently build fairly efficient blue and green microLEDs from indium gallium nitride, but the red ones are missing. Red LEDs have been available for much longer than their blue counterparts, but we currently cannot make them small enough for a high-ppi display. Many researchers and companies are trying to get the red ones working with several different approaches, and I believe we will see the first commercial applications, starting from smart watches, smartphones and AR/VR goggles within the next five years.
