In the past three years, scientists haven’t received the accolades and attention they deserve. The focus on COVID-19 has made the world forget about many other things. However, many scientists and researchers have been making different discoveries in the background. Different scientific discoveries have come up in recent years, from AI advancements to life-creation achievements. Here are five of these notable discoveries.
Life created without eggs or sperm
It’s no news that scientists have been making efforts to create life in the lab without sperm or eggs. Research in Israel has marked an advancement in the study of how stem cells form different organs.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, created mouse embryos in a bioreactor made up of stem cells cultured in a Petri dish. Without sperm or eggs, the embryos developed a beating heart on the eighth day, becoming the first fully synthetic mouse embryos.
An improvement in heart health
High cholesterol levels mostly cause heart diseases, so statins are prescribed to minimize cholesterol in the heart. However, some people cannot take statins because of the muscle aches they give them. Well, there’s now another effective option.
Bempedoic acid, a daily pill, can effectively reduce the risk of heart disease. People with negative reactions to statins can use Bempedoic acid; the fact that it’s activated only in the liver implies a lesser likelihood of causing muscle aches.
The use of AI for visibility
Artificial Intelligence is finding its way into different non-tech or science-related industries. These days, urban planners, reconstructive surgeons, and artists can use AI to create visual forms of their ideas with the recently reported DALL-E 2.
About two months ago, Open AI released DALL-E 2, an image generator. It can view hundreds of millions of captioned images and convert written text prompts into images. This improvement reduces cost and saves time by limiting trial-and-error rates.
A new possibility for an HIV cure
The story of the fifth person to be cured of HIV has given scientists new hope concerning the virus. It has proven that although it will be difficult, it’s not impossible to completely eradicate HIV from the body.
The cured man had a stem cell transplant ten years ago after being diagnosed with severe blood cancer. His bone marrow transplant gave him stem cells resistant to HIV; there have been no traces of the virus in his body for four years. While stem cell transplants remain highly risky, the cure is a new hope.
Impacting the trajectory of an asteroid
While asteroids haven’t been significantly causing damage to the Earth, they will always hit us. NASA has been trying to prepare for whatever asteroid that may be coming our way, and it has recently made headway after this mission.
On the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, NASA hit a 525-foot diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, with its 1,100-pound spacecraft at 14,000 miles/hour. The asteroid’s orbit time changed from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 32 minutes, proof that the trajectory slightly changed.