These are the five most anticipated scientific achievements of 2024

It’s always exciting to review the main scientific achievements of the past year, but there is something that is, if possible, more inspiring: anticipating what the new year has in store for us. Because we have 12 months of discoveries, announcements, launches and astronomical events ahead of us. Many days full of news and 2024 promises to be a great year. Man on the Moon (or almost), mosquitoes turned into biological weapons, the possibility of “weighing” the ghost particle, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and, of course, countless announcements related to the already ubiquitous artificial intelligence. . And it is true that we can wait a few months to meet them, but to be able to satisfy our impatience right now… why wouldn’t we take a look at the calendar?

For the Reason

However, before listing the most anticipated events, we should make a reminder, because unlike most commercial launches in the tech world, science is not governed by such a strict calendar, in fact, scientists themselves want so. But, unfortunately, there are countless failures that can arise during the research or development of a cutting-edge technological product, which we will discuss here. In the aerospace world, delays occur during the day. So much so that a portion of the following milestones may be delayed until 2025. However, this could (most likely) happen during the next 12 months.

we return to the moon

Those famous Apollo missions are a thing of the past and for a long time people wondered why we didn’t return to the Moon. The truth is that we never stop visiting it, but no human has stepped on it for 51 years. We have sent robots and thanks to them we know more about our satellite than ever before. However, NASA has decided to bring back the epic stories of the past with its Artemis Project. In fact, its first mission took place in 2023, in which the agency sent a ship with a fake crew to orbit the Moon.

In 2024 we will take another step in this direction, and the Artemis II mission will send a ship, now piloted by real people. Specifically Christina Hammock Koch, Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen. If all goes as expected, astronauts will be able to orbit the Moon several times, but we will have to wait until 2025 (at the earliest) for humans to set foot on lunar regolith again. And, of course, while that’s happening, other space agencies are also trying to follow in the same steps, so it wouldn’t be surprising if, in a few years, stepping on the Moon loses much of its romanticism. Has been.

A new generation of AI

Artificial Intelligence was the most media scientific/technological topic of 2022, it was again in 2023 and, without a doubt, it will be again in 2024. We can even say this blindly, just by looking at the quick trend that has followed over the years. However, we have much more accurate data, communications in which new versions of the most brilliant artificial intelligence have been announced to be released by the end of 2024. For example, the famous natural language generation model, GPT, is finalizing its fifth version. We still don’t know what it can offer us that GPT-4 doesn’t already offer, but it promises to impress us in the same way as its previous versions.

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