Dr. Nanadkumar M Kamat
A doctorate in Micro-biology, is a scientist and science writer.
This being the last column of the year, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic it would be pertinent to know what science achieved despite the global scare and turmoil unprecedented in modern history. Amazingly science did very well and it was proven that if the challenge is big the scientists could also rise to the occasion and come out with several anti-COVID-19 vaccines in
a record time.
As the year is ending the good news on the anti-COVID-19 vaccine front is contrasted by the emergence of a new variant of the coronavirus in the UK and Republic of South Africa (501.L2). We are still in the dark whether the new variants from the UK and South Africa would follow the same trajectory as COVID-19 out of Wuhan, Hubei, China. If that happens 2021 would witness pandemic 2.0 but if both these countries contain this new variant within their borders then it would end as
an endemic.
The year 2020 was marked by several sample return missions. We had excellent space missions in 2020 with OSIRIS-REX topping the chart by a successful sampling of the surface material of the asteroid Bennu and the Japanese scientists successful in retrieving another sample from asteroid Itokawa. China stunned the world this month by successfully completing a mission to collect and return samples from lunar regolith. This complicated robotic mission puts China now as a front runner in lunar exploration and exploitation. The astronomers regretted the collapse of the world-famous Arecibo observatory and once again China came forward with the offer of their giant radio telescope available for international researchers next year.
The Nobel prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna who had discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using these, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. Scientists successfully mapped boiling plasma on the surface of the sun in unprecedented details. Astronomers could study Comet 2I/Borisov which had visited from outside our solar system.
Not everything on the earth is as old as the earth because when scientists looked at the Murchison meteorite, they found stardust which was seven billion years old. For the first time evidence of seismic activity called ‘Marsquakes’ was found on Mars by robotic geologist InSight. Palaeontologists made a phenomenal number of fossil discoveries in 2020, including the oldest skull of an extinct human species Homo erectus in South Africa dating two million years. A huge turtle fossil was found in South America. A 555-million-years-old worm-like creature’s fossil is now the oldest known ancestor of all animals. Scientists are also looking at the possibility of extracting 70-million-years-old
dinosaur DNA.
The private sector showed its might in space technology in 2020. SpaceX successfully demonstrated in May 2020 its Crew Dragon a private vehicle which delivered astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Elon Musk unfolded his big plans for the Mars mission in 2020. A huge leap was made using software based on Artificial Intelligence when DeepMind’s AlphaFold programme solved the protein folding problem requiring millions of computations. This is a revolution in protein bioinformatics and protein-based drug design. Room temperature superconductors became a reality when a team led by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester New York demonstrated it. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of all visible matter.
When scientists working on the LHCb collaboration at CERN observed a type of four-quark particle never seen before it opened a new area of research in such strange particles never encountered before. The cold atom lab on the International Space Station produced a fifth state of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate under microgravity thus allowing more detailed research on this elusive state which is not possible on Earth due to gravity.
The discovery of Phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus was considered as a biosignature but this claim was challenged and the matter has not been settled to prove that Venus is still without some kind of microbial activity. India announced a mission to Venus – Shukrayan to be launched in 2024 with a spacecraft in the orbit for four years. ISRO has also planned a lander mission to the moon attempting a soft landing in 2021 after learning from the mistakes made in the aborted September 2019 mission.
In 2020 India became the fourth nation in the world to have its independent regional navigation satellite system (IRNSS). Only the USA, Russia and China have such a capacity. ISRO also launched a 42nd communication satellite successfully increasing the capacity of its transponders. COVID-19 pandemic delayed Aditya-1 India’s mission to study the sun. However, ISRO would launch Brazil’s earth observation satellite – Amazonia in early 2021 along with three Indian satellites. India’s ambitious human space flight – Gaganyan has been delayed by a year. Science got a setback in 2020 because thousands of scientists across the world were forced to work from home. Many big projects had to be rescheduled and postponed.
But 2020 also created a large number of job opportunities in software development and online learning and working platforms. The new employment opportunities created by the pandemic in areas like data analytics is good news for 2021. And the research on anti-COVID-19 drugs and vaccines has also shown the huge scope for research in antiviral drugs and medicines giving a boost to life sciences. In 2021, the world would be better prepared for any new pandemic.
Courtesy: The Navhind Times, Goa. www.Navhindtimes.com