2024 to witness leaps in science: UK journal

LAHORE: The rise of ChatGPT had a profound effect on science this year. Its creator, OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is expected to release GPT-5, the next generation of the artificial intelligence (AI) model that underpins the chatbot, late next year, reports Nature, a British science journal.

GPT-5 is likely to showcase more advanced capabilities than those of its predecessor, GPT-4. Scientists are also watching the rollout of Gemini, Google’s GPT-4 competitor. The large language model can process several types of input, including text, computer code, images, audio, and video. 

A new version of Google DeepMind’s AI tool, AlphaFold, which researchers have used to predict the 3D shapes of proteins with high accuracy, is also due to be released next year. The AI will be capable of modelling interactions between proteins, nucleic acids, and other molecules with atomic precision, which could open up new possibilities in drug design and discovery.

Big questions loom on the regulatory front. The United Nations High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence will share its final report in mid-2024, laying down guidelines for the international regulation of AI.

Aiming for the stars: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is scheduled to begin operating some of its instruments towards the end of 2024, ahead of its planned ten-year survey of the entire Southern Hemisphere sky. With the observatory’s 8.4-metre telescope and giant 3,200-megapixel camera, scientists are hoping to discover many new transient phenomena and near-Earth asteroids.

Also in Chile, the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert will be complete in mid-2024. This next-generation cosmology experiment will look for signatures of primordial gravitational waves—the afterglow of the Big Bang—in the cosmic microwave background. Its telescopes will be equipped with as many as 50,000 light-collecting detectors, ten times more than similar projects currently underway.

Astronomers continue to worry that new ground-based telescope data could be rendered unusable because of an increasing number of bright satellite constellations polluting the night sky with light.

Weaponized mosquitoes: The World Mosquito Programme will start producing disease-fighting mosquitoes at a factory in Brazil next year. The mosquitoes are infected by a bacterial strain that prevents them from transmitting pathogenic viruses and could protect up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue and zika. The non-profit organisation will produce up to five billion bacteria-infected mosquitoes per year over the next decade.

Beyond the pandemic: As the world moves past the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government is funding trials of three next-generation vaccines, two of which are intranasal vaccines that aim to prevent infection by generating immunity in airway tissues. The third, an mRNA vaccine, boosts antibodies and T-cell responses, promising to provide long-lasting immunity against a broad range of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation is due to unveil the final draft of its pandemic treaty during the 77th World Health Assembly in May. The accord seeks to better equip governments worldwide to prevent and manage future pandemics. The 194 WHO member states will decide on the terms of the accord, including whether any of its provisions will be legally binding. At the centre of negotiations is ensuring equitable access to the tools, including vaccines, data, and expertise, that are needed to prevent pandemics.

Moon missions: For the first time since the 1970s, NASA is launching a crewed lunar mission. Artemis II could launch as soon as next November and will carry four astronauts—three men and one woman—aboard the Orion spacecraft for a ten-day flyby around the Moon. Artemis II will lay the groundwork for the subsequent Artemis III mission, which will land the first woman and next man on the Moon. China is also preparing to launch its Chang’e-6 lunar sample-return mission in 2024. If successful, the mission will be the first to collect samples from the far side of the moon.

Missions to explore moons in the outer solar system include NASA’s Clipper craft, which will set off for Jupiter’s moon Europa next October. Its objective is to determine whether the moon’s underground ocean could harbour life. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, planned for 2024, will visit Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos. It will land on Phobos and collect surface samples for return to Earth in 2029.

Illuminating dark matter: The results of an experiment to detect dark-matter particles known as axions will see light in 2024. Axons are thought to be emitted by the sun and converted into light, but the tiny particles have not yet been observed experimentally because they require sensitive detection tools and an extremely strong magnetic field. The experiment BabyIAXO at the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg is using a solar telescope made of a 10-metre-long magnet and ultra-sensitive noise-free X-ray detectors to track the centre of the sun for 12 hours per day and capture the conversion of axions into photons.

And 2024 could be the year that scientists nail down the mass of the neutrino—the most mysterious particle in the standard model of particle physics. Results of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment in 2022 showed that neutrinos had a maximum mass of 0.8 electron volts. Researchers will finish collecting data in 2024 and are expected to make a definite measurement of the tiny particles.

The consciousness debate: round two Next year could bring new insights into the neural basis of consciousness. A large project that is testing two theories of consciousness through a series of adversarial experiments is expected to release the results of its second experiment by the end of 2024. In the first round, both theories failed to completely align with observed brain-imaging data, settling a 25-year bet in favour of philosophy over neuroscience. The second round could bring neuroscience closer to deciphering the mysteries of subjective experience.

Saving the planet: In the second half of 2024, the International Court of Justice in the Hague could give an opinion on nations’ legal obligations to combat climate change and rule on legal consequences for those deemed to be damaging the climate. Although the ruling will not be legally binding, the court’s clout can push countries to strengthen their climate goals and can be cited in domestic legal cases.

Negotiations for the UN plastics treaty, which seeks to establish a binding international agreement to eliminate plastic pollution, will wrap up next year. Since the 1950s, the world has produced 10 billion metric tonnes of plastic, of which more than 7 billion metric tonnes are now waste, much of which is polluting oceans and harming wildlife. But there is growing concern among researchers that the UN negotiations, which started last year, are advancing too slowly and will not accomplish the intended goals.

Super-fast supercomputers: Early next year, researchers will switch on Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The gigantic machine can perform one quintillion (a billion) computations per second. Researchers will use the machine to create ‘digital twin’ models of the human heart and brain for medical purposes and to run high-resolution simulations of Earth’s climate.

Researchers in the United States will install two exascale machines in 2024: Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Scientists will use Aurora to create maps of the brain’s neural circuits and El Capitan to simulate the effects of nuclear-weapon explosions.