We asked our regular contributors through e-mail What are some recent scientific breakthroughs/discoveries that aren’t getting enough attention? We got many interesting responses. Here are some of them. We have just copied and pasted their responses, not editing them in any way.
1. You can now do an entire hours worth of MRI scan within 70 seconds because of Swedish researchers who did some coding magic. It’ll be super exciting to see this thing roll out across the world in the coming years.
The article in Swedish: https://www.dagensmedicin.se/artiklar/2018/11/20/en-mix-av-bilder-ger-snabbare-mr/
– NettleGnome
2. Earlier this month, scientists were able to successfully weld glass and metal together using ultrafast (on the order of picoseconds, which are such a short unit of time that compared to it, a full second might as well be 30,000 years) laser pulses. This hasn’t been successfully done before due to the very different thermal properties of glass and metal. This is actually a pretty big breakthrough in manufacturing and could lead to stronger yet lighter materials.
– Metlman13
3. Pretty recently they started doing tests for an extremely mobile skin grafting machine. It uses a kind of hydrogel out of the patient’s own skin and scans the area of the burn then just prints out the skin.
– redthunder97
4. Archaeologists have uncovered a site that was formed within minutes of the time the Chicxulub comet hit, proving that it really happened, pretty much as expected, and slaughtered millions of animals immediately through both fire and debris from the sky and an enormous tsunami that ripped through the North American Inland Sea. This is probably going to remain the find of the 21st century, that’s how amazing it is: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190329144223.htm
– BoredBeforeMyTime
5. Somebody discovered Alzheimer’s might be a reaction to a bacteria.
Link https://www.perio.org/consumer/alzheimers-and-periodontal-disease
– ageralds1
6. Micro-fragmentation the scientific creation of coral ( take up to 25-30 years) done in 3 years! Helping the ocean and planet survive!
– zo_mol
7. Schizophrenia may start in your bone marrow. One guy got cured of schizophrenia by getting a bone marrow transplant.
And another guy got schizophrenia from a bone marrow transplant from his schizophrenic brother.
https://www.nature.com/articles/bmt2014221
– HockeyCannon
8. 2 more cured of HIV.
– Thenewomerta99099
9. If the final trials go well (they are predicted to and the previous trials have done), MDMA-assisted psychotherapy will soon be an FDA-approved treatment for PTSD. It is administered in a couple of doses over a few weeks and has lifelong effects. The group doing this research got FDA Breakthrough Therapy status for it a few years ago and have been carrying out the phase 3 trials since early last year. They were doing research into the same thing in Israel and it just got approved for compassionate use for PTSD in Israel this month. The organization is called MAPS and they do some really interesting work.
ETA: They are still recruiting people for these trials if anybody is interested. Also clarified it’s MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, i.e. psychotherapy and MDMA used together.
– aprilscarlet
10. We have figured out how to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and now, very recently, how to turn it into solid flakes of carbon again. And not just under highly specific and expensive lab conditions, this process is apparently scalable.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/carbon-dioxide-into-coal
We still need to curb emissions but this does flip the equation quite a bit regarding global warming, allowing us to put some of the toothpaste back into the tube so to speak.
Coupled with wind and solar energy, I predict this will become a major industry by mid-century, and very pure carbon an abundant material.
– einarfridgeirs
