Five ways science makes the world a better place

REVERSING DIABETES

Half a billion people worldwide live with diabetes. There are different types with different causes, but they all cause people to have too much sugar in their blood. If not properly controlled, this excess glucose can wreak havoc throughout the body, putting people at risk for gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

For now, patients can manage the condition with medications, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease. Details about the first woman to be treated for type 1 diabetes with stem cells from her own body were revealed last month. Beforehand, the 25-year-old required significant amounts of insulin. Now she produces her own.

Photo: Reuters

In April, a similar cell transplant allowed a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes to come off insulin. It is still early days and challenges remain, not least around scaling up the treatment, but the results so far are exciting.

– Ian Example

CANCER VACCINES

Photo: Reuters

Vaccines have been one of the notable success stories of the pandemic. Now scientists hope the same mRNA technology that underpinned the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 jabs can be used to train the immune system to recognize and attack cancer.

These jabs work by delivering an instruction to the patient’s cells to produce a certain protein that acts as a flag for the immune system to target. In this case, scientists are tailoring the vaccine design to proteins on the surface of a patient’s cancer cells.

In August, hundreds of patients entered the world’s first personalized mRNA cancer vaccine trial for melanoma, and trials are underway for pancreatic, colon and other cancers. And since the protection provided by vaccines can be long-lasting, it may be possible to use the approach as a preventive measure for people at high genetic risk for breast or ovarian cancer, and to prevent the cancer from returning.

Photo: Reuters

– Ian Example

AI AND CANCER

The next four years will see rapid advances in using artificial intelligence to better diagnose serious diseases such as lung cancer and brain tumors, which should mean longer lives.

The technology is being rolled out in hospitals, including some in the north of England, to detect cancer faster and extend lives. According to the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation, the system, which scans X-rays and prioritizes cases where it spots something suspicious that the human doctor may have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45 percent and diagnostic efficiency by 12 percent. To trust.

–Robert Booth

OUTDOOR SPACE

In the two years since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the night sky in a series of images that are technically colored masterpieces. It also enables unprecedented discoveries about the origins of stars, black holes, the evolution of the universe and the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos.

The telescope is so powerful that it has observed galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 300 million years old, whose light has traveled 14 billion years, almost the age of the universe itself, to reach us. Capturing light from the first stars to illuminate the sky, long seen as the holy grail of astronomy, now seems within reach. Some of these discoveries turn conventional theories on their head, with the earliest galaxies appearing much brighter or larger than expected and the first black holes appearing to have snowballed faster than can be explained by current models.

In science, strange and unexpected findings are not viewed with disappointment; they are the fuel that powers the next revolution. This telescope promises to do just that for our understanding of the history of the universe and whether we humans are alone in it.

– Hannah Devlin

RENEWABLE ENERGY

The world’s transition to green energy is accelerating. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global energy watchdog, shows that renewable energy projects will be rolled out at three times the rate of the past six years over the next six years. This would put the world on course to exceed 2030 targets set by governments to create a total global renewable energy capacity roughly equal to the existing energy systems in China, the EU, India and the US combined.

In Europe, the solar energy boom caused market prices to turn negative for a record number of hours this summer. Wind developers are preparing to launch a new generation of floating offshore wind turbines to better cope with stronger wind speeds further from the coast.

The wave of green electricity will be led by the clean energy programs of China and India, which would help displace fossil fuel consumption in two of the world’s most polluting countries.

According to the IEA, China will have more than half of the world’s renewable energy sources by the end of this decade, which is already believed to have slowed China’s pipeline of future coal-fired power stations. According to the Global Energy Monitor, the number of new permits for coal-fired power plants in China has fallen from 100 GW in 2022 and last year to just 12 new projects totaling 9.1 GW in the first half of this year.

– Jillian Ambrose