Achievements in 2018 When we get to the end of a year there is always a review of what happened during that year. It could be a science review telling us what new breakthroughs in science we experienced, what new cars came out during the year or many other things. Sometimes it is a review of the wars we are fighting, because it seems we are always at war with someone. Other times the stock market becomes the main topic. Speaking of the stock market I love it when I hear so called analysts talking about the market like it is alive. They say things like, “the market decided” or “the market is tired of”. I won’t be getting into any of that today because I intend to discuss the what happened in science for the year 2018. We all know Global Warming is on the mind of scientists everywhere. Scientists have come out with a report stating they have found the ideal limit for a temperature increase for the earth to be kept to in this century. It used to be thought we couldn’t let the earth warm more than 2°C, but it was found this was not good enough and things would be a lot better by keeping the temperature increase down to 1.5°C. To accomplish this goal, it will take a lot of changes and probably a lot of money. Some governments may not be willing to make the effort because it is too expensive, too hard to do, or hurts business. 2018 was the year of plastic bags and plastics of different kinds. Governments pressured some stores into charging money for plastic bags. Some stores sold reusable shopping bags to deter the use of plastic bags and some put paper bags back into use. In a way this is kind of laughable since stores, especially supermarkets have plastic everywhere and without manufacturers using something else for packaging it seems like a waste of time to single out plastic bags. There are places on this planet where rivers and streams are now clogged with plastic products and areas in the oceans which have huge islands of plastic. One of the big deals of 2018 was when scientists reported finding a lake on Mars which was sitting under the south pole of the planet where an ice cap was located. The lake was said to be at least 20 kilometers wide, which translates to 12 miles wide for us Americans. It has been thought for a while there could be underground water on Mars. I always thought it was ironic an old movie titled “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”, may have gotten things right. It was about an astronaut who crashes on Mars and finds huge underground lakes on the planets which are so large they could even be underground oceans. It seems 2018 was the year for speculation about water not only on Mars, but on the moon. We seem to be very interested in ancient races and something was found out by scientists in 2018 about the ancient people who populated Britain. Scientists announced that about 4,500 years ago a mass migration came to Britain and it was so large it replaced nearly every ancient who was there before. When I say ancients, I am talking about those people who erected Stonehenge or were around during that time. They were all overrun according to the experts. It turned out over ninety percent of the gene pool was replaced. We also found out for sure that the ancient races mixed when bone fragments found in Russia showed they belonged to a girl who was part Denisovan and part Neanderthal. It was also found according to DNA samples found the ancient Britains had dark skin, but blue eyes. One of the things we were fascinated by in 2018 were impact craters. Well, we have been fascinated by them longer than that, but we really got interested when we found one which was under the ice in Greenland. It was thought a large iron asteroid impacted there, but scientists were not able to zero in on the time period and the best they could come up with was it happened somewhere between 12,000 years and 3,000,000 years ago. Some scientists think this may have caused the last ice age having blocked the sun’s light with the debris which was kicked up. The dates for the existence of humans keeps being moved back as scientists find older and older examples of tools and such. Along with these dates being moved back some scientists now believe modern humans, homo sapiens, traveled from their locations a lot earlier than first supposed. The jawbone of a modern human was found in Israel and has been dated at 185,000 years old. This is far earlier for humans being there, than first suspected. Scientists now also think modern humans lived beside Denisovans and Neanderthals. The field of space travel improved a lot in 2018. SpaceX made a lot of news by using a reusable rocket which instantly made every other rocket obsolete. No one in the government will admit this however, we have to keep those contracts going. Anyway, there were quite a few private companies getting into the fray this year. A company in Australia named Rocket Lab has gotten in the launch business in a SMALL way. They recently launched a small rocket which was able to carry a bevy of tiny satellites. The shrinking of electronics has created a niche business for companies like this since huge expensive rockets are not needed to launch these tiny satellites and this is also cheaper to do. 2018 was the year we became fascinated with meat created in the lab. We had been trying to create this for a few years, but the impetus reached it peak this year. Previously we were able to create some forms of meat like a hamburger, but the cost was incredible. All this changed this year when an Israeli company announced it succeeded in growing steaks. The company, Aleph Farms says the meat is exactly the same as animal meat. A small steak is said to cost about fifty dollars, a far cry from a one hundred-thousand-dollar hamburger, but still too high and Aleph has said it is now working on getting the cost down. There have been some medical advancements in 2018 and one of the major ones was announced by Stanford University which announced they were looking for lymphoma patients to try out their new cancer drug on. When it was tested on animals it eliminated all traces of cancer in their systems. This could truly be a huge discovery. The FDA has put a new device on the fast track. It checks potassium levels which can kill you if too high and was developed by the Mayo Clinic. Many other new medical treatments and devices are being tested.
|
