Five science developments to watch for in 2024

Advanced AI tools
Many people predict that OpenAI, the company that released GPT-4 last year, will debut its next generative AI model GPT-5 sometime this year. Naddaf also predicts that Google will deliver more with their competitor Ultra Gemini, as well as their DeepMind tool AlphaFold, which helps researchers to design new drugs by predicting 3D shapes of proteins.

Weaponized mosquitos
Maybe you’ve heard of this. Apparently disease-fighting mosquitos are a thing, and these ones are infected with bacteria that prevents them from transmitting viruses like Zika or Dengue. The nonprofit organization World Mosquito Program will start producing millions of them in a Brazilian factory this year and release them into the wild with the hope of reducing transmission and protect “up to 70 million people” from dengue fever alone over the next 10 years. Now if we could just stop them from ruining our outdoor barbecues soon, too.

Moon missions
Naddaf explains that NASA will send its first crewed lunar mission to the Moon since the 70s, Artemis 2. This will set the groundwork for Artemis 3, which aims to land the first woman and next man on the Moon. And China’s Chang’e 6 mission, slated for May, will be the first to collect samples from the far side of the Moon.

Neural basis of consciousness
What's the diff between perceiving something and being aware or conscious of perceiving it? Last year, this project made worldwide headlines when it shared the results of its first experiment to test two theories on the neural basis of consciousness. Well, neither of the two theories completely matched with the brain imaging data received. The first round favored philosophy over neuroscience, but the group may release the results of a second experiment at the end of this year, and perhaps shed more light on solving the big puzzle of consciousness. No big deal.

Superfast computers
2024 is set to be a “bumper year” for speedy computers. Europe will turn on its first exascale supercomputer called Jupiter, which can perform one quintillion computations per second. It will be used to create digital twins of the human heart and brain, as well as run high resolution simulations of the Earth’s climate. In case you were wondering, America already has an exascale supercomputer called Frontier, but this year it will install two more called Aurora and El Capitan to create maps of the brain and neural circuits, and to simulate the effects of nuclear weapon explosions.