19 Fascinating Scientific Breakthroughs That Prove the Future is Now
Although we live in an age of doom and gloom, you don't have to be pessimistic.
Published 3 months ago in Wow
Modern science progresses at an exponential rate, and we are much closer to many life-changing breakthroughs than you might think.
Cures to cancer, clean energy, and complete maps of the night sky are right around the corner. Although we live in an age of doom and gloom, you don't have to be pessimistic about the future. Here are 20 recent scientific breakthroughs to give you hope.
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Cabozantinib (Cabometyx) is a chemotherapy drug that may be a new treatment option for patients with neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). The FDA accepted a supplemental new drug application (sNDA) for Cabozantinib in August 2024, with a target action date of April 3, 2025. The drug is intended to treat adults with well or moderately differentiated pancreatic or extra-pancreatic NETs that are locally advanced, unresectable, or metastatic.5
In March, NASA and India are planning to launch NISAR, a next-generation Earth-observing satellite. The idea of using a satellite to photograph the earth and observe changing landscapes isn't anything new, but most take photos in the visible and infrared wavelengths. NISAR will instead use radar, which can penetrate through tree canopies, snow, and other similar materials to give us far more information about the underlying layers.6
We have found a possible treatment for age-related mental diseases such as Alzheimer's by basically reactivating certain healing factors in the brains of rats, and scientists are pretty confident that this should work on humans too. The era of people living to 120-130 is closer than you think, especially when you look at the fact that especially in healthier countries like Japan, there are record high numbers of people living to be over 100.10
Earthquake warning system for up to 2 hours. Permanent GPS antennas are located all over the world and more densely at fault zones. About a year ago geologists found that if they stacked all historical GPS data proximal to large earthquakes, they saw there is a very small acceleration of the surface about two hours before the actual earthquake.12
Geothermal energy. People have figured out how to reuse all the drilling technology developed for fracking to dig geothermal wells almost anywhere. Geothermal has the benefits of nuclear — reliable baseband power — without the downsides. The footprint is smaller, and unlike nuclear power, you can turn it on and off pretty quickly which is important for filling the gaps in green energy when the sun doesn't shine or the wind stops blowing.19
This is rather an engineering issue, but a lot of scientists are working on this as well; RGB microLED displays. We can currently build fairly efficient blue and green microLEDs from indium gallium nitride, but the red ones are missing. Red LEDs have been available for much longer than their blue counterparts, but we currently cannot make them small enough for a high-ppi display. Many researchers and companies are trying to get the red ones working with several different approaches, and I believe we will see the first commercial applications, starting from smart watches, smartphones and AR/VR goggles within the next five years.