End of Year Reports, Pays & Tech Storms 📝

🔭 A New Telescope

Popular Science magazine named NASA's James Webb Space Telescope the Innovation of the Year in aerospace technology. The $10 billion Webb telescope is camped hundreds of thousands of miles out into space. 

As a result, “it can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter.”

Basically, a show of how the universe came to be.

🎨 AI Art

DALL-E 2, which Open AI released in July, showed us what Dr. Phil would look like as Goku. It looks at hundreds of millions of captioned images to turn text prompts written by users into images.

The invention pegged by its creators as a device to “democratise art” has brought a whole lot of storms since July. It set up a new industry of AI artist side-hustlers, made digital artists fear for their jobs, and stirred up another debate about AI ethics.

🪞BeReal

The photo-sharing app exploded in popularity this year—jumping from 7.7 million downloads in April to 53 million in October—for its focus on authenticity. 

🤖 A New Chatbot

ChatGPT showed us what it’d be like to have a friend with all the answers (though not always the right ones). There are several ways ChatGPT can make life easier. The AI can be used to help people lower bills, create diet and workout plans, help with meal planning and grocery shopping, create stories, and prepare for interviews. 

The pace with which it gained popularity even made Google nervous.

💉 Malaria Vaccine

Malaria, found in more than 90 countries, kills an estimated 627,000 people every year. Scientists have struggled to develop a highly effective vaccine for years. This year, though, the technology used to create COVID-19 vaccines has helped a research team develop two experimental mRNA vaccines that could reduce malaria infection and transmission.

🫀 A Piggy Heart

On January 7 this year, Bartley Griffith, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Maryland, transplanted a pig heart into a human for the first time. The surgery was successful. The patient, 57-year-old David Bennett survived with the pig heart for 60 days before giving up.  

“Cardiac xenotransplantation,” or the transfer of a heart between species, was first performed in 1964 when University of Mississippi surgeon James Hardy implanted a chimpanzee heart into 68-year-old Boyd Rush. At least eight other similar cardiac xenotransplants took place over the next half-century, none of them quite successful.