there have been quite a few groundbreaking discoveries in biology neuroscience space research
and so many other areas of science in recent times that we hardly ever hear about any of them due to
all of the irrelevant viral science posts that actually make the news from a lab-made plastic
eating enzyme that can potentially solve the plastic problem to ai that can read minds these
are game-changing science stories the past few years that you might have just completely missed
number 10. oldest animal ever found the origins of animals is one of the biggest mysteries in biology
we still don't know the first animals to have ever lived on earth in fact it likely happened
so long ago that any type of life existing back then would look vastly different from today
so we don't even really know what to look for while we don't know anything about the earliest
animals ever some scientists were recently able to find the earliest animals that we know of in
a study published in nature researchers found fossils of mesh-like creatures in an ancient
underwater reef going as far back as 890 million years pushing our timeline of the evolution of
animals back by about 300 million years while they resemble some sponge-like creatures that we
find in the oceans today more research is needed to determine if they're related to each other as
we still don't know enough about life back at that time 9. plastic eating enzymes plastic is
one of the most abundant man-made substances found on earth scientists have found traces of
it in rain water beaches glaciers and nearly every type of environment you could possibly think of in
the ocean including the deep sea where even light can't find its way plastic waste makes up about
80 percent of all debris and as you might be able to guess that there is a bit of a problem
the abundance of plastic in the environment doesn't just threaten other types of wildlife
especially marine wildlife but also affects our own food supply the biggest problem is that we
have no way to break plastic down to its chemical constituents so the amount of plastic in the world
just keeps on going up and up it'll be a while before we find a permanent solution to this though
some researchers at the university of portsmouth in the uk recently developed a super enzyme that
could potentially solve the problem at a huge scale it was derived from a bacteria found in a
japanese dump back in 2016 which consumes plastic as food and releases separate chemicals as waste
while it's still too slow to make a real dent in the amount of plastic waste we produce every day
the researchers are hopeful that the super enzyme could be improved to work on a larger scale 8.
crispr cas9 cast 9 is a breakthrough nobel prize winning technology that allows us to precisely
edit the genome in a variety of ways while we know that gene editing is the future crispr cas9
provides the first real pathway to it while it had been in limited use in research labs around
the world for the last decade it wasn't until 2020 that it was actually used on patients in a
clinical trial done at oregon health and science university crispr cas9 was administered to seven
patients suffering from liber congenital amaurosis a severe genetic disorder that causes blindness
while it's too early to tell if it worked as the study is still ongoing one of the patients
reported a definite improvement in her eyesight just a few months after the treatment 7. xenobots
robots made out of real living cells have been a staple of science fiction for
a long time now though we've never actually been able to bring them to life for one there's the
ethical dilemma of whether we should be messing around with manufacturing new forms of life at
all more importantly though the technology to accomplish something like that still
just doesn't exist while it'll be a while before we can build our own replicants from blade
runner researchers from tufts university and the university of vermont recently pioneered a new
technology called xenobots built using stem cells taken from an african frog species these xenobots
were programmed to evolve on their own using ai and machine learning made entirely of skin cells
and heart muscle tissue many of the bots evolved to perform functions that you wouldn't expect
including self-healing swimming walking pushing small payloads and anything else that you can
program them to do 6. mind reading machines being able to read and decode brainwaves sounds like a
device straight out of a dystopian fiction novel of course we already have sophisticated tech that
can read brain waves though we've never been able to develop software that could reliably
tell what they mean until now four scientists from kyoto university in japan recently used ai
to develop a technique that doesn't just decode brain waves but reproduces a scary accurate
visual representation of what we're thinking even from memory they use deep neural networks an ai
technique that works like neural networks in the brain to study brain activity and match it with
images in the real world which was then used on subjects who were shown various images over the
course of 10 months software was able to reproduce the images to a remarkable degree of accuracy
though with a few details changed or modified more importantly it worked when the readings were taken
some time after seeing the images too proving that the technology could one day be used to reproduce
visuals straight from memory 5. a new organ it's difficult to imagine that in 2021 there are still
organs inside the human body that we don't know about in an accidental discovery made at the
netherlands cancer institute researchers found a region behind the nose called the
nasopharynx and it's home to an entirely new type of salivary gland it was previously thought to
contain microbial salivary glands that we already know about though their research is the first to
prove that this is a distinct new type of organ they discovered the glands during a completely
different study on prostate cancer and are still not sure about their true function the nasopharynx
region is also quite hard to access and study which explains why it took so long to find them
number four the mars hum nasa's insight lander landed on the surface of mars in november 2018
with the sole purpose of mapping seismic activity under its surface they had detected some seismic
activity on previous missions and suspected that there's a lot more to find if there were
the proper sensors in place indeed as soon as insight got to work it detected that marsquakes
which is what we're calling them now are actually quite regular and most of them are caused by the
planet cooling and contracting interestingly the lander also picked up a mysterious hum sound
everywhere on mars we know that it falls outside the range of human hearing and may be caused by
some kind of seismic activity combined with the sounds of the atmosphere though that's about all
we know about it it's eerily similar to the kind of hum sound audible on earth we don't know the
true origins of that either 3. seeing through walls x-ray vision is one of those cool things
from science vision that are actually extremely creepy if you think about it for a second however
a technology like that has plenty of useful applications too especially in medicine for
one if doctors and other healthcare specialists could monitor their patients in real time without
the need for special sensors they could be treated much more efficiently while seeing through walls
like it works in the movies would still probably take some time to fully develop researchers at mit
have taken their first steps towards it using artificial intelligence and radio signals they
developed a system to track someone's movement in the next room to a high accuracy only in the form
of stick figures instead of a real-life video feed as the technology is still in its early stages
they've named it rf pose and in all their demonstrations it was able to see what was
happening behind a wall just based on radio waves bouncing off things in that room what's surprising
is that it learned how to do all of this on its own without the help of machine learning as the
scientists never explicitly taught it to interpret radio waves from other rooms 2. a giant reef
most people don't realize how vast the ocean really is and how difficult it is to fully map it
that's why we still find things underwater that we'd never seen before including new species of
plants and animals as well as geological features that we totally missed recently researchers from
the schmidt ocean institute found something similar near the great barrier reef during
one of their missions to explore the oceans around australia it was a giant 1 640 foot tall reef that
had gone completely unnoticed in previous missions as it's a bit away from the main structure
they were surprised by its size at its base the new reef is about 1.5 kilometers or 1.9 miles in
length proving that we still know next to nothing about the oceans beyond our immediate shorelines
1. climate change out of all the science stories of the past few years none is as important or
consequential as the recent reports regarding climate change while weather conditions have been
getting more extreme for a while now the year 2021 saw extreme heat waves floods forest fires
and a slew of other disasters in many regions around the world the most concerning though
is a recent report that found that even if we completely cut emissions right now we've passed
a point of no return global temperatures would likely peak much higher than 1.5 degrees celsius
in the next few decades or faster and unless all carbon emissions are completely stopped by 2050
there's really no way to stop that so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did
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