16 fascinating breakthroughs of 2024 that weren’t about AI

All the excitement around artificial intelligence can make it hard to notice all the other exciting progress lately that’s been the result of human intelligence.

Of course, it’s getting harder to say what’s not got some bit of AI or deep learning in it. AI is seeping into everything, including scientific and technological discovery, with impacts that we didn’t expect. The tendencies of generative AI to hallucinate and defy explanation are already turning out to be a powerful fuel for researchers. See, for instance, DeepMind’s AlphaFold, now predicting not just protein structures but also how they interact with DNA, RNA, and small molecules; this year the software helped win three of its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Physics prize went to Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called the godfather of modern AI, and John Hopfield, for ​​”foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The number of peer-reviewed papers using AI is on the rise, and those that use AI methods are more likely to be among the most cited. AI is eating science. 

And maybe it arrives at just the right time, because some argue that science and technology aren’t yielding the advances they used to. As AI research draws attention and unprecedented sums of cash, largely in private U.S. labs, the U.S.’s dominance in science in general appears to be slowing. In an address in June, National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt noted that the U.S. has a declining share of the most cited science papers, and the rate at which new drugs and technologies hit the market has flatlined over the past several decades. This is on top of sharply declining math scores. What technological advantage the U.S. has is largely thanks to its legions of visiting foreign workers and students. 

“We literally couldn’t fill our STEM jobs if it were not for these foreign students coming and staying in the U.S.,” said McNutt. No wonder some of Trump’s biggest backers, especially people like Elon, are worried about his immigration policies, which previously made it harder for even high-skilled foreigners to come to the U.S.

The U.S. still leads in terms of published research and public funding for it. But China is about to outpace the U.S. on both counts. China currently files more patents than the U.S. and now hosts more than a quarter of the world’s clinical trials. 

That we’re even comparing reflects a new paradigm in science, too. For decades, global scientific collaboration wasn’t just handy for thawing tensions during the Cold War, but for tackling increasingly complex problems that know no borders and require ever-bigger equipment—think the LHC or the ITER fusion project—the kind that no one country can afford.

Lately, much of that scientific amity has been swallowed by distrust, where progress is increasingly measured instead by economic and military power. “Crushing your adversary” may be a good motivator for engineering progress, especially when it comes to weapons (and there’s been a lot of that lately.) But what other kinds of progress is lost by that logic? 

Fortunately, global scientific collaboration isn’t totally dead. In the holiday spirit—and after over a year of delay by Congress—the U.S. and China just agreed to continue their decades-old scientific partnership for another five years, with new “guardrails” that permit collaborations around nonsensitive and critical domains like weather, oceanography, geology, epidemiology, and pollution. 

Basic science faces other problems, too, including a loss of public trust, which data suggests has dropped sharply since the pandemic. “We’re not even going to keep federal funding for science at the same level it is today if we don’t bring the public along with us,” McNutt said in her speech.

Whatever your trust issues are with science—and however you feel about AI, or the world in general—you might at least enjoy reading about some of the non AI advancements humans made in 2024.

CRISPR therapeutics arrive

Nearly a year after winning approval from the FDA, the first medical treatment that uses the Nobel Prize–winning gene editing technology Crispr was rolled out to patients. Casgevy—a treatment for people with sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia—involves collecting a patient’s hematopoietic stem cells, editing them ex vivo using CRISPR/Cas9 technology to increase fetal hemoglobin production, and reinfusing them into the patient. Clinical trials demonstrated that 93.5% of participants experienced no severe vaso-occlusive crises for at least 12 consecutive months post-treatment. Vertex (which Fast Company named a most innovative company in 2024), says that the first person to receive Casgevy outside of a clinical trial was dosed in the third quarter of this year. Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize for Crispr, told Fast Company that “it’s extraordinary talking to some of the patients,” who are finding the treatment “completely life-changing.”

Still, change doesn’t come cheap: the U.S. price tag is around $2 million. Doudna’s lab is currently working on a more affordable treatment, with clinical trials in process, as well as developing methods to help prevent childhood asthma through microbiome editing, disease-resistant bananas, and more.

New organs work

About 17 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant, but there’s growing hope that pigs could change that math. In March 2024, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston performed the first successful transplant of a genetically engineered pig kidney into a living human. A previous kidney transplant had failed in the patient, a 62-year-old man with end-stage kidney disease; this time he got his kidney from eGenesis, a xenotransplantation startup. After the transplant, and after specialists made 69 genomic edits using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, the new kidney kicked in, and continued to last without signs of rejection until his death a few months later from causes unrelated to the transplant. (The same was the case with another transplant patient at NYU Langone Health, a 54-year-old woman, who also received a pig’s thymus gland to reduce the likelihood of rejection.) In July, surgeons at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston, Texas, performed the first successful human implantation of an artificial heart. The device, the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart, which relies on magnets to reduce mechanical wear, operated for eight days, keeping the patient alive until a donor heart became available. 

New drugs and therapies

Some of the breakthroughs that have been tested and approved include:

• Lenacapavir, a drug that reduces HIV infections for six months with each shot, showed a remarkable efficacy rate of 100% in trials, promising to drive down global infection rates when used as a prophylaxis. Even after decades of progress, no vaccine exists for the virus, which still infects more than one million people annually. Science, which named lenacapavir its 2024 Breakthrough of the Year, noted that the drug’s success sprang from a basic advance: a new understanding of the structure and function of HIV’s capsid protein, which, as in other viruses, forms a shell around its genetic material. That could point the way toward using capsid inhibitors to fight other viral diseases. In March, researchers at the University of Amsterdam also reported the removal of HIV from infected cells in a “proof of concept” using CRISPR technology.
• A new type of gene therapy allowed children with hereditary deafness to regain their hearing, without the use of cochlear implants, according to the results of a clinical trial published in The Lancet in January. At Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, six children with a form of genetic deafness called DFNB9, which is caused by a gene mutation that interferes with the transmission of sound signals, were treated with an inactive virus carrying a functioning version of a gene, inserted into their inner ears. After 26 weeks, five of the six children regained their hearing and could conduct “normal conversation.” The technique points the way toward treating other types of genetic hearing loss for which there is no known treatment.
• A personalized immunotherapy treatment targeting T-cells, designed to help the body’s immune system target solid tumor cells. The agency granted accelerated approval following early-stage trials in which the treatment, Tecelra, developed by modifying a patient’s own white blood cells, was found to be effective at shrinking tumors in 44% of patients.
• The first new class of drug to treat people with schizophrenia in more than 30 years. Cobenfy, manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb, combines two drugs, xanomeline and trospium chloride, and is taken twice a day. Clinical trials showed the combination helped manage symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. Unlike conventional medications, which work by blocking dopamine receptors—and bring unwanted de-motivating side effects—Cobenfy doesn’t directly influence the dopamine system. 

Big twins

In early November, researchers used the world’s fastest supercomputer to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted. The calculations set a new benchmark for what are known as cosmological hydrodynamics simulations, and provide a new foundation for simulating the physics of atomic matter and dark matter at the same time. The researchers, from the Dept of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, relied on approximately 9,000 compute nodes on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and on data from surveys undertaken by large telescope observatories. 

Those kinds of simulations can complement ever-growing collections of actual data. In April researchers from the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National ​​Laboratory reported their first year of results from what they call the largest 3D map of our universe. Based on observations made using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the research has helped measure the expansion history of the young universe with unprecedented precision and is continuing to shed light on the speed of its expansion over 11 billion years.

Tiny twins

In October, a Princeton-led team of scientists reported the first ever complete mapping of the entire brain of a fruit fly, one of the most-studied animals in biological research, with a detail of 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons. The human brain contains more than 80 billion neurons, and in May, researchers at Google said they had made some progress there, too, with a 3D map of a cubic millimeter of the human brain at nanoscale resolution. The map, containing roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses and amounting to 1.4 petabytes of data, complements a high-resolution atlas of the brain’s architecture created by the EU’s Human Brain Project last year.

Quantum leaps

Amid the scramble for milestones like “quantum advantage” and any reason to be excited at all, quantum researchers were still smashing records. In September, Microsoft and Quantinuum reported they had created 12 logical qubits using Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum computer, tripling their previous record. Entangling these logical qubits, they performed fault-tolerant computations with lower error rates than physical qubits, and simulated a chemical reaction using two logical qubits, along with high performance computing and AI, in the first such hybrid approach for a scientific problem. 

In December, Google announced its Willow device, which uses physical qubits, was able to add more computation without also amassing a bigger and bigger pile of errors. With the right error-correction methods, researchers showed they could increase accuracy as they are scaled up, at a rate that exceeds a crucial and long-fought threshold. Google’s qubits—built with what are called transmons, tiny circuits made of superconducting wire—don’t have quite as long lifetimes as IBM’s transmon qubits. But its researchers made advancements with their surface code, the algorithm that governs how error correction is performed on a given quantum computer. The news fueled more hope that within a decade quantum computers will be big enough and error corrected enough to start making real waves in chemistry, physics, engineering, and more. 

That possibly includes breaking the encryption that protects the world’s secrets, which is why 2024 included another first: The National Institute of Standards and Technology officially released three new encryption standards designed to protect against future cyberattacks by quantum computers. The long-awaited standards come roughly eight years after NIST began its efforts at PQC, or post quantum encryption. A RAND article cited by NIST says the threat could even appear . . . within a decade. Hang on to your cats! 

Touching the sun at record-beating speeds

On Dec. 24, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe swooped closer than it ever had before to the sun, just a few million miles above its surface, flying through the solar atmosphere at a blazing 430,000 mph, which is faster than any human-made object has ever moved. With a maneuver that used seven flybys of Venus and a cutting-edge heat shield, Parker has been creeping ever closer to the Sun since its launch in 2018. The data from this flyby—fortunately coming during a moment of maximum solar activity—will help scientists study various mysteries of the sun, including the origin of the solar wind and how the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, can be hundreds of times hotter than the surface below. After two more solar flybys at the same altitude, the primary mission is expected to come to an end in September.

The Moon’s hot again

People started talking a lot about the Moon again. In January, Japan became the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, with its SLIM mission. A month later, American startup Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, Odysseus, became the first commercial vehicle to land on the Moon. (The lander’s Lunar Library—containing a version of the English Wikipedia, art, and selections from the Internet Archive—is projected to reside on the Moon in a readable state for billions of years.) In June, China successfully landed Chang’e 6 on the far side of the moon, collecting about 2 kg of samples of lunar soil and rocks and carrying them back to Earth. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who analyzed the samples found an unexpected resurgence in the moon’s magnetic field strength 2.8 billion years ago, challenging previous findings from the U.S. Apollo mission.

Not to be outdone, NASA is preparing to send astronauts back to the surface, through the Artemis missions from 2030 onwards. Recently the agency pushed back the start of the mission—sending a crew of four on a 10-day voyage around the moon—to April 2026. NASA says its current mid-2027 target