Each year, scientists break new ground in their quest to understand life and the mysteries of the cosmos. Here are eight milestones in 2024 that caught our attention
Reading a fruit fly’s mind
The first complete map of a fruit fly’s brain details all 139,255 nerve cells and the 54.5 million connections between them. It’s the largest brain map made of any animal, even though the fruit fly’s brain is poppy seed–sized (SN: 11/2/24, p. 32). The map could lead to a deeper understanding of how information flows in the brain.
Nuclear timekeeping
Scientific clockmakers debuted the world’s first prototype nuclear clock. Nuclear clocks would base time on fluctuating energy levels in atomic nuclei. While the prototype isn’t a fully operational timepiece, its development showed scientists the precise frequency of light required to set off fluctuations in the energy levels of atomic nuclei (SN: 10/5/24, p. 7). Nuclear clocks could help scientists explore fundamental physics — an area of science teeming with potential discovery.
Panda protection
Giant panda biology took a huge leap forward this year: For the first time, researchers transformed the bear’s skin cells into stem cells that can be coaxed into any other type of cell in the body (SN: 10/19/24, p. 10). Being able to take skin cells and end up with, say, the precursors of sperm and egg cells gives conservationists a leg up in defending giant pandas from extinction by boosting breeding and expanding the bear’s small gene pool.
New nitrogen factory
A eukaryote has joined some bacteria and archaea in the nitrogen fixation club. A type of marine alga has an internal factory that transforms nitrogen into ammonia, a biologically usable form (SN: 4/11/24). The factory probably started as a separate life-form that entered a symbiotic relationship with the eukaryote. Over millennia, the two may have become so intertwined that they became one…
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