2020 beyond COVID: the other science events that shaped the year

By Davide Castelvecchi, Jeff Tollefson, Emma Stoye & Alexandra Witze

Although a single cataclysmic event gained most attention this year — the COVID pandemic — there were many other newsworthy developments in science and research, from daring space missions to room-temperature superconductors.

Destination Mars

It was a landmark year for space exploration. Three Mars missions launched in July, when the geometry of Earth and Mars aligned in a way that made it efficient to send spacecraft to the red planet. The United Arab Emirates launched its first interplanetary mission, Hope, which will orbit Mars and study its weather. China launched Tianwen-1, which includes a rover and is the nation’s first attempt to land on Mars. And the United States sent Perseverance, a rover that will drill and gather rock samples at the as-yet-unexplored Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator. Perseverance is the first stage of a planned NASA/European Space Agency partnership that aims to bring Martian rocks back to Earth for study for the first time.

Political change

It wasn’t just climate scientists who celebrated Biden’s victory in November. Once Biden takes office on 20 January 2021, he will have an opportunity to reverse many policies introduced by the administration of Donald Trump that were damaging to science and public health. As well as more-aggressive policies on climate change and the environment, Biden has promised a more science-led response to the COVID-19 pandemic and pledged to reverse travel bans and make it easier for foreign scientists and engineers to stay permanently in the United States.

In Europe, researchers continued to voice concerns about the potential impacts of Brexit on funding and international collaboration. The United Kingdom left the European Union on 31 January but another important Brexit milestone comes on 31 December, when the nation’s 11-month ‘transition period’ expires. Despite this looming deadline, many issues affecting scientists — including access to EU research programmes — remain unresolved.

Spotlight on inequality

Scientists were among the millions of protesters who gathered around the world in 2020 to denounce racism and police brutality in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May. Researchers shared their experiences of racism in science, and called for stronger action to address systemic inequalities. Many major scientific organizations released public messages supporting the newly energized Black Lives Matter movement. And on 10 June, thousands of researchers, along with scientific societies, universities and organizations (including Nature), stopped work to reflect on and plan how to fight anti-Black racism in science, following an online campaign that urged the community to #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia and #StrikeForBlackLives.

Some universities have now moved forward with plans to change the names of campus buildings, programmes and memorials dedicated to historical figures who had racist or discriminatory beliefs. And researchers are exploring interventions that could help to combat racism and rein in the use of force in police work. In October, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, became the first major biomedical-research organization to commit to making financial reparation for the continued use of cells from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman. In 1951, doctors took cancerous cells from Lacks without her consent, and later created the HeLa cell line, which today supports a multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry.

Physics firsts

It was a year of firsts for condensed-matter physics. Researchers demonstrated a room-temperature superconductor — a material that conducts electricity without any waste heat and that can operate well above 0 °C. The long-awaited breakthrough comes with a significant footnote: so far, such a material can exist only at pressures close to those at the centre of Earth, limiting its usefulness.

Another team found the first definitive evidence for ‘braided’ electronic states, called anyons — a step towards a new way of building a quantum computer. And a physics laboratory aboard the International Space Station produced the first Bose–Einstein condensate — a gas that behaves as a single atom — at zero gravity. The technique could make it possible to reach record low temperatures of 20-trillionths of a degree above absolute zero, enabling longer and more elaborate experiments on such condensates than are possible on Earth.

Meanwhile, the world of pure mathematics was shocked by the official publication of the baffling papers of Shinichi Mochizuki, even though his eight-year-old claim to have cracked a major problem in number theory — called the abc conjecture — remains controversial.

And two major breakthroughs will make it easier to understand the structure of proteins. First, the technique of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reached single-atom resolution, approaching the precision of the well-established — but more cumbersome — X-ray crystallography. Second, machine learning was for the first time used successfully to deduce the structure of proteins from their genetic code in a way that approximates to what experimental techniques can achieve. Structural biologists say the ‘AlphaFold’ system, developed by London-based AI powerhouse DeepMind, a sister company of Google, could be a game-changer for drug discovery.