By Dr Joseph Milton, the Australian Science Media Centre
It was another big year in science news, as Australia decided to ban kids from social media, considered going nuclear, helped uncover the world's oldest picture story, and approved a genetically modified (GM) banana. In addition, bird flu hit Aussie farmers and egg supplies hard in 2024, although we've been spared the most dangerous strain, for now. We also suffered one of our worst data breaches as online prescription provider MediSecure proved less than secure, while CrowdStrike struck computers down globally in one of the biggest IT outages in history.
Meanwhile, the climate kept on changing, with temperature records smashed throughout the year, and microplastics turned up in every body part scientists checked. As if all that wasn't enough to deal with, an unfortunate pair of astronauts remain stuck in space, while back on Earth, weight loss and diabetes drug semaglutide (Ozempic / Wegovy) started to look like a universal panacea, if you could get hold of it! Scroll down to read about 2024's best and biggest science yarns.
NASA astronauts Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams and Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore got a lot more than they bargained for when they boldly went to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Boeing Starliner in June. The ride out passed without a hitch, but it soon became clear they wouldn’t be boldly going back to Earth anytime soon because the Starliner was dangerously defective. They’d signed up for an eight-day jaunt to test the craft, but the unfortunate travellers have now been stuck on the ISS for five months, unable to return home until February next year when they’ll hitch a ride on a SpaceX Dragon craft. While obviously not ideal, their original mission was a success -they did test Starliner, and found it had multiple helium leaks and faulty thrusters. Fortunately for the intrepid pair, the craft successfully docked with the space station despite this, and Boeing’s return capsule slunk back to Earth with its tail between its legs, sans astronauts, in September. Luckily, both are seasoned space farers – Suni has broken spacewalking records and Butch was part of the team that 3D printed a ratchet wrench on the ISS in 2014, the first example of manufacturing in space. They’ve remained remarkably upbeat, despite having to deal with ‘space smell’. “We’re having a great time here on ISS," Williams told reporters in July. Let’s hope Butch and Suni can maintain that positive outlook until February.
Is social media a highly-addictive hotbed of misinformation and cyberbullying, or can it have a positive influence on kids’ mental health? This year, a Federal Government Inquiry came to the conclusion that the risks outweigh the benefits for young Australians, and the introduction of an age limit for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X was announced in September. In November, that minimum age limit was set at 16, and we learned the ban will be enshrined in law, with cross-party support and endorsement from every state and territory in the country. Social media firms will be charged with enforcing the ban, and it’s hoped an ‘exemption framework’ will encourage them to develop age-appropriate, safe platforms for young people. Unsurprisingly, social media companies were not supportive, and some Australian experts believe an outright ban is not the way to go, arguing that it fails to address underlying societal problems that contribute to some of social media’s issues, and risks marginalising Australian youth. The ban is expected to come into effect in about a year’s time.
In July, Aussie and Indonesian researchers announced they’d found the oldest known evidence of storytelling through art in a limestone cave in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and it shows we’ve enjoyed a pork chop for more than 51,200 years. The researchers said the painting is at least that old, more than 5,000 years older than the previous oldest cave art, after making the discovery using a new technique that involves cutting tiny fragments of the art from the cave wall using lasers. Wafer thin layers of calcium carbonate have formed on top of the art since it was created, and the lasers allowed the researchers to map these layers in unprecedented detail to determine their precise age. It stands to reason the art must be at least as old as the oldest layer that’s formed on top of it, giving them the minimum age of the painting. The painting portrays a pig, with its mouth partly open, and three human-like figures, at least two of whom appear to be brandishing stick-like weapons. The third human figure is upside down with its legs in the air – perhaps after being charged by the understandably upset porker. Older cave art exists, but it portrays geometric patterns, making this the oldest example of an abstract representation of the real world and of storytelling through art, the authors said.
Another year, another set of climate records smashed. In January, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record and that greenhouse gas levels hit new highs, with temperatures already close to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. An Australian study in February and an international study in November found we may have passed that milestone already, suggesting the climate is changing much faster than we thought. Australia sweltered slightly less than the rest of the world in 2023, according to a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) report released in February, which found it was Australia's equal eighth-warmest year on record. But the global records were confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in March, which also reported new records for ocean acidification, sea level rise, and Antarctic ice and glacier retreat. Then, in June, NASA reported that every month of the previous year was the hottest recorded. This continued into July, when the WMO and Copernicus both announced it was likely the 14th consecutive month of record-breaking heat and the hottest month ever recorded. We learned more about the Australian situation in October, when a joint report from CSIRO and the BOM found eight of the nine warmest years on record here have occurred since 2013, leading to more frequent extreme fire weather and longer fire seasons across large parts of the country. Warming oceans around our coasts lie behind recent coral bleaching episodes, the report said, with the summer of 2023-24 reported as the worst on record for the Great Barrier Reef by Australian authorities in April. Then in November, the WMO said 2024 was shaping up to be the warmest year on record. Scientists were united and unequivocal in their response – the only way to prevent planetary catastrophe is to urgently wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
Originally developed by pharma firm Novo Nordisk in 2012 to treat type 2 diabetes, 2024 was the year it started to seem like there was nothing semaglutide (sold as Ozempic or Wegovy in Australia) couldn’t do. When it became clear that this ‘wonder drug’ was an effective way to lose weight without any effort, demand soared, leading to ongoing shortages in Australia and around the world. In March, Australian researchers said their new, faster method for manufacturing the drug could help address that problem. As the months passed, research suggested semaglutide could be useful in treating a surprisingly wide range of conditions, from Parkinson’s and kidney disease to heart problems, cancer, fertility, and even addiction. However, there were also suggestions that it may have some worrying side effects, including increasing the risks of an eye condition and several gut problems. Semaglutide mimics the behaviour of a naturally occurring hormone, glucagon-like peptide-1, in the body. This hormone is released after a meal to signal to your brain that you’re full, so the drug fools us into eating less. That explains weight loss, but what about all the other conditions it appears to help? Well, the truth is we don’t really know, although many of its positive effects are likely the result of losing excess weight. However, we do know that, while the natural hormone is short-lived, semaglutide survives in the body for much longer, and appears to be acting in several organs as well as the brain and gut. That may explain why the drug is rapidly gaining universal panacea status.
Software updates are annoying, but they don’t tend to take out millions of computers around the world and cost the global economy billions, until this year that is. In July, US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to update its Falcon Sensor security software. But the automatic update was faulty and millions of PCs running Microsoft Windows at businesses and other organisations crashed and refused to restart. Carnage around the world ensued as governments, emergency services, hospitals, airlines, banks, servos, and more found themselves facing the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. Within hours, the company had released a new update to fix the problem, but many affected computers had to be fixed manually, so some users were stuck offline for days. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz made a public apology but was ridiculed for offering $10 food delivery vouchers to some software support employees, given the cost of the outage. CrowdStrike was the year’s biggest tech fail story, but Australians were also alarmed in May, when online prescription service MediSecure revealed it had been hacked in 2023, losing the personal data of nearly 13 million Australians, including highly sensitive health information. Unsurprisingly, the government was less than keen to re-hire the company or to bail it out when it declared bankruptcy in June. The entire dataset does not appear to have been published online so far, but some has been found on the dark web, and the entire trove was listed as being for sale after the hack. It’s likely someone has bought it, analysts said, although we have no idea who.
Decarbonising Australia to reach ‘Net Zero by 2050’ was always going to be a challenge. Most have looked to renewables as the solution, but they’re not without drawbacks, particularly consistency of supply. So, this year, the Coalition announced its plan to build seven nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired stations. But 2050 is rapidly approaching, and building full-scale nuclear reactors takes time, so the politicians suggested Australia start with small modular reactors (SMRs), which it said could be online by 2035. They suggested extending the lifespan of existing coal-fired stations to keep the lights on until nuclear is online. But independent reports that looked at the economics and science of nuclear suggested the plan could be hard to pull off. Numerous hurdles would have to be overcome to turn the vision into reality, including the need to overturn federal and state moratoria on nuclear power. The Coalition said going nuclear would reduce power prices, but CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released a report in June which found full-scale nuclear would cost almost twice as much as renewables, and SMRs would be even pricier, suggesting nuclear might increase rather than decrease our bills. And in July, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) released a report about the feasibility of using SMRs. While cautious in its assessment, the report identified a huge stumbling block – operational SMRs don’t yet exist, so to meet that 2035 target, Australia would have to become an ‘early adopter’, a risky and potentially expensive gamble. Reliable and tested SMRs are likely to become available later, the report found, but probably not until the late 2040s, too late to help us reach Net Zero by 2050.
Plastics, once considered a ‘wonder material’, have started to look a lot less fantastic in recent years. Microplastic pollution is by no means a 2024 phenomenon, but this year researchers found the tiny plastic specks in human brains, penises, testicles, placentas, urinary tracts and arteries. How these plastic fragments are affecting our health remains unclear, but the study on human arteries, released in March, found people whose blood vessels contained microplastics were 4.5 times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke, or to die than those without them. And the animal world wasn’t spared – in February, Australian scientists reported finding microplastics in the muscles and intestines of sharks in Queensland, while US researchers found them in the breath of wild dolphins in October. We can expect to see ‘wide scale harm’ from microplastics over the next century, Australian and UK experts warned in September. It’s a threat recognised by the United Nations in its Global Plastic Pollution Treaty, which it’s hoped will become legally binding this year.
Bird flu hit Aussie headlines in May when the H7N3 strain of the virus was detected at a poultry farm in Meredith, Victoria. Then, another strain, H7N9, was confirmed in nearby Terang, and the following month, the H7N8 strain was found at farms in New South Wales and Canberra. The outbreaks spread to 16 farms and led to the deaths of around two million chickens, devastating farmers and leading to egg shortages across the country. There are dozens of strains of bird flu, and these H7 subtypes are lethal in chickens, but unlikely to pass on to wild birds or other animals. So, they’re not as big a worry as the strain of bird flu that’s been hitting global headlines all year – H5N1. First detected in China in 1996, this strain hasn’t yet affected Australia, despite our first human case in June, when a two-year-old girl who caught H5N1 in India returned to Victoria. She recovered and the disease was contained, but scientists said it’s only a matter of time before the strain arrives and spreads here. H5N1 spreads easily to wild birds, which have carried it far and wide, even reaching the Antarctic. It’s killed billions of chickens globally and recently mutated, boosting its ability to infect other animals. It’s since been found in more than 200 mammals, including cats, dolphins and dairy cows this year. And close contact with cattle has allowed the disease to spread to humans in the USA. Scientists’ biggest concern is that, as cases in humans become more common, H5N1 could start to spread from person to person, potentially causing a new global pandemic.
Genetically modified (GM) foods remain a controversial topic, but this year we saw the first government approval for a GM fruit in Australia, a blight-busting banana. The banana, called QCAV-4, was developed by Australian scientists to tackle the devastating effects of Panama Disease tropical race 4 (TR4), also known as fusarium wilt, which has already crippled banana production in Asia, has a foothold in South America, and affects bananas grown in the Northern Territory and North Queensland. The disease is caused by a fungus that can hide in the soil for more than 50 years, and the Cavendish bananas we know and love are particularly vulnerable because they are all genetically identical – every banana plant is a clone of a seedless plant first grown in the 19th Century, which is why commercial bananas don’t contain any seeds. The scientists introduced a single gene to their banana from a wild relative to reactivate its dormant disease resistance, and trials in the Northern Territory have shown it works. If a banana apocalypse sounds like scaremongering to you, you might like to consider that it’s happened before. The world's first widely sold banana, the Gros Michel or ‘Big Mike’, was wiped out by the same disease in the 1950s and 60s, leading to the introduction of the Cavendish variety we’re familiar with today.
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Contact: Joseph Milton
Phone: +61 8 7120 8666
Email: info@smc.org.au