REVERSE DIABETES

Half a billion people worldwide live with diabetes. There are different types with different causes, but all lead people to have too much sugar in their blood. If not well controlled, this excess glucose can cause damage throughout the body, putting people at risk for gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputation, heart attack, stroke and cancer.

For now, patients manage their disease with medication, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease. Details of the first woman treated for type 1 diabetes with stem cells taken from her own body were announced last month. Previously, the 25-year-old needed significant amounts of insulin. Now she produces her own.

Photo: Reuters

In April, a similar cell transplant allowed a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes to stop taking insulin. It’s early days and challenges remain, particularly around scaling up treatment, but the results so far are exciting.

— Ian Sample

CANCER VACCINES

Photo: Reuters

Vaccines have been one of the remarkable successes of the pandemic. Scientists now hope that the same mRNA technology that is the basis of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines can be used to train the immune system to recognize and attack cancer.

These injections work by instructing the patient’s cells to produce a particular protein that acts as an indicator for the immune system to target. In this case, scientists tailor the vaccine design to proteins found on the surface of a patient’s cancer cells.

In August, hundreds of patients participated in the world’s first personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine trial, and trials are underway for pancreatic, bowel and other cancers. And because the protection afforded by vaccines can be long-lasting, it may be possible to use this approach as a preventative measure, for people at high genetic risk of breast or ovarian cancer, and to prevent the recurrence of the disease. cancer.

Photo: Reuters

— Ian Sample

AI AND CANCER

The next four years are expected to see rapid progress in using artificial intelligence to better diagnose serious illnesses like lung cancers and brain tumors, which should help extend lives.

The technology is being deployed in hospitals, including several in the north of England, to detect cancers more quickly and prolong lives. The system, which analyzes X-rays and prioritizes cases where it detects something suspicious that the human clinician might have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45 percent and diagnostic efficiency of 12 percent, according to South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation. Trust.

—Robert Booth

SPACE

In the two years since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the night sky in a series of images that are technicolor masterpieces. It also enables unprecedented discoveries about the origin of stars, black holes, the evolution of the universe and the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

The telescope is so powerful that it has observed galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 300 million years old, whose light has traveled 14 billion years, almost the age of the universe itself , to reach us. Capturing the light of the first stars to illuminate the sky, long considered a Holy Grail in astronomy, now seems within reach. Some of these discoveries upend conventional theories, with the first galaxies appearing much brighter or larger than expected and the first black holes appearing to have snowballed faster than current models can explain.

In science, strange and unexpected discoveries are not viewed with disappointment: they are the fuel that powers the next revolution. This telescope promises to do just that for our understanding of the history of the universe and whether we humans are alone in it.

-Hannah Devlin

RENEWABLE ENERGY

The global transition to green energy is accelerating. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global energy watchdog, reveals that over the next six years, renewable energy projects are on track to expand to a rate three times higher than that of the previous six years. This would put the world on track to exceed 2030 targets set by governments to create total global renewable energy capacity roughly equal to existing electricity systems in China, the EU, India and the United States. United united.

In Europe, the rise of solar power caused market prices to fall for a record number of hours this summer. Wind developers are preparing to launch a new generation of floating offshore wind turbines to better capture the most powerful wind speeds further from shore.

The rise of green electricity will be led by China and India’s clean energy programs, which would help replace the fossil fuel consumption of two of the world’s most polluting countries.

China will have more than half of the world’s renewable energy by the end of the decade, according to the IEA, which has already slowed China’s plans for future coal-fired power plants. The number of new permits for coal plants in China fell from 100 GW in 2022 and last year to just 12 new projects totaling 9.1 GW in the first half of this year, according to Global Energy Monitor.

-Jillian Ambroise