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(Credit: mfame.guru)
A recent news article published in the Guardian speaks about the 10 biggest science stories of 2022 — chosen by scientists.近日，英国《卫报》发布了由十位科学家选出的2022年度十项重大科学进展。从重返月球任务到快速充电电池技术突破，从推动全球平等获得早期天气预警到包容性科学的发展，成果涵盖了各个领域。
The Dart and Orion missions
DART拦截小行星和猎户座任务
[Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at Open University]
The joint Nasa-Esa mission Dart (Double Asteroid Re-Direction Test) was an ambitious attempt to alter the trajectory of a small asteroid (Dimorphos) as it orbited a slightly larger asteroid (Didymos), by sending a spacecraft to crash into it. In October, we learned that the mission had been even more successful than anticipated, and that the orbit of Dimorphos had changed – showing that we could, if given sufficient time, alter the path of an asteroid if it were on a collision course with Earth.
今年10月，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）宣布，“双小行星重定向测试（DART）”航天器成功碰撞目标小行星“迪莫弗斯”，并改变其原有运行轨道。这表明，人类有能力改变即将与地球相撞的小行星的轨道。
As well as asteroid activity, our moon has been in the news, as a destination of choice for a new generation of astronauts. This year, it is 50 years since the Apollo 17 mission, the last time a human set foot on the moon. So it is a cause for celebration that Artemis, another joint Nasa-Esa programme, has started its operation to return people to the moon. The first phase of the mission, the Orion capsule, was launched in mid-November, and successfully returned to Earth last week. The capsule is designed to hold up to six astronauts - though there were non on board this maiden flight around the moon. We can now look forward to a series of increasingly complex flights of Orion – culminating in a crew of astronauts landing on the moon as soon as 2025.
此外，月球作为新一代宇航员的首选目的地登上热门新闻榜。NASA和欧洲航天局的联合项目“阿尔忒弥斯”（Artemis）计划，开始了将人送上月球的行动。任务的第一阶段“猎户座”太空舱（Orion capsule）于11月中旬发射，并于近期成功返回地球。太空舱被设计成最多可容纳6名宇航员，最终，一组宇航员将在2025年登上月球。
Covid’s boost to immune research
吸入式新冠疫苗
[Sheena Cruickshank, professor of biomedical sciences and public engagement at the niversity of Manchester]Vaccine technology has seen an unprecedented acceleration in innovation that could soon be benefiting us in a host of ways... Designing any new vaccine takes a long time, significant investment and a lot of eager volunteers, all of which was accelerated during the pandemic, resulting in a host of novel developments.新冠大流行期间，疫苗研发的速度前所未有。免疫学研究领域也取得了巨大进展。Another approach we could soon see is the use of sniffable or inhalable vaccines – mucosal vaccines. These are already used in China to tackle Covid-19 and may offer long-term protection against respiratory viruses. They are also much more appealing for those of us who are needle-phobic. If these new developments deliver on their promise, then one day soon the calls for annual shots could be a thing of the past.
吸入式疫苗可诱导黏膜免疫。这类疫苗已经在中国用于应对新冠病毒，并可能提供针对呼吸道病毒的长期保护。对于有“针头恐惧症”的人来说，这类疫苗更具吸引力。如果这些新型新冠疫苗效果达到预期，那么很快每年的加强针注射将成为历史。
AI reveals new antibiotics
人工智能助力抗生素发现
[Eriko Takano, professor of synthetic biology at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology]Antimicrobial resistance is a major global threat. 抗菌药物耐药性被世界卫生组织列为人类面临的十大公共卫生威胁之一。Developing new drugs that overcome resistance and replenish our arsenal of effective antimicrobials is a continuous struggle. And that is where AI is now beginning to make a major contribution. For example, Yue Ma and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences used machine-learning techniques originally developed for natural language processing to identify antimicrobial peptides encoded by the genome sequences of microbes in the human gut. The algorithm identified 2,349 potential antimicrobial peptide sequences. Of these, 216 peptides were synthesised by chemical methods, and 181 of them were shown to have antimicrobial activity. This is an impressive success rate, which would not have been possible without the aid of AI.抗菌肽（Antimicrobial peptide, AMP）是传统抗生素的公认替代品，因为它们不太可能引发耐药性；然而，只有数量有限的这类分子进入临床实践，其中数十个正在进行临床和临床前试验。中国科学院的马越和他的同事使用机器学习技术来识别由人类肠道微生物基因组序列编码的抗菌肽。该算法识别出2349个潜在的抗菌肽序列，其中，216个多肽是通过化学方法合成的，181个具有抑菌活性。该团队利用人工智能克服抗药性、补充了有效抗菌剂库，与此同时得以开发新药且成功率惊人。
Early weather warnings
推动全球平等获得早期灾害预警
[Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University]We now have the technology to see many of these natural hazards coming, days in advance. And yet 2022 has been full of lethal events. And yet 2022 has been full of lethal events. In Europe, more than 20,000 people died from record-breaking heat this summer, hitting more than 40C (104F) across England for the first time. In August, one third of Pakistan was underwater during a monster monsoon season, killing 1,700 people. Global heating is making these types of disasters worse.尽管科技能让人们提前预警自然灾害，但今年世界各地的极端气候事件仍造成巨大的死亡和破坏。今年夏天欧洲有超过20000人死于创纪录的高温。8 月，巴基斯坦三分之一的国土淹没在水下，造成1700人死亡。全球变暖加剧了气候灾难。This is why the key scientific story from the past year is not cutting-edge research or hi-tech engineering, but the push by the UN secretary general António Guterres for the world to have equal access to early warnings. Alerting people to danger, so they can take action, is the best way to prevent tragedy. We need equal access to skills and systems that were pioneered years ago. Critical, too, is the leadership to share information and act on the warnings that ensue.联合国秘书长安东尼奥·古特雷斯致力于推动世界平等获得早期预警。早期预警可提醒人们注意危险、采取行动，防止悲剧发生。人们需要平等获得多年前就开发出来的预警技术和系统。强有力的领导也很关键，要能够分享信息并对随之而来的警告采取行动。Inclusive inroads
包容性科学的进步
[Ann Phoenix, professor of psychosocial studies at the UCL Institute of Education]This year saw a small but important advance in the treatment of sickle cell disease. This development brings hope to millions of people worldwide, but predominantly in Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South America.今年，镰状细胞病治疗取得了微小但重要的进展。虽然研究仍处于早期阶段，但这一进展为世界各地，尤其是非洲、印度次大陆和南美的数百万人带来希望。This was also the year when Nasa’s Artemis mission, which aims “to land the first woman and first person of colour on the moon” by 2025, put female torsos Helga and Zohar into space to test the effects of radiation on the grounds that women appear to be at a greater risk from space radiation than men. This may seem unremarkable, but it was only in 2022 that a Swedish research team designed a new crash test dummy representing an “average woman”, rather than a scaled-down version of the male dummy that is the size of a 12-year-old girl.
今年，NASA的“阿尔忒弥斯”计划目标是在2025年前将第一位女性和第一位有色人种送上月球，以测试辐射的影响。瑞典的一个研究团队研制首个基于女性身体构造的汽车碰撞测试假人，从而可不再使用缩小版男性假人。
Developments such as these excite hope of inclusive science where gender, ethnicity and location neither privilege nor exclude. 这些进步激发了包容性科学发展的希望，在这种科学研究中，性别、种族和地点既不享有特权，也不被排斥。Elite mathematicians
数学界的“诺贝尔奖”
[Prof Nira Chamberlain, president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications]The Fields medal recognises outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work. Often described as the Nobel prize of mathematics, it is awarded every four years to recipients under the age of 40. 今年，被称为“数学领域的诺贝尔奖”的菲尔茨奖颁给了4名年轻数学家。Congratulation to Prof James Maynard, who was awarded a Fields medal this year for his "spectacular contributions" to analytic number theory, "which have led to major advances in the understanding of the structure of prime numbers and in Diophantine approximation".获奖者之一、英国牛津大学的詹姆斯·梅纳德对解析数论作出了贡献，在理解素数的结构和丢番图近似方面取得了重大进展。Congratulations also to one of the other Fields medallists, the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, the second woman to win the award. She was cited for many mathematical accomplishments, in particular her proof that an arrangement called the E8 lattice is the densest packing of spheres in eight dimensions.乌克兰数学家马林娜·维亚佐夫斯卡也是获奖者之一，她是第二位获得该奖项的女性。她证明了E8格在8维中提供了相同球体的最密集堆积法，并对傅立叶分析中的相关极值问题和插值问题作出了进一步贡献。
Soft cell, hard cell…
新技术改变细胞生物力学研究
[Yanlan Mao, professor of developmental biophysics at University College London]Early signs of diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's are often associated with changes in cell stiffness. This year, two research groups, one from Germany, and one from the US, published separate studies demonstrating groundbreaking improvements in a method to measure cell-stiffness, known as Brillouin microscopy. Developments in this technique this year have significantly advanced imaging speed and resolution, and reduced photo-damage, making the method now widely applicable for observing changes in cell mechanical properties in living animals.癌症和阿尔茨海默氏症等疾病的早期症状通常与细胞硬度的变化有关。今年，来自德国和美国的两个研究小组分别发表了一项研究，展示了一种利用布里渊显微镜测量细胞硬度的方法。这项技术的发展显著提高了成像速度和分辨率，减少了光损伤，该方法现在广泛适用于观察活动物细胞机械性能的变化。This method will provide a powerful tool for early diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis and Alzheimer's. It will also revolutionize how scientists can measure and track the mechanical changes of our cells during normal development, and critically improve our understanding of the importance of mechanical forces in biology.这种方法将为癌症、动脉粥样硬化和阿尔茨海默氏症等疾病的早期诊断提供强大的工具。它还将彻底改变科学家如何测量和跟踪细胞在正常发育过程中的机械变化，并极大地提高人们对机械力在生物学中的重要性的理解。
Quantum entanglement untangled
诺奖颁给量子纠缠
[Saiful Islam, professor of materials science at Oxford University]"Spooky action at a distance." That's what Albert Einstein called quantum entanglement, which is when two quantum particles have to be considered as a single entity, since influencing one of them affects the other even when they are far apart.“远距离的幽灵作用”——这是阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦所说的量子纠缠，即两个量子粒子必须被视为一个单一实体，因为即使它们相距很远，影响其中一个就会影响另一个。In October this year, the three pioneers of quantum information science, Alain Aspect of the University of Paris-Saclay, John Clauser of JF Clauser & Associates, and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna were awarded the Nobel prize in physics for their contributions to understanding quantum entanglement.
今年10月，法国科学家阿兰·阿斯佩、美国科学家约翰·克劳泽和奥地利科学家安东·蔡林格三位量子信息科学的先驱被授予诺贝尔物理学奖，以表彰他们在理解量子纠缠方面的贡献。
Nature positive
企业提出“自然向好”愿景
[EJ Milner-Gulland, professor of biodiversity at Oxford University]The much-delayed 15th meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, which will set a course for nature recovery from now until 2050. Alongside this, companies are making bold commitments to become “nature positive”, meaning that their activities should, overall, lead to nature being in a better state.近期，《生物多样性公约》第十五次缔约方大会在加拿大蒙特利尔举行，这次会议将为从现在到2050年的自然恢复设定方向。与此同时，各企业正在作出大胆的承诺，要变得“自然向好”，也就是说企业活动总体上应该有利于自然。
[Helen Czerski, research fellow at the department of mechanical engineering, University College London]The October Nature paper by Chao-Yang Wang and co-authors described a way to charge energy-dense batteries incredibly quickly – in just a few minutes. It really highlights the phenomenal speed at which battery chemists, engineers and technologists are rising to the challenge.根据10月份发表在《自然》杂志上的论文，美国宾夕法尼亚州立大学王朝阳院士团队首次实现高能量密度锂离子电池10分钟极速充电。这突显了电池化学家、工程师和技术专家正在以惊人的速度迎接电池技术进步带来的挑战。We are also seeing huge progress in battery technologies based on cheap, abundant sodium instead of expensive and relatively rare lithium, as well as methods to make all these batteries far easier to recycle.今年在电池技术方面的巨大进步还体现在基于廉价、充足的钠而非昂贵、稀有的锂开发的电池技术，以及更简易的电池回收方法。![]()
(Credit: Vecteezy)