How often does something work exactly as planned and live up to its hype? In most parts of the world, it’s like tripping over a unicorn with a couple of winning lottery tickets clenched in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and first images of the Webb telescope.
Indeed, there was a lot of good news from the world of science, with a steady flow of fascinating discoveries and enticing potential technologies – over 200 individual articles attracted 100,000 readers or more, and the topics covered came from all areas of science. Of course, in the face of a pandemic and climate change, not everything we wrote was good news. But as the top stories of the year show, our readers found interest in a remarkable range of topics.
10. Fauci on the rebound
For better or for worse, Anthony Fauci has become the public face of the US pandemic response. Some trust him for his sympathetic, outspoken advice on managing the risk of infection — and others slur him for his vaccine advocacy (plus a handful of conspiracy theories). When Fauci himself ended up on the wrong end of risk management and contracted SARS-CoV-2, that was news too, and our Pandemic Specialist Beth Mole was there for that.
It turns out the course of his infection was a metaphor for the pandemic itself, where every silver lining seems to come with a few additional gray clouds. Fauci took Paxlovid, a drug that was developed as a result of very rapid scientific work discovering the structure of viral proteins and then identifying molecules that might fit into that structure. Because of its design, Paxlovid quickly and effectively suppresses the SARS-CoV-2 infections that cause COVID-19.
But once again there are those gray clouds: once the treatment cycle is over, many people experience a relapse of symptoms for reasons we are still working on. And Fauci was no exception, having symptoms so severe that he went back on the drug to come off it — even though it wasn’t recommended by the Food and Drug Administration.
9. Fear the Magnetar
Neutron stars are probably the most extreme objects in the universe (black holes are an aberration in space-time rather than an object in themselves). They are places where the tallest “mountains” are less than a millimeter high and cracks in the crust can produce violent bursts of radiation. They are also places where the interior is a superfluid of rapidly circulating subatomic particles.
But in a handful of these stars, conditions become even more extreme, as any charged particles inside the superfluid can create a dynamo like the one in Earth’s core that creates our magnetic field. Except a little stronger. Well, as Paul Sutter puts it, 1016 times stronger. These are the magnetars, a short-lived state of some neutron stars (they last about 10,000 years, which is short for astronomy).
There are many ways a neutron can kill you, given its intense gravity and tendency to emit deadly radiation. But magnetars have an additional trick: they end the chemistry. The magnetic fields are so strong that they can distort the atomic orbitals that determine how different atoms stick together to form chemical bonds. When you get within about 1,000 kilometers of a magnetar, this distortion becomes so severe that the chemical bonds no longer work. All your atoms are free to wander about as they see fit, which is not conducive to life in general.
8. The SLS: a mixed triumph?
This article was a personal musing from Eric Berger, who has been reflecting on the changes in NASA and the launch vehicle industry since he began covering both about two decades ago. Most of NASA’s budget has been dominated by the Space Launch System, which finally made its maiden flight this year, sending hardware into orbit around the moon and returning for a pristine splashdown.
After this launch, one might expect the play to focus on that success. Instead, Berger argued that the program’s many failures — myriad delays and cost overruns — transformed the entire launch vehicle industry, giving small companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin a chance to thrive while their incumbent competitors focused on getting the most out of SLS contracts . Without the problems of SLS, Berger argues, the vehicles that will eventually lead NASA into a successful future of human exploration might never have been built.
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