2024 was a fantastic year for the fields of science and technology! While not being a massive year for the headlines, we saw extreme promise and acting on those promises in every single sector and field!
Awards and Achievements
The 2024 Nobel Prizes have highlighted some of the most transformative advancements in science, with a notable focus on the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) across multiple disciplines. In physics, Geoffrey Hinton and John J. Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize for their pioneering work in machine learning, which laid the foundation for the AI revolution now permeating industries such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Their contributions have been integral in developing neural networks that power many of today’s AI technologies, making AI not just a tool but a transformative force in science and technology. In chemistry, the prize was awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for the creation of AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures with unprecedented accuracy. AlphaFold has revolutionized structural biology, accelerating drug discovery, enabling better understanding of diseases, and providing insights that were once far beyond reach. This wave of AI-driven innovation is rapidly reshaping traditional fields like biology, chemistry, and physics, and is also creating entirely new opportunities for exploration and discovery. The increasing sophistication of AI technologies has opened new frontiers in science, empowering researchers to tackle complex problems—from designing molecules for new materials to decoding the mysteries of the human genome. As AI continues to evolve, these Nobel laureates represent just a glimpse into the transformative potential of AI, underscoring its crucial role in solving some of the most pressing global challenges and propelling scientific progress into an exciting new era. The 2024 Nobel Prizes serve as a testament to how AI is not just a passing trend but a cornerstone of modern scientific innovation.
Aerospace & Aviation
Overall, 2024 was a good year for space scientists. Using the recently launched James Webb telescopes, NASA scientists imaged a pair of supermassive black holes merging for the first time. It’s not all good news for stargazers, however, as NASA recently announced that the Chandra X-Ray Observatory will be facing large budget cuts that could even shut it down. This decision reflects the difficulty NASA faces in funding its vast variety of space programs. These programs have had a mix of successes and setbacks; the Artemis moon missions were pushed back to 2026 this year due to concerns about Orion’s heat shield, but SpaceX’s Starship rocket (which NASA will use to send humans to the moon) has undergone a series of successful tests this year
SpaceX is one of the biggest companies in modern-day aerospace, and it fields over seven thousand satellites as part of its Starlink constellation. Its successful test launches of the Starship Rocket, which is the largest and most powerful to ever fly, have underscored their efforts to produce economical reusable rockets.
SpaceX, however, isn’t the only massively successful corporation in this field; Boom Supersonic is another up-and-coming name in the world of aviation. Their efforts to field commercial supersonics are progressing rapidly, and they completed the first private supersonic flight since the Concorde in March with their XB-1 technology demonstrator. Their development of the supersonic aircraft Overture has pushed Boom to a position as one of the leading aviation corporations, with over a hundred orders for the passenger plane already filled! Supersonic technologies are also seeing a resurgence in the public sector as NASA and Lockheed Martin tested their quiet supersonic jet X-59 earlier this month.
Artificial Intelligence & Computing
The world is crazy for artificial intelligence. We are living in an age where AI can not only mimic human writing but surpass it; a recent study indicated that people preferred AI poetry to poetry written by humans. 2024 has been the year of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and its associated suite of AI products. Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has continued to impress with its command of computer-generated writing, attracting more than 100 million users a month. OpenAI’s new video generation software, Sora, has likewise taken the world by storm with both its photorealism and hilariously bad grasp on the laws of physics. Google has proffered a counter to this with its own video generator Veo, which supposedly proffers a better understanding of mechanics, but the company’s Gemini bot lags behind ChatGPT in use. Such is OpenAI’s dominance that Apple decided to integrate ChatGPT into its Apple Intelligence assistant, which rolled out earlier in October and will be used in the iPhone 16 and new Mac Studio. The latter has been touted as the perfect desktop computer with its impressively small form factor and competitive performance, boasting an impressive CPU and integrated GPU. Intel unfortunately can’t boast of the same success with its products. The struggling company nearly crashed with the objective failure of its Core Ultra CPUs and has only been buoyed by the success of its budget GPUs, the Arc lineup. However, Nvidia is bearing down on the GPU market with the launch of its 50 series GPU, which boosted its position as the computing power source of the AI world. Given the quickly changing nature of the AI field, 2024 has shaped up to be a rather pivotal year for commercial computing and the development of artificial intelligence.
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