Technology: The ultimate player
AlphaGo has been going from strength to strength. In January, it emerged that DeepMind鈥檚 Go-playing AI had been lurking incognito in online Go tournaments and secretly beating some of the world鈥檚 top human players. And in May it beat Ke Jie, the world鈥檚 number one player, in Wuzhen, China. Finally, in October, DeepMind unveiled a new version that hones its considerable skills by playing against itself. Three days and 4.9 million games later, AlphaGo Zero is unbeatable.
Technology: GPS spoofing attack
Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS, we revealed in August. The GPS on board a ship off the coast of Russia put it more than 32 kilometres away from where it really was. At least 20 ships were affected. It seems to be the first documented use of GPS misdirection.
Technology: Weaponised propaganda
Could Facebook really tip the balance in an election? In July, we got the first suggestion that it could. A study that created Facebook ad campaigns tailored to certain groups showed how AI can direct political campaigns at people based on their personality and political interests, potentially influencing their vote.
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Health:听Turn back time
In January, we reported on Hanadie Yousef鈥檚 work on mice at Stanford University. She has developed an antibody that blocks the harmful effects of a protein that builds up in the blood with age. Then in March we revealed that Hartmut Geiger at the University of Ulm, Germany, and his team had rejuvenated stem cells in the blood of old mice using a bone marrow protein. The race is on to develop a blood rejuvenation drug.
鈥淭he race is on to develop a drug that can rejuvenate older people鈥檚 blood, restoring its stem cell properties and removing harmful proteins鈥�
Health: Editing our genome
We uncovered results from the first study to use CRISPR genome editing in normal human embryos in March. The team in China had corrected genetic mutations in at least some of the cells of three embryos. Then we revealed in May that as many as 20 human trials of the technique for diseases in adults were imminent, mostly in China. These included the first to edit cells with CRISPR while still inside the body.
Health: Remember this
In July, Christine Denny at Columbia University and her team revived forgotten memories in mice with Alzheimer鈥檚-like symptoms by activating the neurons in which memories were stored. Perhaps Alzheimer鈥檚 just makes memories harder to access, rather than destroying them.
Earth: Climate of fear
The effort to stop climate change hit the buffers in 2017. Donald Trump announced that the US would leave the Paris climate accord, though in practice it is committed until 2020. Emissions of greenhouse gases began rising again after holding steady for three years, and the fraction of our energy that comes from non-fossil fuels has barely changed in 25 years. Finally, the climate models that best fit the observations predict 15 per cent more warming than is generally expected.
鈥淚t is now completely clear that our best models predict more warming than the average model鈥�
Earth: Humans are how old?
It seems our species is almost twice as ancient as we thought. For decades anthropologists have believed that Homo sapiens evolved 200,000 years ago. But H. sapiens-like skulls from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco have now been dated to between 250,000 and 350,000 years ago. The find rewrites our history.
Earth: Now we are three
For years, we thought only two species of orangutan existed: the Bornean and the Sumatran ones. But it turns out there are three. The Tapanuli orangutan was unveiled in November. It is the seventh non-human great ape. But the population is only 800 and they live in an area smaller than London.
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Space and Physics: Cassini鈥檚 swan song
In September, NASA鈥檚 Cassini spacecraft ended its 20-year mission in spectacular fashion by diving directly into Saturn鈥檚 atmosphere, burning up on the way down. The craft was running out of fuel and its fiery demise avoided contamination of nearby moons. We already miss Cassini鈥檚 stunning images of the ringed planet, though they will continue to fuel discoveries for years to come.
Space and Physics: Hidden no more
Half of the normal matter in the universe was missing 鈥� until this year. Made of particles called baryons, this bright stuff was spotted hiding out in tenuous filaments of gas between galaxies, only made visible by combining millions of images.
Space and Physics: A far-off moon
In July, we reported tantalising hints of an exomoon, the first to be detected outside our solar system. David Kipping at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues used the Kepler Space Telescope to find a dip in light as this wannabe moon passed in front of its star. If real, it is probably as big as Neptune and orbits a Jupiter-sized planet 4000 light years away.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩eview 2017鈥�