Short Wave - This Year's Top Science Stories, Wrapped

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

2023 was filled with scientific innovation, exploration and new discoveries. A few of the biggest threads we saw unraveling this year came from the James Webb Space Telescope, the changing climate and artificial intelligence. Today, host Regina G. Barber wraps up these three areas of science news with the help of correspondent Geoff Brumfiel and All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro. Got more science news? Email us at [e-mail]. Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Regina Barber here. And this time I've brought Jeff Brumfield, senior editor and science desk correspondent to the show. Hey, Jeff. Hi there. And All Things Considered host, Ari Shapiro. The interloper returns. Okay, so normally we talk through three things that are happening in the science world,

fresh off the journals and social media that's happening this week. But this time we're giving you three big things in science from this year. We'll take through kind of the top three science threads we saw in spooling. We have the science discoveries happening from the James Webb Space Telescope. And fresh off the COP28 conference, we'll talk climate. But we'll start with another really big theme, artificial intelligence. All on today's episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, A.A., should we start with the big one, AI?

Yes, it was everywhere this year, and it seems like everybody was afraid that ChatGPT was going to put them out of a job. no matter what kind of job they had. So eager to hear what you've got. Yeah, so let's talk about medicine for a minute. You know, the AI revolution was already well underway in medicine before chat GPT showed up. People have been developing algorithms to do things like diagnosed diseases and scans and things like that. But with the language models, things are going even further. Some companies are floating systems to try and streamline medical notes and patient records. Others are rolling out programs that can generate correspondence between doctors and patients,

and that's got some researchers nervous. I spoke to Marzier Gassemi, who's at MIT and studies AI uses in healthcare. She cited one example where Microsoft has rolled out software to some hospitals that uses AI to write messages from doctors to their patients. They're allowing it to draft this text as a suggestion of how a person should communicate with their patient. And that worries me. Because it really hasn't been tested. And we know AI can suffer from hallucinations, basically just make stuff up. It can give misleading information.

And there's bias in the training sets that can discriminate sort of unconsciously against different groups of people. But the fact of the matter is there's so much pressure on doctors in the medical system that these sorts of tools are going to get tried. And that's what's happening. Yeah. And in the sciences, AI is already starting to find its place, specifically in fields like chemistry and biology, where researchers have like a huge number of molecules and compounds to test. It can try to find ones that match the researchers' criteria and people can synthesize the candidate chemicals or compounds in real life to see whether they work. And some labs are taking things

a step further. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have built robots that can do some of the synthesis and testing themselves, potentially further cutting down on time. And, you know, as long as I've been alive, I've heard that STEM careers come with guaranteed jobs. What does it mean if AI can do advanced chemistry? I mean, are scientists going to be out of work? Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about jobs a lot this year, as I've been reporting. And I keep coming up against this sort of basic truth, whether AI is being used in medicine, science, or even things like surveillance and national security. It always seems like it comes back to the fact that it works best with a human in the loop. You know, I spoke to Sasha. Luchione, a researcher at an AI company called Hugging Face, and she put it this way.

I don't see generative AI models replacing people, but I can see them, you know, helping people or being used by people in their existing jobs in order to go faster or to be, you know, to have more creative ideas. And our colleagues at Planet Money really saw this firsthand. They used AI to make a series of episodes, and it worked. I mean, it did a lot of the work for them, but it worked best when they, you know, we're giving it feedback. So I think that's something that, you know, we can hold out some hope that they're not just going to take our jobs, the bots. Okay. Well, our second big topic is climate. What have you got for

us? Yeah. So 2023 was a hot year. So hot that once all the data is in, it's expected to be announced that this year was the hottest on record. And I know scientists say if we want to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, humans need to keep global temperatures from increasing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. How close are we to that number right now? The average temperature of the Earth over the last decade was about 1 degree Celsius higher than pre-industrial temperatures, so we're definitely getting close. Yeah, and earlier this year, our colleague on the climate desk, Rebecca Herscher, she reported that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, humans would have to slash greenhouse gas emissions more than 40 percent by 2030.

And we're not on track to do that. Yeah. Even the most ambitious plan, to cut emissions wouldn't get to zero by 2050. So you're right. It's unlikely. But it's not like a cliff where humans are doomed as soon as we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius. We still have a lot of power to limit the negative impacts of climate change. Well, right. A cliff implies that you either go over it or you don't. But if we don't hit 1.5, we have to keep it below 2. And if we don't keep it below 2, we have to keep it below 2. Like, it keeps getting worse, right? Yeah, I mean, that is stressful. But I do want to say it's not all doom and gloom. Like humans are taking action around the globe. And NPR covered some of those efforts during our climate solutions week, like how Uruguay is using wind power and other green energy sources to help power their grid.

98% of the country's grid. Okay, we'll take hope from Uruguay. Let's leave this planet for a moment and check in on the James Webb Space Telescope, which continued sending back incredible images this year. Gina, you've reported on what this means for astronomy. Yeah, so this telescope has given astronomers a view into the early universe, like showing us the earliest galaxy's black hole, stars that we've ever seen. And what they look like is shocking a scientist because they are way more grown up than scientists like astrophysicist Jorge Moreno expected. It's like if you went to a kindergarten and you saw a teenager. For perspective, I mean, galaxies were thought to form about a billion years after the Big Bang, you know, given the universe is around 13.7 billion years old in total.

But now JWST is really testing that hypothesis. Yeah, and also to put these discoveries in perspective, another astrophysicist, Priya Natarajan, pointed out that we have already detected the oldest galaxy, the oldest black hole, just since JWST started its science operations last year. So she's pretty sure we'll discover more record breakers in 2024. Temperature records on climate, age records on black holes. It's a year of records. Ari, thanks for hanging out with us.

Yeah, thanks. Always a pleasure. Before we head out, the end of the year is here, and we're reminiscing a bit here at Shortwave. We've loved bringing you stories and interviews about time, AI, and moon landing attempts in 2020. And we're excited about everything we'll dig into in 2024. Hopefully with your financial support. This is where we want to say a big thank you to all our shortwave plus supporters and anyone listening who already donates to public media. Your support makes journalism possible, and that goes beyond just reporting the news.

We report on events from the perspectives of people living through them and elevate voices that would otherwise go unheard. And if you're listening and not yet a supporter right now is the time to get behind the NPR network, especially with newsrooms, gearing up for an important election year. Supporting public media now takes just a few minutes and makes a real difference in what's possible moving forward. So join NPR Plus, or make a tax deductible donation now at donate.npr.org slash shortwave. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Kai McName. It was edited by Catherine Fox, Omina Khan, and our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Brett Hanson checked the facts, and the audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Puey Lee. I'm Jeff Brumfield. And I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shorewave from NPR.