As 2023 rolls to a close, Knowable Magazine has looked back over its articles and canvassed editorial committee members from the 51 academic journals — covering analytical chemistry to vision science — published by Knowable’s parent company, Annual Reviews. From good news to bad, from novel vaccines to insect invaders, this year left us with much to ponder. Here we present 12 newsworthy developments from 2023.
Jabs for hope
Hot on the heels of the COVID-19 vaccine success story (including updated jabs that target Omicron subvariants of the rapidly shifting virus), 2023 saw the greenlighting of several new vital vaccines. Abrysvo and Arexvy, the first vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a cold-like virus that can be dangerous for the old or the young, are now available in the United States and elsewhere. And the World Health Organization has recommended a second malaria vaccine, R21, following RTS,S in 2021. RTS,S has already been given to nearly 2 million children in Africa; the new vaccine is about half the price.
This double hit against malaria is a “huge win” for kids, says Matthew Laurens, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who wrote about malaria vaccines in a 2022 opinion article for Knowable. “Like COVID-19, we need multiple malaria vaccines if we’re to succeed in combating this deadly disease.”
Scary smarts
One of the biggest newsmakers of the year was artificial intelligence (AI). San Francisco tech company OpenAI’s conversational bot ChatGPT, first launched in November 2022, was estimated to have more than 100 million monthly users by January 2023. People were simultaneously impressed and appalled by the capacity of AI based on deep learning (a technique inspired by the human brain) to write everything from poetry to class essays and research papers.
“In terms of public interest, I have not seen anything like this in my 30-year career,” says Colin Phillips, a psycholinguist at the University of Maryland and co-editor of the Annual Review of Linguistics.
WATCH: ‘Godfather of AI’ discusses dangers the developing technologies pose to society
Rapidly improving AI has left governments, scientists and consumers alike wondering how best to harness its abilities and guard against its misuse, including the deepfakes now featuring in scams and propaganda. International leaders agreed to work together to guide the technology at the UK’s AI Safety Summit in November — hoping to get regulations in place before computers grow smarter than people.
Wild weather
News reports of broken heat records are starting to sound like, well, broken records. But 2023 really was a standout: The planet had its hottest year on record. As of October, it was about 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1850–1900 average, topping the previous greatest above-average heat bumps of about 1.3 degrees C in both 2020 and 2016.
This extreme heat of 2023 resulted from both long-term climate change trends and the year’s El Niño, a natural climate pattern that, overall, tends to make the world warmer. This was the hottest summer since recordkeeping began in 1880, and September was by far the most weirdly warm month ever seen.
Everything electric to end emissions
In December, delegates at the United Nations climate change convention discussed the first official inventory of our actions to combat global warming. The “global stocktake” concluded that while the world is making some progress and it will be possible to reach the Paris goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, leaders are going to have to accelerate action to get there.
For now, fossil fuel production remains too high for climate targets. But a Climate Analytics report says that there’s a 70 percent chance that greenhouse gas emissions will fall in 2024, making 2023 the “peak” year. Of course, getting away from fossil fuels means ramping up alternative energy sources. Renewables are soaring — particularly solar, and particularly in China.
“Climate change is no longer about our grandchildren or polar bears — it is here, and now affecting everyone, everywhere on the planet, but especially devastating for the poor.”
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