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Lancashire Times
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Richard Trinder
Managing Editor
@richardtrinder
1:00 AM 1st January 2025
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Possible Science And Technology Breakthroughs In 2025

2024 has been a tumultuous year for developments in Science and Technology across a multitude of different disciplines. Next year looks certain to continue the explosion with huge breakthroughs poised to hit the mainstream in space research, quantum computing and the much-discussed and, I think, under-hyped area of Artificial Intelligence.

Space

For a few weeks starting on January 21st, the four most visible planets, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, should all be visible to the naked eye. If you have a telescope, you'll see that Neptune and Uranus have joined in this magnificent celestial coincidence and will all line up and form a graceful arc across the night sky.

Photo credit: geralt
Photo credit: geralt
In 2025 there will be a peak in the Solar Maximum. That's not a difficult prediction to make as the Sun follows a pretty rigorous 11 year cycle of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and sun-spot activity, and it should reach a peak this year.

Observers should see more auroras and radiation storms causing power outages, satellite faults and communication drop-outs. These all occur when particles ejected from the Sun hit the Earth's magnetic field.

There will be a number of high-profile space missions launched this year:

NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative aims to deliver science and technology payloads to the Moon using commercial landers. A range of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations will be sent to various lunar sites by NASA's planned CLPS missions. Experiments to investigate lunar geology, test new technologies for upcoming human trips, and collect environmental data on the Moon will be among their payloads.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx, observatory is scheduled to be launched by NASA in February 2025.

Near-infrared light, which is undetectable to the human eye but detectable by specialised equipment, will be surveyed by this expedition. Objects that are too cool or far away to be seen in visible light can be observed with the help of near-infrared light.

SPHEREx will create a comprehensive map of the universe by collecting data on more than 450 million galaxies along with over 100 million stars in the Milky Way.

An ambitious comet probe and asteroid sample return mission, China's Tianwen-2, is slated to launch in May 2025 with the goal of studying a comet and gathering samples from a near-Earth asteroid.

BepiColombo, a joint mission by ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, will make its sixth flyby of Mercury in January 2025. This manoeuvrer will help the spacecraft enter orbit around Mercury by November 2026. BepiColombo aims to study Mercury's composition, atmosphere and surface geology.

NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which launched in October 2024, will make significant progress on its journey to Jupiter's moon Europa. In March 2025, the spacecraft will perform a flyby manoeuvrer at Mars.

ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission will perform a Venus flyby in August 2025. This manoeuvrer will help JUICE gain the necessary speed and trajectory for its journey to Jupiter. Once it arrives, JUICE will study Jupiter's icy moons to understand their potential for harbouring life.

Medicine

Photo credit: TheDigitalArtist
Photo credit: TheDigitalArtist
2025 is likely to see significant progress in the 3D printing of biomaterials to create human organs. Base materials use a patient's own cells, which drastically cuts rejection rates. The technology is advancing more slowly than expected because of the remarkable complexity of the human organs, and there are also some profound ethical concerns about the whole area of bioengineering.

Many predict that 2025 will be a turning point for cancer vaccines, with mRNA technology potentially changing the game once more, as it did with Covid vaccinations.

The clinical pipeline for mRNA-4157, a melanoma vaccine created by Moderna and Merck that is showing promising results in trials, is nearing its conclusion. The vaccine may be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2025.

Through a partnership with Covid vaccine pioneers BioNTech, the NHS's Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad in the UK seeks to expedite the enrolment of thousands of patients in clinical trials for mRNA-based customised vaccines against colorectal, pancreatic, and melanoma cancers.

In August 2024, a new vaccination that prepares the immune system to identify and combat lung cancer was tested on patients for the first time in the UK. More are expected in 2025.

Quantum Computing

Photo credit: TheDigitalArtist
Photo credit: TheDigitalArtist
Google has introduced a new processor that, according to the company, can solve a problem in five minutes that would currently take ten septillion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, for the fastest supercomputers in the world to finish.

The device is the most recent advancement in a field called quantum computing, which aims to build a new kind of incredibly powerful computer by applying the laws of particle physics.

Google claims that its "Willow" quantum processor offers significant "breakthroughs" and "paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer."

2025 promises to be a year where some of the hype surrounding this new technology is augmented with real results. The speed of quantum computers is staggering, but only applicable to very specific types of mathematical problem. Areas of particular interest are in simulating how proposed new drugs interact with human proteins and in the creation of completely new materials. Significant progress in either of these two areas could produce dramatic changes to our fragile world.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Photo credit: geralt
Photo credit: geralt
The pros and cons of AI are on everybody's lips, and evangelists to Luddites are queuing up to predict the positive and negative aspects of this technology. We've already seen some fruits of the work: image creation, voice cloning, 'artwork, 'music' - all produced from a simple text prompt from the user. These, however, are just the toys for people to play with whilst the technology really gets going.

What's next is the roll-out of 'AI Agents', where AI systems have specific expertise about, say, financial trading, or flight schedules, or traffic management and can provide rapid expert feedback to a question. Clearly the next step is to combine multiple Agents so that a broader question may be asked, and that's certain to happen in 2025.

Perhaps even more compelling than the 'artwork' or 'music' from AI systems will be the advent of multiple AI agent systems combined with a memory of previous interactions. These systems will become so much more powerful when a more natural, broken English conversation can be had with them.

AI systems have already passed the 'Turing Test' where any typical observer could not tell if they were interacting with a person or a computer. In the past this has been done via text prompts on the screen. The next stage is to pass this test while talking to the computer, and will almost certainly not be achieved during 2025. The large AI systems are currently too slow, they don't cope well with ambiguous inputs or misunderstandings or sarcasm, and they really don't like being interrupted mid flow. Well, who does?

Many problems exist with large AI systems, not least their opacity. All too often the reasons for decisions made by AI systems simply cannot be determined. When combined with the obvious biases of such systems this will undoubtedly become a recipe for trouble. In addition the massive increase in demand brought on by artificial intelligence workloads is simply too much for today's electricity grids to handle.

Fortunately, 2025 will not see the start of the era of recursive 'self-improvement', where AI systems learn to improve themselves, leading to a potentially exponential explosion in the intelligence of these systems. We all rightly revere Albert Einstein for his IQ of 160. How then will we deal with an entity with an intelligence quotient in the thousands? It is a problem we are likely to face in just a few years time, but not just yet.