5 Major Scientific Achievements Of India And The World In 2019

Like the other years, in 2019, we have witnessed a lot of scientific discoveries bringing great benefits to our lives and proving the endless capabilities of human beings. Here’s the list of the most important achievements in science in 2019.

Capturing the first-ever image of a black hole

This year, for the first time ever, scientists managed to capture an image of a black hole, which holds so much gravity that it sucks light. Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of telescopes, was behind the generation of this image.

To capture this image, the telescopes took readings from across the globe at the same time. they managed to image the black hole that’s situated 54 million light-years from Earth, that the center of the Messier 87 Galaxy.

According to Ayan Banerjee, IISER Kolkata, this discovery not only validates but also celebrates science.

Exploring the Moon

2019 also marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Amstrong. Meanwhile, Chandrayaan 2 is the first attempt of India in sending a rover to the moon, which the entire country hoped to succeed. Though the mission didn’t end up the way we wanted, its orbiter remains functional and sends important data to ground-based scientists.

In January, China launched the Chang-e4, which became the world’s first spacecraft to safely land on the dark side of the Moon. Currently, its Yutu-2 rover still operates, moving across the Von Karman crater and collecting data.

Redefining brain death

Microbiology has also had huge achievements in 2019. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine successfully restored the cellular function of the brains in 32 pigs that had died hours ago. This achievement marked a revolution in brain disease treatment and redefined ‘brain death.’ They created BrainEx, a system that’s identical to a dialysis machine, to restore the oxygen and circulation flow to a dead brain.

Google developing a quantum computer

This year, Google made headlines when it claimed to have created a quantum computer, named Sycamore, which can take only 200 seconds to conduct a task that would take a traditional system 10,000 years to do. The company claimed its quantum supremacy over the world’s most powerful supercomputers by solving a problem that’s considered almost impossible for conventional machines to solve.

AI got smarter

AI also underwent big leaps this year. Artificial intelligence has not only got smarter regarding emotional and facial recognition, but it has also helped in speeding up and improving processes in medical sciences, which used to take longer with human intervention.

Stanford University’s researchers created an AI algorithm that takes only seconds to scan Pneumonia from an X-Ray. Normally, that process takes about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, Pluribus AI bot, which was developed by US-based Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with Facebook AI, won over leading professionals in six-player Texas hold’em poker.

With such big leaps, science in general and current science, in particular, is playing a vital role in the existence and development of the world. Science contributes to all aspects of our lives, like industries, medical, healthcare, transport, space travel, home science, etc. Every year, India has a day to celebrate the importance of science to our lives, its called National Science Day, which falls on February 28th. The celebration includes many activities such as science model exhibitions, lectures, quiz competitions, debates, research demonstrations, live projects, watching the night sky, science exhibition based on themes and concepts, science movies, and public speeches. And in this ear, there are a lot of places in India where we can study the field such as IITs, IISc, and PSG College of Arts and Science.