Events
January
- 1 January – Detailed telemetry data from the Parker Solar Probe is received, following its passage through the Sun's corona. [1]
- 2 January
- The biggest dinosaur fossil trackway ever found in the UK is reported at a quarry in Oxfordshire, consisting of 200 huge footprints made during the mid-Jurassic. [2]
- Bioengineers at Rice University report having developed a novel "construction kit" for building custom sense-and-respond circuits in human cells. [3] [4]
- 3 January – Researchers report discovering a new class of anti-malaria antibodies. [5] [6]
- 8 January – Scientists publish a comprehensive map of protein locations within human cells, offering potential new insights into how cells respond to infections and other changing circumstances. [7]
- 9 January – The El Capitan supercomputer is officially dedicated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, United States. [8]
- 10 January
- The European Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that 2024 was the world's hottest year on record, and the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold of 1.5°C of global warming. [9]
- The first fully 3D printed microscope is revealed by the University of Strathclyde, made in just a few hours and for a fraction of the cost of traditional devices. [10]
- 13 January – Researchers discover what could be the world's oldest three-dimensional map in a cave in the Paris Basin of France, dating back 13,000 years. [11]
- 15 January – The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft ends its operation after 11 years of mapping the Milky Way galaxy, during which time it made three trillion observations of two billion stars. [12]
- 16 January
- Microsoft researchers publish details of MatterGen, a generative AI tool for materials design. [13]
- The first two-dimensional (2D) mechanically interlocked material is demonstrated by Northwestern University, consisting of 100 trillion bonds per square centimetre, which its creators describe as having exceptional flexibility and strength. [14] Adding just 2.5% of the new material to Ultem boosted the latter's tensile modulus by 45%. [15]
- The air monitoring station at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reports that CO2 jumped by 3.58 parts per million (ppm) in 2024, exceeding the previous record of 3.36 ppm set in 2023. The global atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now at 427 ppm, more than 50% higher than the pre-industrial level. [16] [17]
- 21 January
- Coral bleaching on the southern Great Barrier Reef in early 2024 is reported to have struck 80% of colonies, with some coral genera, such as Acropora , experiencing a 95% mortality rate. [18]
- More than a third (34%) of the Arctic-boreal zone is now reported to be a source of carbon emissions, rather than a carbon sink, a figure that rises to 40% when including emissions from fires. [19]
- The exoplanet WASP-127b is discovered to have wind speeds of up to 33,000 km/h, the fastest jetstream of its kind ever measured. [20]
- 22 January – The second Trump administration imposes an immediate freeze on scientific grants, communications, hiring, and meetings at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – by far the biggest supporter of biomedical research worldwide – impacting $47.4 billion worth of activities. [21]
- 23 January
- Machine learning and 3D printing are used at the University of Toronto to design nano-architected materials exhibiting the strength of carbon steel but the lightness of Styrofoam. [22]
- A study of adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) finds that the condition may reduce life expectancy by 4.5 to 9 years for men, and 6.5 to 11 years for women. [23]
- 24 January – A study by the University of Birmingham finds that electric vehicles now have an average lifespan of 18.4 years, outlasting the average diesel vehicle at 16.8 years and almost matching the average petrol vehicle at 18.7 years. [24] [25]
- 29 January – The European Space Agency (ESA) announces that it has begun monitoring the asteroid 2024 YR4, which at the time had a 1 in 77 (1.3%) chance of impacting Earth on 22 December 2032. [26]
February
- 3 February – Researchers in Berkeley and Cambridge attach copper nanoflower catalysts on perovskite-based artificial leaves for solar-driven hydrocarbon synthesis. Devices can produce ethane and ethylene at high rates by coupling CO2 reduction with glycerol oxidation into value-added chemicals. [27] [28]
- 7 February – Researchers develop an AI chip, smaller than a grain of salt, that mounts on the tip of an optical fibre and uses a "diffractive neural network" to decode images at light speed with very low energy. This breakthrough promises advances in efficient medical imaging and quantum communication technologies. [29] [30]
- 10 February
- The microlensing event MOA-2011-BLG-262L is confirmed to be associated with the highest-velocity exoplanet system detected to date, moving at 541 km/s (1.2 million mph), which is close to the escape velocity for the Milky Way galaxy. [31] [32]
- Following an increase in the impact probability of 2024 YR4 – from 1.3% to 2.1% – the European Space Agency announces that it will use the advanced capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the asteroid, in order to better determine its size and trajectory. [33]
- 12 February
- The WEST tokamak in France is reported to have maintained plasma for 1,337 seconds, a new world record duration for nuclear fusion and 25% longer than a similar effort by China the previous month. [34] [35]
- A new blood test able to detect early-stage pancreatic cancer with 85% accuracy is developed by Oregon Health & Science University. [36]
- 13 February – Scientists at the University of Cambridge report the creation of a solar-powered reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel. [37]
- 15 February – A new record-low global sea ice extent is reported, dipping below the previous lowest that occurred in early 2023. [38]
- 18 February
- The impact probability of 2024 YR4 is raised by NASA, from 2.1% to 2.6% [39] and then 3.1% in the same day. [40]
- The first 3D mapping of an exoplanet atmosphere is achieved by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. WASP-121b (also known as Tylos) is found to have powerful winds carrying elements like iron and titanium, creating intricate weather patterns across its atmosphere. [41]
- 24 February – NASA formally announces that asteroid 2024 YR4 now poses "no significant threat" to Earth in 2032 and beyond, as the chances of an impact drops to 1-in-59,000 (0.0017%). This means a planetary defense mission to intercept and deflect the object in 2028 during a close flyby of Earth is no longer necessary. [42]
- 27 February
- 28 February – An electronic device called "e-Taste", developed by Ohio State University, is shown to replicate the perception of taste, which could enhance virtual reality experiences. [46] [47]
March
- 2 March – Firefly Aerospace successfully lands the Blue Ghost Mission 1 on the Moon as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, delivering payloads to Mare Crisium with instruments to study lunar regoliths and the interactions between solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. [48]
- 4 March – De-extinction company Colossal Biosciences announces the creation of a "woolly mouse" with eight modified genes, expressing mammoth-like traits relevant to cold adaptation and providing a platform for validation of genome engineering targets. [49] [50]
- 5 March – Italian researchers report turning light into a supersolid for the first time. [51] [52]
- 6 March – A study in Science finds that butterfly populations in the U.S. declined by 22% between 2000 and 2020, with 13 times as many species decreasing as increasing, raising concerns about future biodiversity loss. [53] [54]
- 10 March – A study in the journal PNAS finds that microplastic pollution reduces photosynthesis in plants and algae by up to 12%, leading to estimated annual food losses of 110–361 million tonnes of crops and up to 24 million tonnes of seafood. Without action to reduce plastic waste, this could lead to another 400 million people at risk of starvation within two decades. [55] [56]
- 11 March
- The discovery of 128 new moons of Saturn is reported, by astronomers using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope, bringing the gas giant's total number of confirmed satellites to 274. [57] [58]
- Three new rocky exoplanets, all smaller than Earth in size, are detected around Barnard's Star, the closest solitary star to our own Sun at just 5.96 light-years away. Barnard b, a candidate world that observations had hinted at previously, is also confirmed, bringing the total number of known planets around the star to four. [59] [60]
- 13 March – The first image of two PINK1 proteins attached to the membrane of a mitochondrion is obtained, via cryo-electron microscopy, a potential breakthrough in developing treatments for Parkinson's disease. [61] [62]
- 20 March – Oxygen is discovered in JADES-GS-z14-0, the most distant known galaxy, located 13.4 billion light-years from Earth. [63]
- 26 March
- Confirmed aurorae on Neptune are reported for the first time, seen by combining visible light images from the Hubble Space Telescope with near-infrared images from the James Webb Space Telescope. [64]
- A study in The Lancet finds that cuts to foreign aid proposed by major donor countries, such as the US and UK, could undo decades of progress made to end HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, with potentially 10.8m additional new infections by 2030. [65] [66]
- 31 March – GPT-4.5 is reported to have passed the Turing Test. [67]
April
- 1 April – Fram2 launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the first crewed spaceflight to enter a polar retrograde orbit, [68] i.e., to fly over Earth's poles. [69]
- 2 April – The world's smallest pacemaker – able to fit inside the tip of a syringe and be non-invasively injected into the body – is demonstrated by scientists at Northwestern University. The device, measuring just 3.5 millimeters in length, is designed for temporary use and can be made to biodegrade within a set number of days, depending on a patient's needs. [70]
