Science

The climate crisis demands solutions. And one of the most promising is hydrogen energy. Hydrogen doesn’t emit CO₂ when burned, only water. But the challenge is how to produce it cleanly. And science has found the answer: green hydrogen.

Currently, 95% of hydrogen is produced from natural gas (“grey hydrogen”), which emits CO₂. But water electrolysis, powered by solar or wind, produces clean hydrogen. The main barrier is cost. Electrolyzers are expensive, with an efficiency of around 70%.

But in 2023, scientists from the Technion (Israel) created a catalyst made of nickel and iron, replacing expensive platinum. This reduced the cost by 30%. The EU has launched the Hydrogen Backbone project – 28,000 km of pipelines by 2030.

Hydrogen is not for cars. Batteries are more efficient for passenger cars. But for trucks, ships, airplanes, and steel mills, hydrogen is indispensable. In 2024, Airbus unveiled a concept for a 200-passenger hydrogen plane.

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In 2019, Google announced quantum supremacy: their Sycamore processor solved a problem in 200 seconds that would have taken a supercomputer 10,000 years. This was the moment when quantum computing ceased to be science fiction and became a new stage in technological evolution.

A classical bit is either 0 or 1. A quantum bit (qubit) is a superposition: it can be 0, 1, or both simultaneously. And entanglement allows qubits to be linked so that the state of one instantly influences another – even over a distance. This violates classical logic but follows the laws of quantum physics.

Why is this important? Because some problems cannot be solved classically. For example, modeling molecules for drugs, optimizing logistics, breaking encryption. A quantum computer is not “faster.” It thinks differently.

Today, qubits are created from superconducting circuits (Google, IBM), ions (IonQ), and photons (Xanadu). But they are fragile: any interaction with the outside world destroys their state. Therefore, they are cooled to -273°C—closer to absolute zero than space.

IBM plans to create a 1000-qubit processor by 2026. But quantity isn’t everything. Quality (low error rate) is key. For now, quantum computers are needed for hybrid solutions: classical and quantum.

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In 2012, a quiet revolution occurred. The AlexNet neural network won the ImageNet competition, recognizing images with 10% higher accuracy than all previous systems. This was the moment when deep learning ceased to be a theory and became a reality. Since then, AI has transformed medicine, science, art, and everyday life.

The essence of this breakthrough lies in the architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They imitate the work of the brain’s visual cortex: they identify edges, shapes, and textures, and assemble them into a coherent whole. But unlike humans, AI can learn on millions of images in hours.

Today, AI diagnoses skin cancer more accurately than dermatologists. It analyzes tomograms, predicts epileptic seizures, and develops drugs. In 2020, DeepMind’s AlphaFold solved protein folding—a problem biologists had been struggling with for 50 years. This accelerated drug development exponentially.

But AI isn’t magic. It learns from data. And if the data is biased, AI will discriminate. For example, facial recognition systems perform worse on darker skin because the training sets were mostly Caucasian. This isn’t a technological failure. It’s a reflection of society.

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In 2015, humanity heard the cosmos for the first time. Not seen, but heard: through the faint ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. These were gravitational waves – predicted by Einstein in 1916 but thought elusive.

The discovery was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Two giant detectors in the United States, each with 4-kilometer-long arms, measured changes in wavelength smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. It’s like measuring the distance to the nearest star with an accuracy of a hair’s breadth.

As the black holes (with masses of 29 and 36 suns) began orbiting each other, they emitted energy in the form of gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second, they merged, creating a ripple that reached Earth on September 14, 2015, at 09:51 UTC. The signal lasted 0.2 seconds, but it changed astronomy forever.

Until then, we studied the universe only through electromagnetic radiation: light, radio waves, and X-rays. Gravitational waves are a new sensation. It’s as if someone who’s been blind all their life suddenly sees the world. We can now “hear” events invisible to telescopes: neutron star mergers, the birth of black holes, even possible traces of the Big Bang.

In 2017, LIGO and the European Virgo detector detected the collision of two neutron stars. 1.7 seconds later, the Fermi space telescope detected a gamma-ray burst. This was the first multi-channel observation, and it confirmed that heavy elements (gold, platinum) are born precisely in such collisions.

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In 2012, the scientific world was shaken by a simple yet revolutionary tool: CRISPR-Cas9. It’s more than just a technology. It’s a molecular “scissor” capable of cutting and replacing sections of DNA with precision down to a single nucleotide. For the first time in history, humanity gained the ability to correct genetic errors underlying diseases previously considered incurable.

The idea wasn’t born in a laboratory, but in nature. Scientists noticed that bacteria use fragments of viral DNA as “memory” to protect against future attacks. The Cas9 system is their “immune system.” Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier realized that this system could be reprogrammed. In 2020, they received the Nobel Prize—the first women to receive it in chemistry.

The essence of CRISPR is simple: scientists create “guide RNA” that finds the desired section of DNA. Cas9 makes the cut. The cell itself “repairs” the break—and if you feed it “corrected” DNA, it will integrate it. It’s like finding a typo in a book and replacing one letter without rewriting the entire page.

CRISPR is already being used in clinical trials. In 2023, the US and UK approved Casgevy therapy for the treatment of sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia, blood disorders that plague millions. Results: 90% of patients were freed from painful crises.

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