Fusion Power

Cartilage Regrowth

Room Temperature Semiconductors

Quantum Computing

    def generate(topic, year):
       return f"Scientists have made a major breakthrough in {topic}"

I’m familiar with Helen Blau, her team is into everything: telomeres and aging, reversing cardiomyopathy, HIV, that team is really hardcore into prolonging and improving lives and wellness.

Heard.

But if even one of their interests panned out it would be paradigm changing for millions and they’re doing it to save your lives not get a updoot on hacker news. They’re all pretty anonymous and understated Imo but i am a great fan and i would love for it to be the “year of” anything they’re studying. I listed a few and I’m sure there’s dozens I’m unaware of.

I’ve been thinking that this stuff is all more closely related than we think and that as they go down one of these paths they’re finding all this other stuff along the way, it’s genuinely fascinating.

Heart disease and failure is one of the biggest ways we meet our ends right now. There’s so much interplay between aging processes, ceasing t-cell production, shortening telomeres , that ties in together with this and im glad they see a bigger picture than me having another 20 years , too winded to stand up and piss or strapped to a bed hooked to tubes and groaning!

Survivor bias of those things that haven't been solved.

Notably absent:

The fat pill HIV fix Cystic fibrosis

We make fun of the stuff that hasn't been solved yet ("It's always ten years away!") while ignoring the things that were previously always ten years away until scientists cracked it.

>Year Of The Linux Desktop

After Win11 Microsoft really did all they could to get us there this year.

I think 'room temperature semiconductors' have been around for a while.

I feel it's unfair to ding Linux on this, even with the implied "slightly less".

I've had Windows as my main personal computer for practically forever, because of games. Before that it was DOS. That changed a couple months ago.

Literally just now--in preparation for this comment--I decided to try something I never tried before: I mounted my Win10 drive, picked an arbitrary old Windows game EXE (2006 "Prey" game demo), and launched it as a "non-Steam game" with just one little drop-down menu tweak... and it launched! I may get 10 FPS instead of 200, but that's more than I expected off the bat.

In the the "years of the Linux desktop" of my youth, I wasn't nearly as optimistic. In terms of more-recent games, I have little reason to keep my old drive for dual-boot purposes except for specific games that go out of their way to interfere with clumsy anti-cheat rootkits.

Don't forget about Alzheimer's disease

Back on /. (way back when!) I read an article about optic nerve regrowth in mice. IIRC a lattice was built, stem cells shot onto it, and some other stuff was done, and a new optic nerve ended up growing.

It involved removing the poor mouses existing eye, so there was no net gain (still had a mouse with only 1 working eye), but I was hopeful progress would be made so I could get myself a working optic nerve.

Nope. No progress in 20+ years. Someone got a paper published and went on and did something else.

It is a relatively uncommon problem, for ~98% of children with a problem with their optic nerve, patching the opposite eye works to force the optic nerve to grow. I'm in the (un)lucky 2%!

Admittedly not the worst rare health problem to have.

Battery tech