Our distant relatives
Alison George
This time next year, our understanding of our origins will have been transformed.
Molecules in the fossils of our ancestors are increasingly opening a new window on the evolution of the first hominids. Recently, the limits of this approach have been pushed further, with analysis of dental enamel proteins from a 2-million-year-old fossil of the extinct giant ape Gigantopithecus. And DNA as old as 400,000 years has been recovered from hominin ancestors of Neanderthals. So the ability to identify even older skeletal remains looks promising.
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Such techniques could shed light on our extinct cousin Homo naledi. This hominin, discovered in 2013 by Lee Berger, lived around 250,000 years ago. It has a strange mix of modern and archaic features, so it is hard to work out where it should sit on the evolutionary tree. Could it be the mysterious Species X, which we only know about from traces of its DNA in our genomes that suggest we interbred with it some 200,000 years ago?
We could also confirm that skulls found in China belong to the Denisovans, giving us our first proper look at the face of these ancient humans. Another game-changing discovery is on the cards from Berger, too. From the looks of yet-to-be excavated hominin bones he has discovered in South Africa, he thinks he may have found an entirely new species.
Crunch time for anti-ageing
Graham Lawton
It won鈥檛 go down in history as the year we conquered ageing, but events in 2020 will tell us whether or not we鈥檙e finally going to do it.
Two promising drugs are at the final stages of the development process. One clears out old 鈥渟enescent鈥� cells, which have been linked to age-related diseases such as Alzheimer鈥檚 and arthritis. Another mimics the effects of a transfusion of young blood, which has been shown to increase cognition in animals and reduce biomarkers for cancer and heart disease. Both drugs are in clinical trials that, if successful, will see them move into the final phase 3 stage as early as next year.
Neither of these target ageing per se, but they explicitly target diseases of old age, and their inventors think they could eventually be sold as all-purpose rejuvenation therapies. That will take time, but it could start to happen by the end of the 2020s.
A crucial year for our planet
Adam Vaughan
Only time will tell if 2020 will join recent years as the warmest on record, but the temperature is guaranteed to rise at a pair of crucial environmental talks next year.
The UN climate summit in Glasgow in November should be the most important on the issue since the Paris conference in 2015. Ahead of the meeting, countries are expected to submit tougher carbon-cutting plans, to start closing the gap between the 3掳C of warming we are on track for with existing plans, and the 1.5掳C Paris goal.
The other big moment will be the UN鈥檚 biodiversity gathering, hosted by China in October. The aim will be to agree on new targets to stem the loss of biodiversity across the planet. These could include a mission to protect 30 per cent of land by 2030, up from 15 per cent now.
It is likely the climate and biodiversity agendas will overlap next year, as the role of forests and farming in both comes to the fore. 鈥淚 think it鈥檚 a critical year for the planet, not just biodiversity,鈥� says Cristiana Pa艧ca Palmer, the UN鈥檚 former biodiversity chief.
Climate action will be a key issue in the 2020 US election on 3 November, just one day before the US is due to exit the Paris accord.
The tech ahead
Donna Lu
Concerns about foreign interference and the spread of misinformation online will be prominent ahead of the US elections in 2020. Twitter has already banned all political advertising and Google will no longer allow targeted ads based on political affiliations. Facebook has announced measures to remove coordinated networks of fake accounts 鈥� though the company continues to rule out fact-checking political advertising, a widely criticised stance that makes it difficult to stem the spread of misinformation by political groups.
More broadly, privacy and government surveillance will continue to be hot topics in many parts of the world, fuelled in part by the growing use of biometrics such as facial recognition algorithms. China鈥檚 government aims to have its social credit system fully in place next year. This tracks and monitors citizens, assigning them a score based on their social behaviour and credit rating. In the UK, police use of facial recognition technology will be scrutinised, with calls to regulate its employment or ban it outright.
On the streets, we still won鈥檛 see driverless cars in full use, but advances will be made. Tesla plans to activate a self-driving feature in its cars by mid-year, and the company has indicated it will roll out self-driving taxis in some parts of the US. In the UK, the government has committed to having fully self-driving cars on the road by 2021, and the year ahead will see passenger trials on London roads.
Pioneering treatments
Debora MacKenzie
Like every year for the past 200,000 or so, 2020 will see struggles against germs and our own wayward cells. But we will also be turning the tables like never before.
Viruses, usually the enemy, will take out cancer, and stem cells will mend hearts 鈥� at least in the lab. In addition, stem cells will fight Parkinson鈥檚 disease, diabetes and macular degeneration of the eyes in large-scale trials.
Some suspect those and other diseases could all involve covert bacteria. A potential Alzheimer鈥檚 cure based on this hypothesis (see 鈥淎lzheimer鈥檚 disease breakthrough鈥�, page 26), and others involving the bacteria in our microbiomes, will be tested in 2020, as people over 65 reach unprecedented numbers and diseases of ageing become a global emergency.
It will be a crunch year for polio. The wild virus, now in only two countries, won鈥檛 be eradicated until at least 2021. Meanwhile, the weakened live virus used in one vaccine is reverting to its deadly form and circulating more widely. All hopes are pinned on a high-risk strategy: a new, still largely untested vaccine to be rolled out in July.
The Ebola epidemic in central Africa may finally be brought under control in early 2020, barring more of the violence that has hampered and killed health teams. And the first commercially approved Ebola vaccine will go into production in mid-2020.
No such luck for the world鈥檚 remaining pigs, as the lack of a vaccine allows African swine fever to continue rampaging across Eurasia. The virus led to a halving of pig numbers in China this year. In 2020, other continents, notably Australia, will be desperately screening at borders for infected pork.
Also likely in 2020 are more infections resistant to all antibiotics. Researchers have identified potential new antibiotics, but there is little financial motive to bring them to market. In 2020, the UK will launch the world鈥檚 first scheme to address this 鈥� and we may find out if it can break the logjam.
Vaccines can also defeat bacteria. A promising new vaccine for tuberculosis could enter large-scale trials in 2020, and Pakistan will be the first to roll out a new childhood vaccine for typhoid, after the bacteria evolved extreme resistance to antibiotics.
Plastics in our bodies
Graham Lawton
Every time you eat, drink or breathe, you are taking tiny bits of plastic into your body. These are mostly the breakdown products of the billions of tonnes of garbage dumped on land and in the oceans over the past 50 years.
You might assume that swallowing and inhaling tiny particles of plastic is a health risk. That is a plausible hypothesis. As yet, however, that is all it is. But 2020 will be the year we start to find out, as 15 research projects funded by a Dutch health group report their results. They aim to get a handle on five big questions about microplastics and human health: our exposure to and risk from these particles in food and the air, their effects on the immune system, whether they reach our internal organs and their potential as carriers of pathogens.
