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scientific discoveries
And it feels like scientific breakthroughs are coming in every field in every way.
Cars that can drive themselves.
Making movies on phones.
Low-calorie tequila.
We've come a long way, kids.
It just takes an enormous amount of time. But slow and steady wins the race.
Redditor skunkspinner wanted to discuss the life advancements we could soon see, so they asked:
What scientific breakthrough are we closer to than most people realize?
Body Parts
"Growing transplantable organs."
- Willbreaker-Broken1
"Dean Kamen is a company based in New Hampshire that claims they’re about twenty years away from it going live. They’ve only just entered stage one of trials."
- ScurryOakPlusIvyLane
Mouth Growth
"They're hoping that a new drug will be available for use by 2030 that essentially grows your teeth back. It stimulates stem cells in your tooth pulp and encourages growth."
"(Also to my understanding this drug was originally being tested as an Alzheimer treatment in Japan.)"
- Tilting_planet
"I've seen headlines for the past few years about this kind of research. Even though I'm most likely too far gone to benefit from it, I'm glad to see that we're still on a promising path toward a solution. Even though my situation is my own fault, it always cheers me up to know that we're getting closer to making sure no one ever feels bad about their smile."
- weeskud
"I always wondered about this! Our teeth are constantly naturally remineralizing under the right conditions, it’s an equilibrium thing. Fascinating that caries and cavities don’t already heal on their own :( The field of dentistry seems so old-school: yeah here we're just gonna drill that out and put some metal amalgam or polymer over the top. Oh yeah, and that won’t last forever and could fall out. Gl."
- TheGoodFight2015For the Public
"Vaccines for herpes and Lyme's Disease are in deep (successful) clinical trials and should be available to the public very soon."
- SpecialWhenLit
"I worked at a med school over a decade ago, and someone there was working on a herpes vaccine (regular old herpes simplex types 1 and 2), and they said it was "really close" back then."
"And about 20 years ago, several of my friends were in a herpes vaccine trial (we were all really young because, of course, they needed people without prior exposure to the virus). I couldn't do it bc apparently, I was positive for type 1, even though I had never had symptoms. And I still haven't, to this day. I wonder how many people are completely asymptomatic like me."
"Is there somewhere I can read up on the progress that's been made since then? I know it's rare for it to cause serious illness, but it's not completely unheard of."
- Dense_Sentence_370
In the Blood
"A cure for symptomatic rabies! Using monoclonal antibodies, scientists were able to alter the immune response in rat's CNS significantly into infection. You can read the study here."
"This is awesome because before this treatment, once you showed symptoms you were essentially dead. Rabies is also a lot more common in Asia and Africa, with roughly 56k cases a year."
- Juliette_xx
"For anyone interested, the difficulty in treating rabies is that once it's in the brain, it's difficult for anti-rabies drugs and the immune system to get past the blood-brain barrier that protects your brain from things in the blood."
"What they've done here is create a lab rabies virus that doesn't cause disease but can still get to the brain and have engineered it to produce antibodies against the rabies virus. That way the antibodies are now in the brain and can kill the dangerous Rabies infecting the brain."
"Whether it will translate to humans who knows. It's not the first time they've 'cured' rabies in animal trials. Also, it's going to be expensive as hell, and the cost of the currently available rabies vaccines is what's stopping the eradication of rabies in poorer countries in Africa and Asia where 95% of cases are."
- CAEserO
Lifelong Concern
"Curing addiction with a diet drug (GLP-1’s) There have been lifelong alcoholics, drug addicts, people with eating disorders, gamblers, etc who’ve lost all desire for these things while on Ozempic, Wegovy, and Semaglutide. They’re conducting studies already.
- Carrots-1975
One Day At A Time Drinking GIF by INTO ACTIONGiphy
A Head's Up!
"Earthquake warning system up to 2 hours."
"Permanent GPS antennas are located all over the world and more densely at fault zones. About a year ago geologists found that if they stacked all historical GPS data proximal to large earthquakes, they saw there is a very small acceleration of the surface about two hours before the actual earthquake."
"We are literally only missing the technology to make even more precise GPS measures, so we can do this in real-time on singular regions. It is proven that this is an actual thing that happens and we can literally warn of earthquakes within a significant time span."
"And the land movement is so subtle that only by lumping all the data together did the precursor stand out, Bletery says. 'If you just remove one or two quakes, you still see it,' he says. 'But if you remove half, it’s hard to see.'"
"This is not a solution or has saved any lives, but it is an absolutely staggering discovery that will have an insane focus in the upcoming years. https://www.science.org/content/article/warning-signs-detected-hours-ahead-big-earthquakes"
- PTSDaway
Benefits of Nuclear
"Geothermal energy."
"People have figured out how to reuse all the drilling technology developed for fracking to dig geothermal wells almost anywhere. Geothermal has the benefits of nuclear — reliable baseband power — without the downsides. The footprint is smaller, and unlike nuclear power, you can turn it on and off pretty quickly which is important for filling the gaps in green energy when the sun doesn't shine or the wind stops blowing."
"The US government just cleared out almost all the red tape for digging geothermal wells on public land too, basically it is now as easy to dig a geothermal well as it is to dig an oil well."
"They are even looking at using geothermal wells like batteries by pumping water into them and pressurizing them. So when there is an excess of solar or wind electricity, it can be stored in the geothermal wells."
- JimWilliams423
Immuno-infrared Sensors
"Early diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson's, I think. I've been following a story for a few years now of a woman who could smell Parkinson's and is now working with researchers to turn her weird unique ability into an early screening test."
- OutAndDown27
"That actually the topic of my bachelor's thesis :D but we do it with immuno-infrared sensors and a bit of Cerebrospinal fluid or blood. Earlier diagnostics will open up a whole new treatment window for patients before the damage to the brain tissue is bad enough that they show symptoms."
"The research group I am currently in also works on the early detection for other neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's and ALS."
- Octopiinspace
The Cut
"A cure for HIV seems to be on the horizon, some scientists managed to 'cut' it out of cells using CRISPR last year."
- PM_UR_NUDES_4_RATING
"I was part of the team that did this research. I think a big barrier is drug delivery because the latent reservoir is all over the body and you need to target every single cell for this to be a real cure. The central nervous system is also a huge problem because there are long-lived HIV-infected macrophages in the brain and the blood-brain barrier prevents most treatments from getting through. It is still a long way off from being a true cure sad to say."
- Owl_Mae
In the Works
"I have a lot of families that work in different pharma companies. We were recently discussing that there is a very promising treatment for Alzheimer's in the works that could stop the progression of the disease and maybe reverse some of the brain damage. It's still in the testing phase and wouldn't be on the market for years but it's something that would be awesome to be able to use."
- Chickadee12345
Lights On
"This is rather an engineering issue, but a lot of scientists are working on this as well; RGB microLED displays. We can currently build fairly efficient blue and green microLEDs from indium gallium nitride, but the red ones are missing. Red LEDs have been available for much longer than their blue counterparts, but we currently cannot make them small enough for a high-ppi display. Many researchers and companies are trying to get the red ones working with several different approaches, and I believe we will see the first commercial applications, starting from smartwatches, smartphones, and AR/VR goggles within the next five years."
- HeinzHeinzensen
Longer Living
"Synthetic Biology. S**t's going to get weird real soon."
- CompulsiveCreative
"Just started reading the Sci-Fi novel ‘Hyperion’ and this is a thing in the book — life extension treatments where people 100+ look 50, but their minds still go at the same rate."
- quick_brown_faux
Robot Technology GIF by VALERISGiphy
Connections
"Understanding how hormones and mental illness are linked, especially in women who previously were diagnosed with mental illness but who had endocrine disorders. And to add, menopause! In response to the Lancet's awful claim of 'over-medicalization' scores of researchers the world over have doubled down to learn more!"
- roundyround22
"Know someone who battled with depression and anxiety and all was gone when for another reason got treated for hypothyroidism. In a few weeks, he was a completely different person."
"In the last years, there are studies pointing to a relationship between the gut biome and mental health too. We don't know too much yet about how the certain body mechanisms interact with the mind."
- oalfonso
H2O Access
"Large-scale water desalinization. It may seem trivial to most people, but access to fresh water and water purification are the largest problems on the planet. Desalinization has been extremely expensive for years and never has the investment needed to break the scalability barrier."
"Well, our friends in the Middle East claim to have made some huge accomplishments over the last few years thanks to graphene and access to abundant power. Their new plants should be coming online next year."
"Not having to worry about access to clean water would mean massive jumps in agriculture, industrialization, and population."
- sardoodledom_autism
Fully Charged
"A technological leap forward in battery storage capacity, cheaper and lighter weight. This will have the biggest impact on everyday life.
- Next_Dark6848
"I think most people anticipate this. We've been told to expect this imminently for more than a decade."
- ProfessorTallguy
Power Health GIF by AOK NiedersachsenGiphy
Well that all sounds very hopeful.
It's amazing how advancements can be growing in leaps and bounds yet simultaneously at a snail's pace.
Cures for diseases would change the world.
Although that idea can bring along a little sadness.
If only they'd have come along sooner.
So many loved ones are gone.
But better to hope than wallow.
And excess battery power?
Lord! Yes, please!
So close, yet so far.
I wish there was a cure for impatience.