Science Events to Watch for in 2020

 Climate meeting and human-animal hybrids are set to shape the research agenda

SEE shows the most science events to Watch for in 2020, according to the article of Nature magazine.

Mega-collider dreams

CERN hopes to secure funding for a future mega-collider in 2020. The European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a special meeting of its council in Budapest in May, where a committee will decide on the plans as part of an update to the lab’s European Strategy for Particle Physics.

CERN’s proposal includes a menu of options for a future collider. The lab hopes to build a 100-kilometer machine that could be up to six times as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider and cost up to €21 billion (US$23.4 billion).

In the United States, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, should unveil long-awaited results from Muon g–2, high-precision measurement of how muons — more-massive siblings of electrons — behave in a magnetic field. Physicists hope that slight anomalies could reveal previously unknown elementary particles.

Synthetic yeast

An ambitious effort by synthetic biologists to rebuild baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is due to reach completion in 2020. Researchers have entirely replaced the genetic code of much simpler organisms before — for example, the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides — but doing this in yeast cells is much more challenging because of their complexity.

The effort, called Synthetic Yeast 2.0, is a collaboration between 15 laboratories on 4 continents. Teams have replaced the DNA in each of the 16 chromosomes of S. cerevisiae piecemeal with synthetic versions. They have also experimented with reorganizing and editing the genome — or deleting chunks of it — to understand how the organism evolved and how it copes with mutations.

Researchers hope that engineered yeast cells will unleash more-efficient and -flexible ways to manufacture a host of products, from biofuels to medicines.

Climate homework due

In August, the United Nations Environment Programme will release a major report on the scientific and technical aspects of geoengineering — approaches that could be used to fight climate change. These include pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and blocking sunlight.

Also in 2020, the International Seabed Authority is due to issue long-awaited regulations that will enable mining of the bottom of the sea. Scientists worry that the mining could damage marine ecosystems, with potentially disastrous impacts on already stressed environments.

But the big event on climate will come in November, when the COP26 climate conference — a moment of truth for the Paris agreement — kicks off in Glasgow, UK. Under the 2015 accord, countries must come forward with updated targets for reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions to help limit global warming to no more than 2 °C. But most countries have been slow to act on their promises. The future of the treaty itself hangs in the balance: the United States is expected to formally drop out that month.

US election climax

The White House and the US Congress are up for grabs in November, and the outcome could have big implications for science, in particular, the climate. The second term in office would allow President Donald Trump to continue unravelling his predecessor’s climate policies — and all but ensure the United States’ formal exit from the Paris agreement a day after the election.

Democrats could stymie those efforts by winning the White House or gaining a majority in both houses of Congress. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats are being contested.

‘Humic’ are coming

The dream of growing replacement organs for humans in other animals could get closer as researchers make strides in the ethically fraught technique. Stem-cell scientist Hiromitsu Nakauchi at the University of Tokyo plans to grow tissue made of human cells in mouse and rat embryos.

He will then transplant those hybrid embryos into surrogate animals, a step that wasn’t allowed until a new law in Japan came into effect last March. Nakauchi and collaborators have also applied to do a similar experiment using pig embryos. The ultimate goal of such research is to produce animals with organs that can, eventually, be transplanted into people. But some researchers think it will be safer and more effective to grow ‘organoids’ in the lab.

Mozzie counter-attack

In the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, a major test of a technique that could halt the spread of dengue fever will reach its conclusion. Researchers have released mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia bacteria — which inhibit the replication of mosquito-borne viruses that cause dengue, chikungunya, and Zika — and let the infection spread in the wild population. Smaller tests in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Brazil have shown tantalizing promise.

Also promising is a malaria vaccine that is due to be trialed on Equatorial Guinea’s island of Bioko. And in 2020, the World Health Organization hopes to eliminate sleeping sickness, or African trypanosomiasis, as a public health problem. This notorious disease is carried by tsetse flies (Glossina spp.).