Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
We’ve had a busy and exciting year here at Science Quickly. After a few months of working behind the scenes, I officially started hosting the show back in May. I’ve had so much fun chatting with you all three times a week since then, and I can’t wait for all the conversations we’ll get to have in 2025.
Before we here at SQ take a short break for the holidays, I thought it would be fun to ask a few Scientific American editors about the biggest science stories of the year. Let’s get into it.
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Andrea Thompson: I’m Andrea Thompson. I’m the Earth and environment news editor at Scientific American.
So the biggest weather and climate stories this year are a lot of what we’ve seen in recent years: hurricanes, floods, record heat.
Hurricanes were a big story, especially in the U.S. this year. We had several really devastating ones and really surprising ones, kicking off with Hurricane Beryl, which was the earliest Category 5 on record for the Atlantic Ocean, and it really rapidly intensified, and meteorologists were just sort of left with their mouths hanging open watching this storm develop.
We had two really devastating hurricanes.
(CLIP: NBC 6 meteorologist John Morales speaks about Hurricane Milton in October: “ Incredible hurricane. It has dropped (chokes up)—it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific.”)
Thompson: Hurricane Milton and then particularly Hurricane Helene, which dropped tons of rain on western North Carolina and wreaked absolute devastation there.
But it wasn’t just the U.S. that was hit by these storms. The Philippines actually had five typhoons, which are the same type of storm as a hurricane; it’s just called a different name in the Pacific than it is in the Atlantic. So they had five typhoons and a tropical storm, all within a month, which is a lot of storms. And that wreaked a lot of devastation and killed a lot of people there.
Besides those sort of big storms we had a number of heat waves, which is just something that is incredibly connected to climate change and is one of the easiest weather events to see the imprint of climate change in and is something we just see more of every year. They last longer, they are hotter, and they happen more frequently than they have in the past. And one of the notable ones this year was in the Southwest U.S. …
(CLIP: CBS Morning News anchor Anne-Marie Green discusses the heat wave in June:  “A dangerous heat wave is threatening more than 30 million people across the Southwest this morning.”)
Thompson: Which has sort of been a focal point for these year after year. But Phoenix in particular had 113 consecutive days with high temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 38 degrees Celsius) or higher. The previous record was 76 days in 1993. So that is a substantial increase on that. And so that heat caused hundreds of deaths just in Phoenix alone. So when you consider that those heat waves were over a broader area, you know, you’re looking at much higher numbers.
Of course, that wasn’t the only place that saw heat. There were also really terrible spring heat waves across a large swath of Asia, from the Palestinian territories to India, Thailand and the Philippines.
There were also huge floods.
(CLIP: PBS News Hour co-anchor Amna Nawaz speaks about flooding in October:  “In Spain, where crews are searching for bodies in abandoned cars and swamped buildings after devastating flash floods.”
Thompson: Spain was one of the sort of hallmark events this year because it was, I think, very surprising to people there; they weren’t expecting it. That caused a huge amount of devastation and death. There are also really major floods in parts of Africa—Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad—and all of these also have some fingerprints of climate change on them.
So probably the biggest climate story this year is that it’s going to be the hottest year on record, which we know before it’s even technically over. We really knew this, honestly, at the end of October, just based on how hot all of the months of the year so far had been. And it’s going to surpass the record just set last year, which itself was record hot by a record margin.
So 2024 is even hotter than 2023, and that is also one of the hallmarks of climate change: that we see record-hot years increasingly happen. In fact, all of the hottest 10 years on record have been in the 21st century, and it’s probably not going to be long before the 2024 record falls.
You know, if I could pick just a couple words or phrases to describe 2024, it would be “record-hot” and “extreme.” And I feel like those are probably (laughs) the words I would have picked in a lot of other years, too, but it’s just—that fact is a sign that climate change is here and it’s happening now. It’s not a future problem, as I think we thought about it as, you know, a couple decades ago; we’re living it right now, and every year really bears that out.
And, you know, looking ahead to 2025, we obviously can’t know if 2025 might be the year that breaks 2024’s record. I think right now climate scientists would probably say it’s not as likely, in part because we’re expecting a weak La Niña.
So most people have heard of El Niño. La Niña is the opposite; it’s sort of the flip side of an El Niño. An El Niño happens when water temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean are higher than normal, and that releases heat into the atmosphere that causes this cascade of changes in weather around the globe. So La Niña is the opposite; it’s when those temperatures are colder than normal. That also—it changes weather patterns. It also tends to slightly cool global temperatures, whereas El Niño slightly raises them. And part of why 2023 and 2024 were record-hot is a little bit due to El Niño, although (the) vast majority of that heat is from long-term climate change.
But with a weak La Niña likely developing in 2025, global temperatures might be a little bit lower, so it’s possible 2025 will come in under 2024 and 2023. But it’s still, even with a La Niña, going to be among the hottest years on record, almost certainly. The years where we see La Niñas now are actually hotter than some El Niño years from 30 or 40 years ago. And that is really a mark of how much climate change has impacted global temperatures.
You know, in terms of weather that we might see, sort of in broad seasonal trends, we are going to see heat waves somewhere. They are going to break records. There are going to be hurricanes and typhoons around the world. Where they’ll hit, how strong they’ll be, we can’t know. There are going to be floods in places. These things are going to keep happening every year, and climate change is having an impact on all of them: to increase their likelihood, to make them worse and to make them happen more often.
Feltman: Climate was obviously a major theme in the news this year, but we also had a lot of health stories to tackle—including a few that aren’t existentially distressing. Let’s look back on some awesome health advances from 2024.
Tanya Lewis: I’m Tanya Lewis, senior editor for health and medicine at Scientific American.
So we actually learned a lot of really cool things about the human body this year. One thing we learned, which you might remember from an earlier podcast episode, is that scientists discovered a new pain medication that works by blocking nerve channels before the pain reaches the brain, and it’s not addictive like opioids.
Another thing we learned is that vitamin D deficiency is not as big of a problem as we thought. Early in the 2000s studies suggested that vitamin D deficiency was a contributor to cancer, heart disease and many other illnesses and that taking vitamin D supplements might help. But more recent studies have failed to show as much of a benefit as we thought, and most people actually have adequate levels of vitamin D.
Researchers have also discovered ancient brains that are miraculously well-preserved for thousands of years after death. And they think that these brains might be undergoing a process of protein “misfolding,” which resembles what happens in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or even mad cow disease.
Finally, there’s a new advancement that can help people who are born without a uterus. Scientists have found a way to actually transplant uteruses from a healthy donor into these individuals, who can then get pregnant and give birth to a live baby.
If I could describe 2024 in three words, I think I would choose “unexpected” because we are constantly seeing and learning new things about the body and about new diseases that we didn’t expect. I would say “political” because unfortunately, health, like all aspects of science, have become politicized. And then finally, not to leave on a downer, but I would say “ominous” because there are, unfortunately, some major public health threats looming, like the potential of a bird flu pandemic.
In 2025 I will be keeping a close eye on bird flu, or H5N1, the virus that’s been transmitting among wild birds and dairy cows and poultry in the U.S. I’ll be following what’s happening with the politicization of science under the new administration—a new presidential administration—and hope to see, you know, areas of consensus, hopefully, between the different parties so that we can keep Americans healthy.
While there are many public health threats that loom on the horizon, there’s still a lot to look forward to, and we’re just beginning to see some of the fruits of decades of research in things like mRNA vaccines and weight-loss drugs and many other developments. I think we’re in a pretty good position to tackle some of these major public health threats that we might be facing in the coming year.
Feltman: I don’t know about you, but I’m grateful for that spot of optimism. Also, let me take this opportunity to sneak in my favorite reminder one last time this year: now is not the time to start exploring the world of raw dairy, no matter what people on TikTok might tell you. Just hit pause on that one at the very least.
Speaking of the Internet: Here’s associate technology editor Ben Guarino to tell us how the artificial intelligence conversation evolved in 2024.
Guarino: The focus of 2024 in AI has definitely been on generative AI because the biggest developments this year were often in the new forms of what it could make. When ChatGPT was unveiled in 2022 we saw it make text, but now generative AI is making really convincing audio. I watched a demo of a ChatGPT-based voice where the user asked it to count to 30 really fast and then it paused to catch its breath in the middle of counting. So the folks who are developing these generative systems are really looking to: How do they sound human, and, and how do they feel authentic? So there’ve definitely been improvements to audio.
Generative AI has now been moving into things like video with OpenAI’s really impressive video maker, Sora, which it showcased as a demo earlier this year and then, at the start of December, released to its paying customers. I tried to log in right away to use it, but the traffic was so heavy, I, I couldn’t get in, so there’s definitely an interest in using generative AI to make video.
And with that also started to come some backlash. So I’m thinking of, in November, Coca-Cola turned some of its iconic ads into movie—into video using generative AI and people piled on online, so there’s definitely been, on the one hand, if we’re looking at the big trends in generative AI, an improvement in what it can do, but also, I would think, an awareness and maybe a more pronounced backlash this year than we’ve seen in previous years: understanding how generative AI was trained on data, on what artists made, on what writers have written. And also maybe some concerns about it taking work away from people.
Pew Research has done surveys each year, going back for the past few years, looking at how people are excited about AI or concerned about AI, and over the past three years an increasing proportion have said that they’re more concerned than excited about AI, and, and I think that might be a trend we will see continue into next year.
One major area that AI had an impact in 2024 is definitely search. So at the start of this year Google didn’t have AI answers in its search results, but to me that’s almost wild to think about; I’ve gotten so used to seeing them already, you know? If anybody is a regular user of Google Search, I have to imagine that you’ve seen the generative AI results at the top, and these are gonna stick around—Google’s latest numbers, I think, were that one billion people have used Google’s large language model, which is called Gemini, in Search, and talking to the New York Times recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that, you know, to expect Google Search to continue to evolve in 2025, and I have to imagine that’s gonna be more layering of artificial intelligence into search results.
And there’s also been an awareness, too, of the energy demands of generative AI. And there are some estimates, although the figures aren’t exact, that adding generative AI to search results is increasing, not insubstantially, the energy demands on every time that you search something on Google.
If I could describe 2024 in three words, I would say “boom.” We’re definitely in an AI boom. I think this really was the year that AI started showing up on our phones, started showing up on our computers, started showing up in our workplaces in more obvious ways than maybe we had been familiar with before. There have been huge investments in AI and continued investments in generative AI. We saw OpenAI make plans to move from a nonprofit to a profit. We saw Elon Musk break up with OpenAI and roll out his competitor, Grok, on X, formerly Twitter.
The next word I would pick, I think, as a consequence of that boom is “slop.” “Slop” was a contender for Oxford’s word of the year; it lost out to “brain rot.” But “slop” means this AI equivalent of spam. So if you were on Facebook at all earlier this year, maybe you encountered something like “Shrimp Jesus,” which was this phenomenon where people were using chatbots to make these bizarre chimeras of religious figures and crustaceans, or these clearly AI-made images of structures built out of Coca-Cola bottles, and it’s really—was just engagement bait.
I’ll take a slightly more optimistic note with the third word and I’ll say “promise.” I mean, we saw some clever and what I would consider good uses of AI in terms of pattern recognition, of using AI to help decipher a scroll that was burned by the Pompeii volcano from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, to AI helping in drug development for looking for novel forms of antibiotics. So there definitely is something here to AI. I don’t want to be too cynical here; I think it’s good to be critical, but this definitely is a technology that has promise.
In 2025 I think we’re going to see more about the hunger for water and energy and resources that generative AI needs, especially for the large data centers required to operate it. We know that Microsoft is looking at reviving, for instance, one of the mothballed reactors at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant, to power its data centers. There’s been more attention paid to what’s called “Data Center Alley” in the mid-Atlantic. In terms of keeping these data centers active, that requires fossil-fuel plants.
I also think we’re gonna start to see more forms of generative AI—so that’s AI based on LLM-type style models—that aren’t quite like the chatbots we’re familiar with. I’m thinking specifically, as an example, what are called AI agents. So these are systems that you would access on your phone or computer like you would a chatbot, but it’s got more autonomy to do things.
So one common example of what an AI agent might do is help book you a plane ticket. And you might tell it—or it might know because it’s been analyzing your personal data—that, you know, you prefer aisle seats, so it will look for aisle seats for you and, and book an aisle seat. And these agents, in theory, have more autonomy to interact with other apps, and they don’t require the hand-holding or the prompting that something like ChatGPT needs now. So if you’ve used ChatGPT with any regularity, you might know that it might take multiple prompts to get it to produce the thing that you’re looking for. With—the idea behind an AI agent is that you tell it what to do and, and it goes off and it interfaces with other apps, and you don’t need to keep nudging it along.
Feltman: I’m glad we ended on AI because it gives me an excuse to plug some more Science Quickly before we sign off. One of my favorite SQ episodes is also one of our most recent: our deep dive on Google’s AI podcast tool. If you haven’t listened yet, you should definitely go check it out while we’re off for the holidays.
I also really loved our episode on folk music and the evolution of song. I’m not going to say it’ll definitely be the only time you’ll ever hear me sing on Science Quickly, but that’s not exactly going to be a regular thing.
And I can’t forget the episode where I got to interview an astronaut from actual space. In fact, we made history by conducting the first-ever live video interview from the cupola observatory! That’s definitely the best background I’ve ever gotten to enjoy on a video call.
We covered the science of fear, the fight to end implicit bias in health care and the dangers of weight stigma at the doctor’s office. We did deep dives on extreme archaeology, Antarctic exploration and the beauty and mystery of math. From learning about animal conservation to tackling zombie-apocalypse prep, we’ve done our best to help you stay curious. Here’s to a whole lot more of that in 2025. We’re taking a few weeks off from new episodes so our team has time to enjoy the holidays, but we’ll be back bright and early in the new year.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Today’s episode was reported and co-hosted by Andrea Thompson, Tanya Lewis, and Ben Guarino. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a wonderful holiday season. See you next year!
