Shoot for the moon with The Globe’s 2023 science quiz

a. India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, including a lander and a rover, touched down near the moon’s south pole on Aug. 23. The rover travelled more than 100 metres across the lunar surface. However, neither reactivated after shutting down for the onset of lunar night in early September. Missions launched by Russia and the UAE both failed to land successfully this year. A Japanese spacecraft is currently heading for an attempted soft landing in January.

b. In April, Jeremy Hansen and three U.S. astronauts were selected to be the crew of Artemis II. The mission to circle around the moon and return is scheduled to launch no earlier than next November. It will mark the first crewed lunar flight in more than 50 years.

d. So far, the sample curation team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston has managed to extract about 70 grams of asteroid material, mostly through a flap in the ring-shaped sample collection head. But the team has not been able to remove two screws that would allow them access to the remainder of the sample. The team is now working on a new procedure to open up the device, which must be kept in a nitrogen environment to prevent contamination.

c. LK-99 caused a sensation when it was claimed to be a room-temperature superconductor in an un-reviewed paper posted online in July. The claim was soon challenged by numerous research teams and disproven by August.

d. Based on data compiled by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, the staggering size of the area burned this year is nearly as much as burned over the previous seven years combined.

c. Southern Turkey was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Feb. 6 – the year’s strongest – followed by a 7.5 earthquake the same day. The double blow was the year’s worst by far, with a confirmed death toll exceeding 59,000.

c. Hurricane Hilary reached Category 4 off the coast of Mexico before it slammed into the Baja Peninsula on Aug. 20 and travelled north into the United States, unexpectedly capturing the spotlight in the midst of the Atlantic hurricane season and triggering the first tropical storm watch in Southern California’s history.

b. A scientific working group that reports to the International Commission on Stratigraphy selected Crawford Lake as the reference site for the start of the Anthropocene – the proposed geological period that is defined by humanity’s profound impact on the planet. The choice was based on the lake’s well-preserved record of sediment deposits that include traces of plutonium from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s. The plutonium coincides with a number of changes that became evident around the same time because of human influence on the climate and the global environment.

c. The assessment, from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, also found that 3,500 of the invading species can be characterized as harmful, “seriously threatening nature, nature’s contributions to people and good quality of life.”

a. In a study published in August in the journal Nature, researchers estimated the skeletal mass of Perucetus colossus to be 5.3 to 7.6 tonnes, more than double that of an adult blue whale.

b. The study, conducted at a Moroccan zoo and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that the crocs were interested in cries of distress from young primates including humans, most likely because they might lead to tasty snack.

a. Despite public protests, the Shropshire county council’s planning committee approved the roadway by a six-to-five vote. We assume Darwin would consider this a depressingly unnatural selection.

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d. The approval, on Dec. 8, comes three years after Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were awarded the Noble Prize for developing the gene editing technology, and 11 years after the landmark paper that launched it.

c. The drugs, which go by various trade names including Trulicity and Ozempic, were developed years ago to treat Type 2 diabetes. More recently, they have attracted attention because they can reduce body weight and weight-related conditions. This led to an explosion of media coverage in 2023 and continuing shortages of the medications.

c. The analysis, which was based on blood donor samples, showed an average infection rate of 76 per cent that skewed higher in younger people.

a. As documented in a study published in August, scientists worked with 29 epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of their treatment. The patients listened to the song which was then reconstructed using only their brain patterns. Though it sounds distorted, both the melody and some of the lyrics are recognizable in the audio reconstruction.

d. In a research article published in Nature, the archaeologists document finding two logs with notches cut so that they fit together, as though part of a larger wooden structure. Dating techniques set the age of the logs at about 476,000 years ago – long before Homo sapiens appeared.

b. Writing in the journal Science, the authors note that romantic kissing is described in clay tablets in the Sumerian language. This is contrary to an idea raised in 2022 that kissing emerged more recently and may have been a driver of disease transmission.

b. Dr. Hinton was also first to add his name to a statement from the Center for AI Safety that says: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI” should be a global priority for humanity.

c. In a study published in July, scientists showed how they were able to “de-extinct” the protein sequences.