2023 Biggest Breakthroughs in Science - Tier List

Fusion? LK-99? Antimatter doesn't fall up? As the year comes to an end, let's look back and rank the most incredible Science Breakthroughs of 2023. From the seemingly impossible to the literally impossible!

Merch!
I think Scientists are Rockstars so I made t-shirts to celebrate it

#physics #science #breakthough #technology

Previous featured episodes:

Chapters:
0:00 Science Breakthroughs 2023 Tier List
1:10 LK-99 - Scam Or Bad Data?
2:42 The NIF Fusion Breakthroughs
4:46 NASA Test World's Most Powerful Ion Engine
6:25 Toyota's Solid State Batteries
7:36 Antimatter Doesn't Fall Up
8:50 Ozempic and Wegovy
10:13 Wormhole Created in a Quantum Computer
11:13 Ad Read
11:59 First Detection of Background Gravitational Waves
13:29 Double Slit in Time Experiment
14:46 Creating Oxygen On Mars
15:53 The James Webb Space Telescope
17:38 Breakthrough Alzheimer's Treatment
18:27 First CRISPR Therapy Approved - Sickle Cell
19:31 ChatGPT and A.I Science

If you enjoy the channel and want even more physics, tech, and business content, I've just launched new Instagram and Threads pages. Follow on the links below

A few people have asked so I've added the info below. Some of these are affiliate links. If you make a purchase it doesn't cost you anything extra, but a percentage of the sale will help support this channel and my work to bringing entrepreneurship into science.

[DrBenMiles]

A lot happened in 2023! What was your top science story? Let me know down below 👇

And yes technically quantum wormholes were last year, but they snuck into this year...

[hgbugalou]

Cmon man, JWST breaking cosmology and the hubble tension stuff deserves at least an A tier! That is going to be big once we get our head around it.

[adilsongoliveira]

I've been using Ozenpic for the last 18 months +- and lost about 26Kg. It helps a lot but it just makes the dieting easier. I still had to change my eating habits and reduce/replace the many tasty things I indulged in. Coincidentaly I did a check-up today and my IMC is now normal, my blood pressure is also back to normal, my liver fat is gone, etc. I now need to increase my muscle mass but that's expected. Phase 2 starts in January :)

[skyblueo]

If you add all the James Webb discoveries into one story, as opposed to everything else on your list, it has to be S-tier. It just weighs more.

The double slit in time discovery is even more mind-blowing than the original double slit experiment. Time increasingly feels like an iceberg where all we know about it is just the tip, and it may not be anything like what we think it is.

[chuckcosby]

Nice video! James Webb should be an S. FYI, Toyota first announced they would have a solid state battery in two years in 2015. Then again in 2017, 2020 and now again in 2023. You had it right, this is just a bait to delay people from buying any car and make existing EV's look inferior to the near future that never arrives.

[PotatoSofi]

Discovering a room temp, ambient pressure, super conductor wouldn't even be a discovery of this decade... It would be the discovery of the millennium. That thing can rewrite how we treat and see electronics in general and revolutionise ALL sectors of production, on top of a giant pile of researchs that aren't related but would benefit massively from such discovery.

[ronhoffman]

Plasmogen therapy that allows the mitochondria to regenerate, gives more ATP and cell energy. This in turn provides cells with ability to clean out junk, repair DNA, and regain lost function. Trials have shown a reversal of Alzheimer's disease. One patient who could not walk, talk or recognize family members, after two weeks of plasmogen treatment, was walking and talking with her family that she knew. If verified would definitely be an S.

[jaycobe]

Thanks for all the great content this year. Your ability to relay scientific information in an understandable manner is extraordinary. Keep on rocking in 2024.

[sirgog]

One to consider for D tier in mathematics - some of the advances in Ramsay theory. It's an advance in graph theory specifically, but these often show up in other fields later, especially around neural networks.

[DCGreenZone]

The restoration of an optic nerve by Sinclar et. al, and the realization that cellular senescence may underlie most/all neurodegeneration. Think about those implications.

[DreadEnder]

One of the least covered and most important scientific discoveries in 2023 was the discovery of a pinacosaurus specimen. One, with an intact larynx! It was previously thought that dinosaurs didn’t have larynx’s and so couldn’t make complex vocalisations. But this discovery completely changed our understanding of prehistory!

[justincollins]

As a dietetics student who is focusing heavily on obesity, I feel like semaglutide is at least worth a B tier classification. Or at least it would be if it were new in 2023. We've been aware of the weight-control potential of semaglutide as far back as 2020 (if not earlier). Also, don't sleep on 15% weight loss - that's 30 lbs in those weighing 200 lbs as a starting weight and most individuals being prescribed these drugs are starting at a much higher weight than that. Furthermore, gaining weight when getting off the medicine is a weird double standard that doesn't exist with other drugs - blood pressure medicine is considered effective if it lowers blood pressure as long as someone stays on it, but nobody acts like it's worthless if blood pressure goes back up when a person stops taking the drug.

All that said, one new thing that happened in 2023 was Tirzepatide being approved for weight management. This stands out because Tirzepitide is both works on both GLP-1 and GIP pathways and it has also been demonstrated as being more effective than semaglutide. The future of weight management pharmacology is looking promising, the present is pretty hopeful itself too.

[mAny_oThERSs]

You forgot to mention the scientific breakthrough i made.
Poor quality chicken nuggets taste better with milk, because chemistry and biology and stuff. Easily a-tier.

[Asthr]

Low frequenzy gravi waves is easily S tier for me XD. That's another nobel prize.

[hgbugalou]

Honorable mention: All the discoveries about the micro biome and how it is far more important to humans in many ways. I think some big things are coming in the next few years there.

[oilbender]

Don't agree with all the rankings but great video. Also. I thing you missed two big ones.
1) Canon nonimprint lithography breakthrough.
2) A mathematician recently released an improved version of shor's algorithm if that's hownits spelled.

[tucan]

That antimatter is affected by gravity deserves more, experiments like that are hard to run and if we only had theories for all we knew it might not have been affected by gravity.

[OniFeez]

I work for one of the major banks here in Australia, and I think in 2023 (or 2022) I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture/talk by a Dr Michelle Simmons who at the time was several months away from publishing a journal entry because her and her team had discovered a way to mass organize qubits (necessary for quantum computers) onto silicon wafers. This was a pretty big deal for several reasons; the first being that it being silicon wafers means that it is applicable to the current semiconductor design and usage of silicon and secondly up to this point mass organization and ordering of qubits was a difficult/nigh impossible thing to accomplish. But her and her teams work is still a couple of years away from fruition, as far as I know, there's been no headway on error checking etc, etc (which when a cpu runs an instruction, several copies are actually run and then compared, the answer that comes out the most often is typically the 'correct' one etc, etc).

As for Ozempic and Wegovy, I think, obviously if you don't change your eating habits prior to taking Ozempic, then when you stop and those eating habits continue, it's obvious that you'll put the pounds back on, surely that would have been obvious?

[woody]

James Web is the very best of the year, it’s contributions will go on for years.