The Innovation | Innovation Focus in 2021

导 语

From vaccines to climate change, from brain-computer interfaces to solar system exploration, science played an instrumental role in 2021 as we continued to fight COVID-19 and came together to break down boundaries and address common challenges faced by all human beings. The Innovation Editorial Team summarizes the following scientific events that have helped shape 2021, which gave us hopes, tears, or a glimpse into the future.

2022年起航了！从疫苗到气候变化，从脑机接口到太阳系探索，科学在2021年发挥了极其重要的作用。全世界继续抗击COVID-19，应对全人类面临的共同挑战。The Innovation编辑团队总结了塑造2021年的科学事件: 这些事件给我们带来希望，眼泪，或对未来的憧憬！

图1 图文摘要

Combating COVID-19 | 抗击新冠疫情

It remained a top priority for the global scientific community to help combat COVID-19 in 2021. The World Health Organization reported in November that five million lives had been lost to the novel coronavirus, making it one of the deadliest viruses in history. Into the second year of the pandemic, a number of variants emerged as mutations of the original SARS-CoV-2 strain. Among them, the Delta variant became the most prevalent and led to more infections and more serious illnesses, joined later by the Omicron variant which proved to be even more infectious than Delta. Researchers have developed mRNA, inactivated, recombinant and other types of vaccines, neutralizing antibodies, as well as oral antivirus drugs to effectively reduce severe illnesses, hospitalization, and death rates. More rigorous efforts are needed in 2022 to end the pandemic and get life back on track.

在过去的一年，抗击 “新冠病毒”仍是全球科学界的首要任务。据世界卫生组织的报告，“新冠病毒”已夺走了超过500万人生命，使它成为历史上最致命的病毒之一。在这一年里，世界各地出现了多种新冠病毒变异毒株。其中，Delta变异株导致了更多感染和更高死亡率；近期出现的Omicron变异株比Delta更具传染性。为了抗击疫情，科学家已开发了mRNA、灭活、重组和其他多种类型的疫苗，以及中和抗体和口服抗病毒药物，以有效降低住院率和死亡率。然而，全球抗疫仍任重道远，2022年人类需进一步团结一致来结束“新冠病毒”大流行。

Sampling the Solar System | 探索太阳系

The three probes to Mars—the US’s Mars 2020, China’s Tianwen-1 and the UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter—arrived at the Red Planet earlier this year. As China became the world’s second country to land on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover started collecting samples to be returned to Earth in a decade from now. Rocks brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 mission from the Moon revealed that there were still volcanic activities on our nearest neighbor two billion years ago, a time by which scientists previously thought it should have cooled off. After preliminary analyses of samples returned by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft from a near-Earth asteroid named Ryugu, scientists believed they are among the most primordial materials available to laboratories on Earth. The Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to touch the Sun: it entered the Sun’s upper atmosphere in April and sampled particles and magnetic fields from there for the first time in human history.

2021年初，三个火星探测器--美国的“火星2020”、中国的“天问一号”、阿联酋的“希望号”--先后抵达了这颗红色星球。随着祝融号的成功着陆，中国成为世界上第二个登陆火星的国家。与此同时，毅力号火星车成功采集火星样品，计划在十年内返回地球。对中国嫦娥五号月球岩石的研究显示，二十亿年前我们最近的邻居仍然存在火山活动，尽管科学家们以前认为它应该早已冷却。对日本隼鸟2号采集的近地小行星“龙宫”的样本进行初步分析后，科学家们认为它们是可用于地球实验室研究的太阳系最原始物质之一。Parker太阳探测器成为在人类历史上第一个接触太阳的航天器：它在四月份进入太阳的最外层大气，并从那里获取粒子和磁场信息。

Climate Change Conundrum | 气候变化难题

2021 was a year of weather extremes across the globe, from megafires and tornadoes in the US to deadly floods in western Europe and China. Climate researchers continued to find solid and highly alarming facts about global warming. The Arctic temperature has been rising four times as fast as the planet as a whole, and our Earth is likely to reach the crucial 1.5℃ warming limit in the early 2030s. At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the two-week-long negotiations over emissions commitments, carbon trading, and reparations for climate damage did not seem to be enough to put the world on track to avert a climate crisis. Looking ahead, key climate solutions include developing technologies for higher energy efficiency, wider renewable energy use, and innovative pathways for carbon neutrality. Mitigation measures beyond the technical realm are also much needed.

从美国的特大野火和龙卷风到西欧和中国的凶猛洪水，2021年是全球极端天气频发的一年。气候研究人员不断发现有关全球变暖的可靠且需高度警惕（令人担忧）的事实。北极温度的上升速度是整个地球的四倍，我们的地球很可能在21世纪30年代初达到关键的1.5°C变暖上限。在格拉斯哥举行的COP26气候峰会上，为期两周的排放承诺、碳交易和气候损害赔偿谈判似乎不足以让世界走上避免气候危机的正轨。展望未来，关键的气候解决方案包括：开发高效能技术，更广泛地使用可再生能源，以及寻找碳中和。当然，技术领域之外的缓解措施也亟需夯实。

Predicting Protein Structures | 预测蛋白结构

Software driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can now solve and predict the accurate structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. Researchers from the UK-based company DeepMind reported that they had used AlphaFold to precisely predict the structure of about 200,000 human proteome (98.5% of human proteins). AlphaFold and alternative software such as RoseTTAFold, led by scientists from the University of Washington in Seattle, are also working to predict which of the proteins work together and how they interact. Compared with the traditional practice of months-long laboratory experiments for cracking a protein’s structure, AI is revolutionizing the landscape of medicine and drug discovery. Both AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold have made their databases publicly available to accelerate research discovery and innovation around the world.

人工智能（AI）驱动的软件可以从氨基酸序列中预测蛋白质的准确结构。来自DeepMind公司的研究人员报告说，他们使用AlphaFold精确预测了大约20万个人类蛋白质组（占人类蛋白质的98.5%）的结构。不仅是AlphaFold，由西雅图华盛顿大学的科学家领导的RosettaFold等类似软件也在用于预测哪些蛋白质协同工作以及它们之间的相互作用。传统的通过实验室试验来破解蛋白质结构往往需要耗费数月，与之相比，人工智能正在彻底改变医学和药物发现的格局。目前AlphaFold和RoseTTAFold都已公开了数据库，以加速世界各地的研究发现和创新。

Turning Waste into Wealth | 变废为宝

Scientists from China reported a new route to convert carbon dioxide, a typical greenhouse gas, to starch. Using a “building block strategy” based on chemical and biological catalytic modules, researchers created artificial starch with significantly less steps compared with the starch naturally produced in crops via photosynthesis, and the team did so eight times more efficiently than nature can. The researchers claimed that the technology is up for scale production at the industrial level, which could have major implications for food security, farmland conservation and climate change given the essential role starch plays in industrial manufacturing and our daily life.

来自中国的科学家报告了一种将二氧化碳（一种典型的温室气体）转化为淀粉的新途径。使用基于化学和生物催化模块的"构建块策略"，研究人员通过人工方法合成了淀粉。与通过光合作用在作物中自然产生的淀粉相比，其步骤要少得多，效率可高出八倍。研究人员声称，鉴于淀粉在工业制造和日常生活所起的作用，该技术有望在工业水平上实现规模生产。这可能对粮食安全，农田保护和气候变化产生重大影响。

Fusion for Future | 核聚变

The year 2021 witnessed major breakthroughs in nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion can be achieved by either magnetic confinement or inertial confinement, but both routes face the ignition challenge: reactions must produce more energy than they need to get started, so they become self-sustaining. In May, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak set a new record after it ran at 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, four times longer than the previous record holder in South Korea. In August, the U.S. National Ignition Facility used 1.9-megajoule lasers to achieve a landmark energy production of 1.3 megajoules, the highest ever recorded with the inertial confinement route. Scientists believed that enough heat was generated in the reactions to spread through the compressed fuel in this experiment. These advances are yet another important step towards delivering the promise of nuclear fusion as an ultimate solution to energy problems on Earth.

2021年见证了核聚变的重大突破。核聚变可以通过磁约束或惯性约束来实现，但这两种途径都面临着点火挑战：反应产生的能量必须要启动所需的能量更多，因此聚变才能持续稳定进行。今年5月，中国的先进超导托卡马克实验装置（“人造太阳”EAST）在1.2亿摄氏度下运行了101秒，创下了新纪录，比韩国之前保持的纪录还要长四倍。8月，美国国家点火装置使用1.9兆焦耳激光器产生了1.3兆焦耳的巨大能量，这是惯性约束路线有史以来的最高记录。专家认为，在这个实验里，反应中生成的热量足以穿过压缩的燃料。2021年12月30日，EAST实现了1056秒的长脉冲高参数等离子体运行。这些进展意味着，人们用可控核聚变来解决地球能源问题的最终目标，又迈出了重要的一步。

Big Telescopes for Big Science | 大望远镜

Three decades in the making, and the 10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope finally lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana on December 25 to look for the first lights in the Universe. With China joining the campaign to build large science facilities for fundamental research, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) on the Tibetan Plateau captured the highest energy light particle ever, arriving from a star-forming region 4,600 light years away. LHAASO also detected cosmic particle accelerators which are hundreds of times more powerful than the ones physicists have built on Earth. Meanwhile, from a basin in southwest China, the world’s largest single dish radio telescope (FAST) observed an episode of more than a thousand fast radio bursts, offering new insights into one of the most mysterious phenomena in the radio sky.

经过三十年的酝酿，耗资100亿美元的James Webb太空望远镜终于在12月25日从法属圭亚那的库鲁升空，寻找宇宙中的第一束光。中国近年来在基础研究中不断投入建设大科学装置。最近，青藏高原的高海拔宇宙线观测站（LHAASO）捕获了有史以来能量最高的光子，证实其来自4600光年外的恒星形成区。LHAASO还探测到宇宙里的“粒子加速器”，其功率是物理学家在地球上建造出来的加速器的数百倍。与此同时，从中国西南部的一个盆地，世界上最大的单口径射电望远镜（FAST）针对单一射电源观测了一千多次快速射电暴，为观测宇宙中这个最神秘的现象之一提供了新视角。

Dragon Man Mystery | 龙人之谜

The skull of Homo longi, or Dragon Man, recovered from Harbin in northeast China once again shook up the human family tree. As one of the most complete early human fossils ever known, it featured large eye sockets, thick brow ridges and oversized teeth, belonging to a male that died at least 146,000 years ago. Though scientists still need to agree on where to fit him on the branches of the human family tree, those involved in the study believed that Dragon Man may be more closely related to Homo sapiens (our species) than it is to Neanderthals, making it one of the closest relatives of modern human.

在中国东北哈尔滨发现的龙人（Homo longi）头骨化石，再次撼动了人类的演化树。作为有史以来最完整的早期人类化石之一，他特点突出，具有大大的眼窝，厚厚的眉脊和超大的牙齿，属于一个男性个体，至少生活于14万6千年前。虽然科学家们仍然争论他在人类系统树上的具体位置，但这项研究的研究者认为，龙人可能与智人（我们现存人类的物种）的关系比他与Neanderthals的亲缘关系更密切，是现代人类最亲近的亲戚之一。

Brain-Computer Interfaces | 脑机接口

The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology made significant progress in the past year, especially for invasive BCIs that directly place micro-electrode arrays inside a brain. A video released by Neuralink showed a monkey playing video games with his mind—and a microchip implanted in his brain. Also with a brain implant, a team led by Stanford University enabled a paralyzed man to write texts just by thinking of the letters. While BCI technologies will bring us great convenience in the future, researchers need to better understand how the brain works, improve recording and decoding technologies, develop highly integrated chips, and very importantly, figure out how to make the technologies ethical and responsible.

脑机接口（BCI）技术，尤其是直接在大脑内放置微电极阵列的侵入式BCI，在过去一年中取得了重大进展。Neuralink发布的一段视频显示，一只在大脑中植入了一个微芯片的猴子可以用意念来玩电子游戏。同样通过给大脑植入微电极，斯坦福大学领衔的一个团队使一个瘫痪的病人能够通过想象在外设输出手写文本。BCI技术将在未来给人类带来极大的便利，但研究人员需要更好地了解大脑是如何工作的，并改进记录和解码技术，以及开发高度集成的芯片。此外，合乎科研伦理和负责任地发展和使用这些技术也将变得非常重要。

Open Access and Beyond | 超越开放获取

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that the free and immediate access to all publications and data has never been more important. In 2021, more organizations moved towards Open Access (OA). The European Commission launched its own platform Open Research Europe in March to facilitate the publication of research funded under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe across all subject areas. Starting January 1, 2022, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US will officially join Plan S and require all laboratory heads to publish their research papers and make the papers freely available on the publication date. This past year also marked the 20^th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which defined OA for the first time.

COVID-19大流行表明，“免费和立即获取”出版物和数据从未如此重要。2021年，更多学术组织转向开放获取（OA）。欧盟委员会于3月推出了自己的开放平台Open Research Europe，用来发表由Horizon 2020和Horizon Europe资助的所有领域的研究成果。今天开始，美国霍华德休斯医学研究所将正式加入S计划，并要求所资助的研究者以OA形式发表他们的研究论文。2021年也是布达佩斯开放获取倡议（Budapest Open Access Initiative）发布20周年；该倡议首次定义了OA，旨在促进科学家研究成果在全世界范围内的免费获取。

原文信息

本文内容来自Cell Press合作期刊The Innovation第三卷第一期以Editorial发表的“Innovation Focus in 2021” (投稿: 2021-12-22；接收: 2021-12-26；在线刊出: 2022-01-04)。

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100203

www.cell.com/the-innovation/home

引用格式：Editorial Office. (2022). Innovation Focus in 2021. The Innovation. 3(1),100203.

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