1. How hard it is to clone a human.
Last year, a Korean team became the first to clone a human embryo, coaxing it to the blastocyst stage at which embryonic stem cells can be obtained.
ILLUSTRATION: JUNE HSU
In August last year, a team from the UK was given the first British license to perform therapeutic cloning for human embryos, with a further license granted to Professor Ian Wilmut's team at the Roslin Institute.
Even with this sort of expertise, stem cell expert Dr Steven Minger of King's College London does not expect success this year, "it's going to be very difficult."
Meanwhile, although cloning of primates has succeeded in Pittsburgh, it appears that all attempts at implantation have failed.
2. More about Titan.
A few hours' worth of information could be all scientists get for 20 years of endeavor as Huygens, the dinner table-sized probe of the Cassini spacecraft, parachuted through the atmosphere of Titan Friday.
But what information? Titan is the mystery moon of Saturn. Its opaque, smoggy, orange atmosphere means that its surface has never been seen before. "By next week, we could have a completely different view of another world in our solar system," says TV science presenter Dr Chris Riley. "It may be the last time in history that we'll be able to say that."
Titan is a world dominated by constantly reacting organic compounds with lakes, or even oceans, of liquid ethane, methane and nitrogen.
3. What it's like inside a comet
Deep impact is a six-year NASA mission to discover what lies deep inside a comet. Like Cassini, this is two spacecraft in one -- a flyby craft and a smaller impactor.
In July, in a piece of spectacular cosmic vandalism, the impactor will be launched directly into the path of comet Tempel 1 for a "planned collision," forming a crater 14 storeys deep and a football stadium wide, all of which will be filmed by the onboard camera.
"Comets are time capsules that hold clues about the formation and evolution of the solar system," says NASA. If they find complex molecules, rather than the simple ones anticipated, expect the history of Earth to be rapidly rewritten in 2005.
4. How someone looks after a face transplant.
A surgical team from Louisville, Kentucky, is hotly tipped to perform the world's first face transplant this year, taking a face from a donor corpse and attaching it to a severely disfigured recipient.
The team, which includes bioethicists, submitted a detailed proposal to an ethics panel last May, and the lengthy approvals process concludes soon. In Britain, meanwhile, plans have been put on hold after a Royal College of Surgeons' working party concluded that the risks outweighed the benefits.
5. Whether the world's oceans are becoming more acidic and what it means for wildlife.
The UK's Royal Society's working party on rising acidity of oceans reports in the spring. Environmental biologist professor John Raven, who is chairing it, says: "The same pollution that we believe is heating the world's oceans through global warming is also altering its chemical balance."
Of particular concern is the impact of rising acidity on ocean creatures needing calcium carbonate for their structure, such as corals and molluscs. It might also affect plankton and have a potentially disastrous consequence on marine food webs.
6. Whether carbon trading works.
Carbon trading, a key plank of the Kyoto agreement, began two weeks ago but, like much to do with Kyoto, already seems to be going nowhere.
Countries rushed in ill-thought proposals to meet the January deadline. Dr Keith Tovey, the HSBC director of low carbon innovation at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in southeast England, points out what will happen if the EU approves the plans of the defaulting nations (Poland, Czech Republic, Italy and Greece).
"They've set their allocations so high that if approved, it will affect the price of carbon credits, causing them to plummet." And at a stroke, the whole scheme descends into farce.
It's not all bad on the global warming front. Tovey's colleague at the Carbon Reduction Center at UEA, Dr Trevor Davies, predicts that by the end of the year, "the combination of science certainty and increasing extreme climate events will have won over more of the doubters and persuaded those already converted of the need for urgent action."
7. How effective biometric ID data is (and whether it prevents terrorism).
High-tech passports containing biometric data are to be introduced in Britain next year, five years ahead of the international deadline, so that the UK can remain in the US visa waiver program.
This requires passports with embedded electronic chips containing a log of up to 1,800 facial characteristics which can be compared electronically to those held on an international database.
Failure rates of up to 10 percent have already been reported in the technology and there are doubts that the system it will do much more than validate the honest.
8. Whether RNAi is hype or hope.
RNA interference (RNAi) has been hyped as the greatest medical advance since antibiotics.
"By the end of 2005, we'll have a much better idea of whether it's likely to be a potential treatment or will be a research tool up there with PCR (polymerase chain reaction -- a way of creating multiple copies of DNA)," says Dr Richard Sullivan, director of clinical programs at Cancer Research UK.
RNAi is a naturally occurring defense system triggered by double stranded RNA (typical of many viruses) entering the cell. RNAi blocks specific genes and prevents them from working.
Harnessing this "silencing" phenomena could allow disease-causing genes to be switched off at will. It is already being trialed in prostate and cervical cancer but the first report of a trial, on the eye disease AMD, is due at the end of the year.
9. Whether artificial life is a flash in the pan or a new industry.
"Vesicle bioreactors" are the Scrapheap Challenge of biology. A crude artificial cell, they have walls made from fats in egg white and contain the contents of an E coli cell stripped of its genes, plus a virus enzyme to decode DNA.
Distinctly unpromising -- yet when genes are added, they dutifully churn out proteins just like normal cells would. These are the recently announced brainchild of Albert Lichlaber at Rockefeller University. They could be the early entrants to a new field, synthetic biology, in which entire organisms are built from scratch.
Life? Not as we know it, Jim.
What we still won't know
Whether nuclear is an option.
It is an election year in Britain, so discussion of the nuclear option in relation to climate change could be inhibited, despite the fact that renewables cannot possibly produce the carbon reductions needed to comply with Kyoto.
How to clone a baby.
The expert Pittsburgh group failed to get a single cloned monkey embryo to implant. Treat any human claims from Zavos, Antinori and their ilk this year with extreme suspicion.
The whereabouts of the Higgs Boson particle.
Better concealed than a snowflake in a blizzard, this puppy is highly unlikely to reveal itself, even if it exists outside the fevered imaginations of particle physicists.
An endless source of energy.
Wonderful idea, but cold fusion, whether it involves a glass of water, a cup of tea or even a jug of Tizer, is not going to happen this year. Or ever?
The biological purpose of a female orgasm.
If an orgasm is not necessary for conception, what is the point of it?
Why women go into labor.
With more than 750,000 births a year in Britain alone, you'd have thought someone would have cracked this mystery.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry