22 of the biggest scientific discoveries of 2022

Cui Jun/Beijing Youth Daily // VCG via Getty Images The year 2022 was an exciting one for science. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope yielded two major breakthroughs: new infrared images of the universe and the first evidence of carbon dioxide outside of the solar system. The ongoing pandemic spurred the innovative development of a nasal vaccine for the latest variants of the coronavirus and a renewed urgency in finding a universal vaccine for the flu. What’s more, many feats not entirely new to the past year received either validation from the scientific community, such as the FDA’s first approval of lab-grown or “cultivated” meat, or represented signs of important progress in a specific field, as evidenced by the historic procedure that provided a human man with a heart transplant from a pig, marking a new level of possibility in xenotransplantation. And as to the enrichment of the collective knowledge about the development of the human race, human footprints dating back to the ice age were discovered in Utah. To outline some of the most impressive scientific gains over the past year, Stacker consulted scientific journals and the latest news reports to compile a list of 22 major scientific discoveries and innovations that happened in 2022. The fields outlined here range from biology to geology, engineering to paleontology, and genetics to artificial intelligence, among others. Read on to learn more about some of this year’s most significant discoveries and what they mean for the future of health care, technology, climate, and more. You may also like: What 60 years of data tell us about our garbage habits Tonga’s January volcano was the biggest eruption ever recorded Maxar // Getty Images On Jan. 15, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted underwater in the South Pacific Ocean. Volcanic eruptions don’t normally send noticeable amounts of water into the atmosphere, but this one sent a whopping 146 teragrams into the stratosphere–enough to temporarily warm the Earth’s atmosphere and, according to NASA, fill “58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” Ameca debuts at Consumer Electronics Show 2022