In 2022, Science Magazine selected NASA's new space telescope, JWST, as its Breakthrough of the Year.
After a successful launch and a near-perfect unfolding and commissioning process, the data coming in are already giving us a much clearer picture of the cosmos than we've ever seen.
But there was a lot of ground-breaking science last year in the lab, the field, and even in congress.
Here are a few other advances that made 2022 a big year for science.
2021's Breakthrough of the Year was AI's ability to predict protein structures.
This year, AI continued to get creative, from designing novel proteins, to writing computer code that can solve numerical problems.
On the visual front, text-to-image models like DALLE-2 generated intricate and captivating images.
In the coming years, humans will continue to use AI as a tool to innovate and create.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test crashed a spacecraft into a little moon called Dimorphos, permanently altering its orbit.
This was the first-ever trial of a planetary defense strategy that could be used if we ever detected an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
