While the internet obsessed over juicy diss tracks, scrutinised the details of jewel heists and chased down Labubus, science moved behind the scenes in ways that altered the world.
For the better or worse, here are the top seven ways that events and breakthroughs in 2025 changed our lives forever. (Hint: it doesn’t include Katy Perry jettisoning into space).
1. The world’s fastest supercomputer
In January, the world’s fastest supercomputer was inaugurated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Named El Capitan, it’s only the third computer ever to reach exascale computing speeds – with a peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPS (2.79 quintillion calculations – known as ‘floating
point operations’ – per second).
The supercomputer will be used to organise America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons and research the design of new ones. Its construction started in May 2023 and cost $600 million.
2. Planetary shifts
Data published in January revealed that 2024 was the first calendar year on record to have had a global average temperature 1.6°C (2.8°F) above pre-industrialised levels. The news came almost a decade
after 195 countries adopted the Paris Climate Accord, in which they agreed to take steps to limit global temperatures caused by human-induced climate change to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average.
Later in the year, in June, scientists announced that ocean acidification had exceeded the limit the planet can handle. It’s the seventh of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ we’ve crossed since 2009. If we cross all nine, it could trigger environmental collapse.
3. HIV breakthrough
The route to a potential cure for HIV was revealed in May when researchers in Melbourne, Australia, announced they’d found a way to force the virus out of human cells. Prior to their discovery, one of the
key challenges in treating HIV has been that it can conceal itself in white blood cells, meaning that it
could reactivate at any time.
The researchers used mRNA technology to make the virus visible – a breakthrough that was
previously considered impossible.
Almost 40 million people around the world live with HIV and have to take medication to suppress the virus so that they don’t transmit it.
The researchers also think their discovery could help to treat other diseases involving white blood cells, including cancers.
4. Signs of life on Mars
A detailed study of ‘leopard spot’ markings on a Martian rock revealed that the intricate patterns
are “the clearest sign of life we’ve ever found on Mars,” NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy announced in September.
The rock, thought to be around 3.5 billion years old, was discovered by NASA’s Perseverance rover during its exploration of the Jezero Crater in July 2024. Ever since, planetary scientists have been trying to work out what created the markings. The leading theory is that they came from ancient Martian microbes.
Perseverance has taken and stored a fragment of the rock. If all goes to plan, the sample will be returned to Earth one day and thoroughly examined for signs of past life.
5. Neutrino scattering seen
In July, an effect involving neutrinos was finally observed after 50 years of searching. First theorised in 1974, coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS), in which neutrinos scatter coherently in a nuclear reactor against an atomic nucleus (rather than the reactor), creates a tiny nuclear recoil.
Measuring this, scientists say, is akin to trying to establish the change in motion of a moving car after bouncing a ping pong ball off it.
Yet a detector in Switzerland has now captured CEvNS with unprecedented clarity – a breakthrough
that could herald a new era of neutrino detectors. These could have powerful applications, including revealing new forces or particles that only interact with neutrinos.
6. First footage of human embryo captured
September brought the news that, for the first time ever, the moment a human embryo implants itself in an artificial uterus had been caught on camera. The video and still images offer an unprecedented view of a critical step in human development.
Implantation failure accounts for 60 per cent of miscarriages. The researchers who captured
the images hope that they’ll contribute to a better understanding of the process, which could
help improve fertility outcomes, both in natural conception and in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
7. The universe is slowing down
Data presented in March agreed with previously established theories that the Universe is expanding, but went on to suggest that the rate of acceleration is gradually dwindling. A couple of months later, in June, members of the Supernova Cosmology Project published new results that appeared to bolster findings
presented in March.
If the Universe’s expansion is indeed slowing, the consequences would be huge. Scientists might be forced to review the well established Standard Model of particle physics. What’s more, the trajectory hints at a new possible ending for the Universe, whenever it happens: a catastrophic ‘Big Crunch,’ in which expansion eventually reverses and the entire cosmos collapses.
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