Environment | Health | Space | Coronavirus outbreak

Republish

Twenty surprising scientific facts we learned in 2020

From corals bunkering down in deeper waters to wait out climate change stress, to how vaccines can boost our immune system beyond a specific disease – here are the 20 most surprising scientific facts that we discovered this year. 

17 December 2020

By Horizon magazine

We still have much to learn from bats and their evolutionary tricks. Image credit - Vlad Kutepov/Unsplash

Image credit - Vlad Kutepov/Unsplash

Read: Five things you need to know about bats, disease and coronavirus

Image credit - Vlad Panov/Unsplash

Read: We are starting to crack the mystery of how lightning and thunderstorms work

Image credit - Gal Eyal

Read: Understudied deeper water reefs could teach us how to better conserve corals

Image credit - Nikolay Kondev/pxhere

Read: 'Four times more toxic': How wildfire smoke ages over time

Image credit - Felineora/Wikimedia

Read: Bats have different song cultures and chatter about food, sleep, sex and other bats

Image credit - National Cancer Institute/Unsplash

Read: Q&A: How vaccines can strengthen immune response beyond a specific disease

Image credit - pxhere

Read: Q&A: Why clouds are still 'one of the biggest uncertainties' in climate change

Image credit - pxhere

Read: Bees use shark 'supersense' to help find food

Image credit - pxhere

Read: How Stone Age humans unlocked the glucose in plants

Image credit - Birger Schmitz

Read: Space dust fossils are providing a new window onto Earth's past

Image credit - grebmot/Pixabay

Read: How life on Earth could help us find life on Mars

Image credit - Ramon Kagie/Unsplash

Read: How hybrid electric and fuel aircraft could green air travel

Image credit - sarangib/Pixabay

Read: We can programme plants to grow biomolecules. Is farming the future of vaccines?

Image credit - Sarah Kaehlert

Read: Q&A: The curious case of male pregnancy in seahorses and pipefishes

Image credit - pxhere

Read: The science of tickling: why the brain won't let us tickle ourselves

Image credit - Boudhayan Bardhan/Unsplash

Read: Plants can detect insect attacks by 'sniffing' each other's aromas

Image credit - pxhere

Read: Cloud shapes and formations impact global warming - but we still don't understand them

Image credit - Preclinics, Potsdam

Read: Alpacas and antibodies: How scientists hope to stop coronavirus in its tracks

Image credit - Pikist

Read: How speech recognition techniques are helping to predict volcanoes' behaviour

Image credit - Matthäus Rest

Read: Solving an ancient dairy mystery could help cure modern food ills

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Richard Zaltzman is chief executive officer of EIT Food. © EIT Food

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