Renewable energy, gene editing, and large-scale language models

Science magazine’s top ten scientific breakthroughs for 2025

Every year, the editors of Science publish a list of ten significant events in science that occurred that year. Last year, the list was topped by pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which provides six months of protection against HIV infection. This year, the journal named the growing use of renewable energy sources as the most significant breakthrough.

Sun and wind

Science considers the increased use of renewable energy sources  —  solar, wind, and hydropower  —  to be the most significant breakthrough of 2025. Renewable energy has become cheaper than any other energy source in many countries, with costs declining by 70–90 percent over the past fifteen years. China, a longtime leader in annual carbon dioxide emissions, has become the primary producer of solar and wind energy. Today, China produces over 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, their components, and raw materials (polysilicon, silicon wafers, photovoltaic cells), as well as approximately 60 percent of wind turbines. China actively exports solar panels to almost every country in the world  —  half of these exports go to Europe, a quarter to Asia and Australia, about 10–15 percent to the Americas, and a small portion to the Middle East and Africa. Turbines are also exported, primarily to Asian countries.

In 2018, the Danish company Ørsted commissioned an offshore wind farm consisting of 87 wind turbines.

In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to reduce CO2 emissions by 7–10 percent by 2035 by cutting fossil fuel use. Currently, the country gets about 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources, yet CO2 emissions have remained flat for the past eighteen months.

Gene therapy

Like their colleagues at Nature, the editors of Science magazine highlighted the personalized gene therapy for infant KJ Muldoon. The boy was born in 2024 with a rare mutation, carbamoyl phosphate synthetase I deficiency, which prevents his liver from processing ammonia. He was required to follow a low-protein diet (the breakdown of protein produces ammonia) and take medication. Doctors predicted that KJ would have severe developmental delays and would eventually require a liver transplant, which he might not live to see. However, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered KJ’s parents an experimental therapy. From February to May, he received three doses of a drug based on lipid nanoparticles and CRISPR editing, which was designed to correct the mutation. As a result, KJ was given half the medication, was able to eat more protein, and began gaining weight.

Scientists plan to create similar gene editing systems to treat five more patients with other mutations — since they will be nearly identical, they can be tested in a single clinical trial.

Pig kidneys

The development of xenotransplantation, which also involved genome editing, also made the top ten: genetically modified pig organs are better suited for human transplantation. A pig kidney with ten modifications, transplanted into a woman late last year, functioned in her body for four months. And this year, a new record was set: a GM kidney with changes in 69 genes functioned in a man’s body for nine months before failing. Scientists have yet to find the genes that, when modified, will allow pig kidneys to function longer in the human body. At the same time, they are developing new ways to suppress transplant rejection or increase immune tolerance.

Kate Flock / Massachusetts General Hospital

Heat-tolerant rice

Science cited the identification of the mechanism by which rice tolerates nighttime heat as another breakthrough. Chinese researchers spent several years growing different rice varieties in areas with high nighttime temperatures and crossing them. They identified the QT12 gene, located on chromosome 12: if it was activated during nighttime heat, the rice was unpalatable and brittle, but if it was deactivated, the grains were of good quality and yielded higher crop yields.

The scientists crossed the commercial rice variety Huazhan with a variety carrying alleles of the gene that remain inactive even under heat stress. They obtained a 78 percent higher yield, while the proportion of brittle, unpalatable grains decreased. The researchers hypothesized that the tolerance and yield of other commercial rice varieties could be improved by selecting or breeding plants with protective alleles.

DNA from dentistry

In 2010, paleogeneticists isolated the DNA of an unknown hominin from a finger bone fragment found in Denisova Cave. They named him Denisovan, and teeth and other bone fragments were subsequently found, but all were small. Until now, we didn’t know what these people looked like, but this year, scientists identified Denisovan DNA in fossilized plaque from a tooth found in a skull discovered back in 1933. In 2021, the skull was obtained by scientists, who initially described it under its own species, “dragon man” (Homo longi). However, there were suggestions that it might be a Denisovan  —  and scientists finally confirmed this by sequencing DNA from dental calculus, which preserved it better than porous bone.

Qiang Ji et al. / The Innovation, 2021

New antibiotics for gonorrhea

Two new drugs for gonorrhea were also included in the list of scientific breakthroughs. Between 80 and 100 million people are infected with gonorrhea each year, and the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae has developed resistance to almost all antibiotics previously used to treat the infection. Cephalosporins remain effective against it, but they are not always effective. This year, gepotidacin from GSK and zoliflodacin from Innoviva Specialty Therapeutics, in collaboration with the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership, completed Phase III clinical trials. Gepotidacin blocks DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV, enzymes essential for DNA replication in bacteria. Zoliflodacin also acts on DNA gyrase, but through a different mechanism. Both drugs can be taken as tablets, while cephalosporins are only available by injection. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved these drugs.

Generous neurons

Disruption of tumor innervation often slows their growth, suggesting that nerve cells somehow contribute to cancer development. This year, researchers discovered how neurons help cancer cells proliferate. By culturing cancer cells alongside neurons, they observed that neurons transfer their mitochondria to the tumor cells. Evidence of this mitochondrial transfer was detected in mouse models and human prostate tumor samples. When a mixture of cancer cells and neurons was implanted in mice, they formed tumors and metastases. Only 5 percent of cancer cells received neuronal mitochondria, compared to 27 percent in lung metastases and 46 percent in brain metastases.

3D reconstruction of mitochondria transfer (marked with white arrows) from neurons (green) to tumor cells (red). Gregory Hoover et al. / Nature, 2025

The Vera Rubin telescope

The Vera Rubin Observatory’s ground-based LSST telescope, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, began operation this year. For the next ten years, it will scan the entire southern sky (not just individual objects). The image will be updated every three days, allowing the observatory to collect more data in a year than all previous telescopes combined. This data will be used to create a three-dimensional map of the cosmos, available to all users online.

The telescope is equipped with a three-ton camera with a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels and a viewing angle of 9.6 square degrees, which is roughly equivalent to 45 full moons. Although the image detail of this telescope is inferior to that of the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes, its advantage lies in its large field of view and continuous scanning of the sky.

Muons

Physics experts have called the inclusion of muons in the Standard Model a breakthrough. Back in 2006, the E821 experiment, which measured the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment, showed discrepancies with theoretical calculations, suggesting the possibility of new physics. A similar experiment, Muon g-2, in 2021 yielded the same values: together, they differed from those predicted by the Standard Model with a statistical significance of 4.2 standard deviations. In 2023, scientists measured the muon’s magnetic moment again, and this time, the combined result differed from the theoretical value by 5 standard deviations. However, in 2024, the theoretical value of the anomalous magnetic moment was recalculated using large-scale QCD simulations on a lattice with a finer pitch than previously used, reducing the discrepancy to less than one standard deviation. New measurements of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment later appeared to agree with these predictions.

Muon g-2 experiment. Reidar Hahn / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Large language models in science

Large language models (LLMs), often simply referred to as neural networks, have proven themselves in various fields over the past year. Science editors noted how Gemini and GPT-5 outperformed students at the International Mathematical Olympiad: Gemini solved all twelve problems, while GPT solved ten. Another Google model generated five hypotheses about how superbugs become resistant to antibiotics  —  one of these hypotheses had previously been proposed and experimentally confirmed by biologists, but it took them years. And the large language model Llama conducted fifteen virtual chemical tests and determined optimal reaction conditions that had not yet been discovered by scientists.

Failures of the year

2025 was not without its scientific failures. One of these, according to the Science editors, was the decline in the quality of scientific research due to the falsification of results and the use of large language models. While some scientists use neural networks to research and create, others use them to write shoddy scientific papers. Some deliberately fill their portfolios with fabricated studies in pursuit of the h-index, while others entrust neural networks with data processing and writing without bothering to verify the results. As a result, the number of “junk” scientific papers is growing exponentially.

Another failure, according to the editors of Science, is the changes that have begun to affect science and healthcare in the United States under Donald Trump and his administration. The National Institutes of Health has been forced to cancel numerous projects, including those related to inclusivity, equality, climate change, and gender studies. The government has sharply cut research institute budgets for 2026 and frozen all federal grants to Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, citing the universities’ refusal to comply with the administration’s new requirements to combat anti-Semitism. The United States also suspended financial aid to other countries, resulting in the cessation of food and medicine shipments abroad. The country cut healthcare funding and withdrew from the WHO.

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