30 | New Scientist | 21/28 December 2019
Preview of 2020
The tech ahead
Concerns about foreign interference and
the spread of misinformation online will
be prominent ahead of the US elections
in 2020. Twitter has already banned all
political advertising and Google will no
longer allow targeted ads based on political
affiliations. Facebook has announced
measures to remove coordinated networks
of fake accounts – though the company
continues to rule out fact-checking political
advertising, a widely criticised stance that
makes it difficult to stem the spread of
misinformation by political groups.
More broadly, privacy and government
surveillance will continue to be hot topics in
many parts of the world, fuelled in part by
the growing use of biometrics such as facial
recognition algorithms. China’s government
aims to have its social credit system fully in
place next year. This tracks and monitors
citizens, assigning them a score based on
their social behaviour and credit rating.
In the UK, police use of facial recognition
technology will be scrutinised, with calls
to regulate its employment or ban it outright.
On the streets, we still won’t see driverless
cars in full use, but advances will be made.
Tesla plans to activate a self-driving feature
in its cars by mid-year, and the companynumbers and diseases of ageing become
a global emergency.
It will be a crunch year for polio. The wild
virus, now in only two countries, won’t be
eradicated until at least 2021. Meanwhile,
the weakened live virus used in one vaccine
is reverting to its deadly form and circulating
more widely. All hopes are pinned on
a high-risk strategy: a new, still largely
untested vaccine to be rolled out in July.
The Ebola epidemic in central Africa may
finally be brought under control in early
2020, barring more of the violence that has
hampered and killed health teams. And the
first commercially approved Ebola vaccine
will go into production in mid-2020.
No such luck for the world’s remaining
pigs, as the lack of a vaccine allows African
swine fever to continue rampaging across
Eurasia. The virus led to a halving of pig
numbers in China this year. In 2020,
other continents, notably Australia, will
be desperately screening at borders for
infected pork.
Also likely in 2020 are more infections
resistant to all antibiotics. Researchers have
identified potential new antibiotics, but
there is little financial motive to bring them
to market. In 2020, the UK will launch the
world’s first scheme to address this – and
we may find out if it can break the logjam.
Vaccines can also defeat bacteria. A
promising new vaccine for tuberculosis
could enter large-scale trials in 2020, and
Pakistan will be the first to roll out a new
childhood vaccine for typhoid, after the
bacteria evolved extreme resistance to
antibiotics. Debora MacKenziePlastics in our bodies
Every time you eat, drink or breathe, you
are taking tiny bits of plastic into your body.
These are mostly the breakdown products
(pictured above) of the billions of tonnes of
garbage dumped on land and in the oceans
over the past 50 years.
You might assume that swallowing and
inhaling tiny particles of plastic is a health
risk. That is a plausible hypothesis. As yet,
however, that is all it is. But 2020 will be
the year we start to find out, as 15 research
projects funded by a Dutch health group
report their results. They aim to get a handle
on five big questions about microplastics and
human health: our exposure to and risk from
these particles in food and the air, their effects
on the immune system, whether they reach
our internal organs and their potential ascarriers of pathogens. Graham Lawton (^) ❚
has indicated it will roll out self-driving
taxis in some parts of the US. In the UK, the
government has committed to having fully
self-driving cars on the road by 2021, and
the year ahead will see passenger trials on
London roads. Donna Lu
Pioneering treatments
Like every year for the past 200,000 or so,
2020 will see struggles against germs and
our own wayward cells. But we will also be
turning the tables like never before.
Viruses, usually the enemy, will take
out cancer, and stem cells will mend
hearts – at least in the lab. In addition,
stem cells will fight Parkinson’s disease,
diabetes and macular degeneration of
the eyes in large-scale trials.
Some suspect those and other diseases
could all involve covert bacteria. A potential
Alzheimer’s cure based on this hypothesis
(see “Alzheimer’s disease breakthrough”,
page 26), and others involving the bacteria
in our microbiomes, will be tested in 2020,
as people over 65 reach unprecedented
Debris including microplastics
are recovered from a beach
in Tenerife, Spain
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