2025's BIGGEST MOMENTS IN SCIENCE

Revisit the discoveries and events from the last 12 months that will change the world in the years to come

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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 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. NEUTRINO SCATTERING SEEN