The global energy transition reached a new milestone in 2025. Renewable energy overtook coal as the world’s largest source of electricity. Installation of solar and wind power increased at a fast enough rate to cover the entire increase in global demand between January and June. This scientific advance stands out as the most important of the year according to the magazine Sciencewhich is publishing this Thursday a list of the most significant innovations of 2025.
The prestigious publication accompanies this selection with a resounding editorial which represents a full-fledged amendment to the policy against renewable energies and in favor of fossil fuels that Donald Trump applies from the White House. Beyond the environmental and health problems that this policy generates, the magazine emphasizes the economic contradiction that it represents for the interests of the United States “by not benefiting from their own innovations”. Because a significant portion of the technologies that have led to this growth in renewable energy around the world “were developed in the United States.” But it is China that perfected them and manufactures them, keeping the profits. This country, remember Sciencesupplies 80% of the world’s solar panels, 70% of wind turbines and 70% of lithium batteries.
But Trump implemented a policy of shutting down renewable energy in the United States and encouraging fossil fuel extraction from the first minute of his return to the White House. “While the rest of the world buys cheap renewable technologies from China, the United States is doubling down on its commitment to fossil fuels,” says the magazine, which calls it a “bad decision” to have given up on the “commercial opportunity” to export components for solar and wind power plants to the rest of the world. “China’s revenue from the export of renewable technologies is almost as high as what the United States currently earns from the export of fossil fuels, but revenue from the sale of renewable energy is growing much faster due to strong global demand,” the editorial warns.
The article of Sciencewhich depends on the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is headquartered in Washington DC, follows a long list of Trump’s executive orders since January aimed at boosting oil and gas extraction, lowering environmental requirements and thus also benefiting fossil fuels and stopping renewable projects. It was also released just a few weeks later National Security Strategy of the United States of Americain which Trump outlines his foreign policy priorities.
In this document, which constantly attacks the European Union, the Trump team implicitly recognizes the problem in the section relating to energy. Because it proposes as its main objective “to restore American energy domination”, but only by relying on “oil, gas, coal and nuclear (energy)”. It should be remembered that the fossil fuel sector generously financed Trump’s return to the American presidency and that even his current Secretary of State for Energy is a former fossil fuel industry executive. hydraulic fracturing. In international forums, the Trump administration is allying itself with oil states to defend the fossil fuel sector. And at the last climate summit, held in Belém (Brazil) in November, majority support of countries was not achieved to call for abandoning oil, gas and coal, the main culprits of climate change.
But the global energy trend is different, as highlighted Science in its publication on the most important scientific advances of the year. “China’s growing green technology exports are also transforming the rest of the world. Europe is a long-time customer, but countries in the South are also rushing to buy Chinese solar panels, batteries and wind turbines, driven by market forces and the desire for energy independence,” summarizes this publication.
The energy conflict between China and the United States becomes even more relevant with the development of artificial intelligence, whose data centers, essential for maintaining AI, require large amounts of electricity. While China is preparing to feed them with renewable energy and only incorporate fossil fuels as a backup, the United States is banking on an energy model anchored in the past, he warns. Science.
Besides renewable energy, the list of advances in 2025 ranges from personalized gene editing for diseases, to large language models (LLMs) that have demonstrated advanced scientific capabilities, to the incorporation of a revolutionary telescope in Chile.
Personalized gene therapy
KJ Muldoon was born in August 2024 with a defect in the CSP1 gene, responsible for producing an enzyme essential for the liver to remove ammonia from the body. Without this enzyme, ammonia builds up and can cause serious damage to the brain and other organs.
In record time, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia created a breakthrough therapy that corrected a single faulty letter in Muldoon’s genome. He developed a base editor, an advanced version of the CRISPR tool. At six months old, Muldoon became the first patient to benefit from personalized gene editing. As a result, he began eating more protein, gaining weight and reducing the amount of medication needed to control his ammonia levels. The researchers now plan to treat five additional patients with similar metabolic disorders caused by other genetic abnormalities.
New weapons against gonorrhea
Gonorrhea affects more than 80 million people each year and can cause serious complications, such as infertility in both sexes, and increase the risk of HIV infection. The resistance of the bacteria responsible for the disease, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, with antibiotics has made traditional treatments less and less effective.
This year, two new infection-fighting drugs demonstrated effectiveness in clinical trials and were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA): gepotidacin, developed by GSK with support from the US Biomedical Research and Development Authority; And zoliflodacinof Innoviva Specialty Therapeutics and the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership. While these advances are important, experts caution that their effectiveness may be temporary.
How tumors promote their spread
A team of scientists has discovered the mechanism by which tumors trigger nerve cells to grow and spread. They do this by transferring mitochondria, the organelles responsible for providing most of the cells’ chemical fuel. In doing so, they also provide them with additional energy, essential for the spread of the tumor and promoting metastasis.
Using a microscope, the scientists observed how mitochondria were sent to malignant neighbors via tiny bridge-like structures. The team found evidence in mice injected with cancer cells and in samples of human prostate tumors, the journal reported. Nature.
the dragon man
A team led by Chinese scientists and a Swedish Nobel Prize winner in medicine has rescued DNA from a fossil attributed to a new human species, the Homo longiknown as the Dragon Man. The researchers successfully extracted genetic instructions from a small sample of dental plaque, which preserved genetic material from saliva. The 146,000-year-old skull belonged to a Denisovan, a subspecies of the genus Homo. This discovery made it possible to know for the first time what the faces of these humans looked like, since no complete skull had been found before.
LLMs as tools for doing science
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in several scientific disciplines, including chemistry and biology, according to Science. An advanced version of Google DeepMind’s Gemini won a gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad, while OpenAI’s GPT-5 made progress on classic number theory problems.
The mystery of the muon
Midyear, an experiment concluded that the muon, a negatively charged elementary particle similar to the electron but with a mass 200 times greater, is no more magnetic than current theory predicts. In 2025, for the first time, theorists managed to calculate its magnetism with great precision.
Animal organs for humans
A man from New Hampshire, United States, lived for nearly nine months with a pig kidney with 69 altered genes, a record that has not been surpassed since 1964, when a chimpanzee kidney was used, a practice now considered ethically unacceptable. A pig kidney with six modified genes worked almost as long in a woman in China. Faced with the shortage of human organs, science continued this year with clinical trials of xenotransplantation (from animals to humans). Although notable progress has been seen, researchers agree that donor pigs still need additional genetic modifications to increase how long their organs survive in the human body.
Other ways of seeing space
In 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be completed, atop Cerro Pachón, Chile. This is a project that aims to revolutionize astronomical observation. Instead of pointing at specific targets, as conventional telescopes do, Rubin systematically scans the entire visible sky every three days for ten years. It was created to produce alerts every night about objects that move, change brightness or suddenly emerge.
A gene protects rice from nighttime heat
Faced with the significant threat posed by extremely hot nights to rice crops, a team of Chinese researchers has identified a gene that helps the cereal to resist. Scientists analyzed more than 500 varieties grown in regions prone to sultry nights and located a gene called QT12, responsible for regulating the grain’s response to heat. Plants with a protective version of this gene retained firm, good quality grains. By introducing it into a commercial variety, scientists achieved yield increases of up to 78% under heat stress.
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