SCI COMMUN ### Areas to watch As biomedical scientists continue to battle the deadly pandemic this year to help the world return to normalcy, researchers across the disciplines still aim to hit big milestones or launch new projects despite the challenges brought by COVID-19. European scientists will also have to contend with the aftermath of Brexit. Many U.S. scientists, in contrast, have a more hopeful political outlook, with some likely to play an invigorated role in tackling another global crisis, climate change, after President-elect Joe Biden, who has vowed to make it a top priority, is sworn in this month. In this section, Science 's news staff forecasts areas of research and policy we expect to make headlines this year, from protecting the high seas' biodiversity to probing how ancient humans interacted. ### Global warming Nearly 8 years have passed since the fifth assessment report from the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the famed body of volunteer climate scientists that since 1990 has chronicled humanity's persistent warming of the planet. The sixth installment, crafted by more than 700 scientists and delayed by the pandemic, will come out in sections this year and next, and it's expected to further sharpen the picture of the human impact on climate. Its findings will be bolstered by a new generation of climate models and scenarios, fed by indicators of unabated global change: data showing accelerating sea level rise; rapid ice melt at the poles; and waves of extreme heat, drought, and fire. In November, the world's countries will meet in Scotland's Glasgow for the next U.N. climate summit, where they are expected to increase the ambitions of their pledged cuts in greenhouse gases and agree on a full set of rules to implement the Paris agreement. Among the attendees will be the United States, which President-elect Joe Biden has said will rejoin the pact. ### Public health The launch of immunization campaigns in many countries has raised hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic can be brought to an end. But how exactly it started remains murky, and a World Health Organization international team of 10 scientists will travel to China several times this year as part of an investigation into the pandemic coronavirus' origins—a politically sensitive mission because the United States and China have sparred over who is to blame for the pandemic. The team hopes to discover the virus' closest relatives in bats, where and how it jumped to humans, whether another species acted as an intermediate host, and, most important, how we can prevent other pandemic viruses from emerging. ### National security Restoring U.S.-Chinese scientific collaborations to health could be a test of President-elect Joe Biden's success in negotiating with the Asian superpower on trade, immigration, and security concerns. A new U.S. government–sponsored forum on science, technology, and national security will advise the new administration on how to strike the right balance between openness and preventing the theft of new technology. A new U.S. law provides stiff penalties for federal grant applicants who fail to disclose all sources of funding when submitting a proposal, based on the assumption that greater transparency is the best way to monitor ties with China and other entities posing potential threats to U.S. security. University leaders are hoping Biden will reverse President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies and avoid ratcheting up economic and political tensions. But prominent Republicans in Congress are threatening even more punitive steps against China. ### Infectious diseases To complement mass vaccinations against COVID-19, drug companies this year will dash to custom design drugs that block the pandemic coronavirus and treat the disease's symptoms. Even if many people receive one of the new, highly effective vaccines approved in recent weeks by regulators, the virus is expected to remain endemic. In 2020, only the antiviral remdesivir and a handful of other drugs, all originally designed to treat other conditions, showed even limited benefits against the disease. To identify new drug candidates, researchers have deployed artificial intelligence and supercomputers, and more than 590 experimental drugs are in development, according to a leading pharmaceutical industry tracker. For example, researchers have high hopes for compounds that disrupt reproduction of the pandemic virus by inhibiting one of its two proteases. Cocktails of such therapies could tame the virus, an approach used successfully against HIV. The protease inhibitors and other compounds look promising in cell and animal studies. But studies on human volunteers are only getting started, and it could take years to pass safety and efficacy reviews. ### Planetary science Mars's thin air makes it hard to slow a probe to a soft landing. Of the 18 robotic probes sent to the planet's surface in the past 50 years, eight have crashed. This year, two more will attempt a touchdown. On 18 February, NASA's SUV-size rover, Perseverance, will take the plunge, slowed by parachutes and retrorockets on a “sky crane” platform. After landing in Jezero crater, near a fossilized river delta, the rover will collect rock samples for eventual return to Earth. Around the same time, China's Tianwen-1 mission will arrive with an orbiter, a lander platform, and a rover the size of a golf cart. Officials have chosen a landing site not far from Jezero, along the southern edge of Utopia Planitia, a broad plain that may have been repaved by ancient flows of mud. A successful touchdown would be China's first on Mars. ### Microscopy Researchers aim this year to sharpen the resolution of cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique for studying protein structure that may yield new insights into their roles in maintaining human health and causing disease. Another technique, x-ray crystallography, has long been the gold standard for mapping individual atoms within a 3D protein structure. But it only works for proteins that can be packed into crystals. Cryo-EM doesn't require crystals, and its resolution has steadily improved over the past decade. In 2020, it crossed the threshold of atomic resolution as researchers using cryo-EM microscopes equipped with improved electron detectors and software mapped the structure of apoferritin, an iron-binding protein. That protein is unusually rigid, which made it easier to hold steady during cryo-EM mapping. Next, researchers want to image less rigid proteins. Success would be a boon to structural biologists, allowing them to generate highly detailed maps of large proteins and complexes of multiple proteins that cannot be crystallized. ### Astronomy The long wait will soon be over: NASA's much-delayed flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is set to finally take to the skies on 31 October. JWST is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 6.5-meter-wide mirror that has six times its predecessor's light-gathering power. The gold-coated, honeycombed mirror will be cooled so it can collect the infrared light of distant objects, red-shifted by the universe's expansion. JWST will be sensitive enough to scrutinize the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets for signs of life and gather the light of the universe's first stars and galaxies. The $8.8 billion spacecraft, which will cost billions more and launch years later than originally planned, recently endured final tests—violent shaking to simulate launch. This month, engineers are unfolding its mirror and unfurling its multilayered Sun shield one last time to check that all is well. By midyear, JWST will be packed up and shipped to French Guiana, where it will be loaded onto a European Ariane 5 rocket. Next stop: deep space. ### Energy The Joint European Torus (JET), the world's largest fusion reactor, will this year embark on a campaign to generate substantial amounts of fusion power. The U.K.-based JET is a tokamak, which uses powerful magnets to constrain a hot plasma so that atomic nuclei crash together and fuse, releasing energy. After an upgrade, JET has a new metallic lining and extra heating power; in this year's trials, it will be fed a potent mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium (D-T)—a fuel rarely used because radioactive tritium needs careful handling and cleanup. In 1997, the last time this fuel mix was used, JET generated 16 megawatts of power for a few seconds, well short of the power consumed to make it happen. The new campaign will initially aim for similar power levels but try to sustain them for longer. That will help in planning for the huge ITER reactor, under construction in France, which has a similar shape and lining. ITER is due to start operations in 2025, but will not begin to use D-T fuel until the mid 2030s. ### Nutrition Help may arrive this year for millions of malnourished children who remain sickly and fail to fully recover even after receiving proper nutrition and treatments for being underfed. Pandemic-related disruptions and job losses are expected to cause the number of such children to skyrocket. One problem for underfed children is disruption of the gut microbiome, which leads to an immature, inefficient digestive system that stunts growth. To repair the microbiomes, health specialists are looking forward to results of a study in Bangladesh that evaluated a low-cost nutritional supplement; it's a mix of easy-to-find ingredients, such as chickpeas, bananas, and soy and peanut flours. In 2019, this team reported that in experiments in mice and pigs, followed by a monthlong pilot study of 60 children, the supplement led to gut repair, as indicated by changes in blood markers. The study did not last long enough to test effects on growth. Since then, these researchers have been comparing the intervention with an existing supplement in a larger, 3-month trial of malnourished children. ### Conservation Few rules protect biodiversity in the two-thirds of the ocean that lies outside nations' sovereign waters. This year, the United Nations is expected to finalize the first treaty specifically intended to change that. The pact is expected to provide a way to designate marine protected areas (MPAs) on the high seas; researchers have been developing a list of candidates and supporting evidence. The draft language also sets minimum standards for environmental impact assessments that nations would be required to conduct before starting commercial activities that might harm marine life. A new, international scientific and technical body, similar to one that manages marine life around Antarctica, would review MPA proposals. The treaty draft also provides for a system to manage genetic sequences taken from marine organisms living in the high seas. ### Archaeology Expect to see studies of ancient humans follow new paths this year, as researchers combine analyses of ancient DNA with other molecular and microbial clues to examine social ties and migrations. Scientists will merge DNA evidence with data from proteins and isotopes, as well as microfossils and pathogens from bones, tooth plaque, and fossilized poop. Such studies this year could help determine which early Celtic family members inherited wealth. They could help identify the homeland of the biblical Philistines and clarify the identities of early Anglo-Saxons and Greeks in Europe, as well as mummies in China and Egypt. ### Public health An obscure $4 billion U.S. government fund that compensates people injured by vaccines is poised to become more tight-fisted this month. Changes proposed by the Trump administration will likely take effect in mid-January, making it more complicated and time consuming for people to win a payout if they sustain shoulder injuries after incorrectly administered injections with flu, tetanus, and other vaccines. The new rules won't affect people who might be injured by COVID-19 vaccines, who would need to apply to a different government program for compensation. But claims that other vaccines caused shoulder injuries have grown on the heels of expanded influenza vaccination and a 2010 paper in which government scientists first described “shoulder injury related to vaccine administration.” ### Biomedicine For more than 3 decades, scientists have dreamed of shrinking tumors by shutting off a protein called KRAS whose growth signals drive many cancer types. KRAS was thought to be impervious to drugs, in part because it offered no obvious pockets that inhibitors could target. But multiple companies have now developed compounds that fit into a groove on some cancer-promoting mutant KRAS proteins and curb their signals. The drugs have shown promising results, first in rodents and then in cancer patients. In December 2020, Amgen asked the Food and Drug Administration to review its KRAS drug, sotorasib, setting the stage for approval this year of the first member of this novel drug class. The drug could first be licensed for use in certain lung cancer patients. Another firm is expected to submit its KRAS drug for approval this year as well.

A famous story about the Beatles tells of the collaboration between Paul McCartney and John Lennon on the song “Getting Better” for their legendary Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. After McCartney wrote the lines “I've got to admit, it's getting better; a little better all the time,” Lennon wryly added, “It can't get no worse.” This story could serve as an epigraph as the calendar turns from the year 2020, which could hardly have gotten much worse, to 2021, when we hope life will indeed get a little better all the time. Better from COVID-19 because of the vaccines, better from misinformation spread by outgoing president Donald Trump and his allies, and better, we can hope, when it comes to the production and distribution of scientific knowledge. There's plenty of exciting science to be optimistic about in 2021 (see News on p. 6). At the end of 2020, the DeepMind group in the United Kingdom announced a major advance in long-standing challenges in protein folding, predicting three-dimensional (3D) structures of proteins from their amino acid sequence. The next year portends even more exciting advances in protein structure and design. On the cosmic front, there are many efforts underway to bring samples from the Solar System back to this planet. The Hayabusa2 mission that traveled to the asteroid 162173 Ryugu retrieved what could be a treasure trove of material revealing details about the ancient delivery of water and organic molecules to Earth. Similarly, the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission has collected samples from the asteroid Bennu that, when they arrive, could reveal important aspects of the formation of the Solar System. The new Mars rover Perseverance will land in February and, in addition to transmitting important data from the red planet, will begin the process of collecting samples that may eventually be studied in terrestrial laboratories. In biology, the COVID-19 pandemic led to major advances in the development and application of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. It is stunning that science not only came up with a vaccine to a new pathogen so quickly but also advanced a brand new vaccine technology, albeit one that was already in development for several years. The application of mRNA therapies to other problems in infectious diseases and throughout medicine will be exciting to follow. Quantum computing remains an important area to watch. This year, Science published a paper that describes the application of a quantum computer to an important problem in theoretical chemistry. In the coming months, it's likely that there will be progress in addressing the problem of quantum error correction, pushing quantum computing a little closer to routine application. Additive manufacturing and 3D printing continue to become more practical. In particular, the ability to apply these techniques to new types of materials will make it more likely that advanced manufacturing can benefit from the science behind these processes. On the policy front, the continued development of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) organization—as described in a recent editorial by Ottoline Leyser—will be of keen interest as the Brexit process continues. Despite choppy politics, the scientific vision of UKRI is strong and could lead to advances in British science. In the United States, although the Biden White House will certainly be friendlier to science, the science denial that fueled the Trump administration will linger in the American population and among some conservative politicians. The battles ahead are not to be underestimated. Continued denial of climate change and COVID-19 is sadly inevitable, and it will take everything U.S. science and the Biden administration can muster to stay strong. Still, as new leaders are named and confirmed in health and science policy, U.S. science should be able to at least catch its breath and feel optimistic about a new era. Although 2020 will certainly go down as a year that couldn't get much worse, there is plenty to be proud of and reason to hope that things will be getting better. The virus was confronted. Epidemiologists and other scientists became household names. And the scientific community found a much stronger voice, one that will serve us all well in 2021 and beyond.

When the present is scary, the future can be virtually unthinkable. But it's at times of great change and uncertainty--and 2020 surely qualifies--that it is most important to try to look ahead, to think about how decisions made right now can reverberate. This year, Future Tense Fiction--a partnership of Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination--published 12 stories that take very different looks at the years to come. In the case of Max Barry's "It Came From Cruden Farm," that future is very near--it's set on Inauguration Day 2021, when a new president learns that the U.S. government has custody of an alien, and it's complicated. Other futures are more distant; as part of our package of three stories on artificial intelligence and governance, "The State Machine," by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, follows a graduate student trying to learn about the very earliest days of his country being run by A.I. Tobias S. Buckell's "Scar Tissue," Holli Mintzer's "Legal Salvage," and Karl Schroeder's "The Suicide of Our Troubles" all grapple, in very different ways, with legal rights for nonhumans.

Two American B-52 bombers flew another show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday, a week after President Trump warned Iran that he would hold it accountable "if one American is killed" in rocket attacks in Iraq that the administration and military officials blamed on Tehran. The warplanes' 36-hour round-trip mission from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota was the third time in six weeks that Air Force bombers had conducted long-range flights about 60 miles off the Iranian coast, moves that military officials said were intended to deter Iran from attacking American troops in the region. The United States periodically conducts such quick demonstration missions to the Middle East and Asia to showcase American air power to allies and adversaries. But tensions have been rising in advance of the Jan. 3 anniversary of the American drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Iraqi leader of an Iranian-backed militia -- deaths that Iranian leaders repeatedly insist they have not yet avenged.

We review the EfficientQA competition from NeurIPS 2020. The competition focused on open-domain question answering (QA), where systems take natural language questions as input and return natural language answers. The aim of the competition was to build systems that can predict correct answers while also satisfying strict on-disk memory budgets. These memory budgets were designed to encourage contestants to explore the trade-off between storing large, redundant, retrieval corpora or the parameters of large learned models. In this report, we describe the motivation and organization of the competition, review the best submissions, and analyze system predictions to inform a discussion of evaluation for open-domain QA.

Deep neural networks usually require large labeled datasets for training to achieve the start-of-the-art performance in many tasks, such as image classification and natural language processing. Though a lot of data is created each day by active Internet users through various distributed systems across the world, most of these data are unlabeled and are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this paper, we develop an efficient active learning method that requires fewer labeled instances and incorporates the technique of adversarial retraining in which additional labeled artificial data are generated without increasing the labeling budget. The generated adversarial examples also provide a way to measure the vulnerability of the model. To check the performance of the proposed method under an adversarial setting, i.e., malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks, we perform an extensive evaluation on the reduced CIFAR-10 dataset, which contains only two classes: 'airplane' and 'frog' by using the private cloud on campus. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed active learning method is efficient for defending against malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks. Specifically, whereas the baseline active learning method based on the random sampling strategy performs poorly (about 50%) under a malicious mislabeling attack, the proposed active learning method can achieve the desired accuracy of 89% using only one-third of the dataset on average.

Machine learning based systems are reaching society at large and in many aspects of everyday life. This phenomenon has been accompanied by concerns about the ethical issues that may arise from the adoption of these technologies. ML fairness is a recently established area of machine learning that studies how to ensure that biases in the data and model inaccuracies do not lead to models that treat individuals unfavorably on the basis of characteristics such as e.g. race, gender, disabilities, and sexual or political orientation. In this manuscript, we discuss some of the limitations present in the current reasoning about fairness and in methods that deal with it, and describe some work done by the authors to address them. More specifically, we show how causal Bayesian networks can play an important role to reason about and deal with fairness, especially in complex unfairness scenarios. We describe how optimal transport theory can be used to develop methods that impose constraints on the full shapes of distributions corresponding to different sensitive attributes, overcoming the limitation of most approaches that approximate fairness desiderata by imposing constraints on the lower order moments or other functions of those distributions. We present a unified framework that encompasses methods that can deal with different settings and fairness criteria, and that enjoys strong theoretical guarantees. We introduce an approach to learn fair representations that can generalize to unseen tasks. Finally, we describe a technique that accounts for legal restrictions about the use of sensitive attributes.

Policies for partially observed Markov decision processes can be efficiently learned by imitating policies for the corresponding fully observed Markov decision processes. Unfortunately, existing approaches for this kind of imitation learning have a serious flaw: the expert does not know what the trainee cannot see, and so may encourage actions that are sub-optimal, even unsafe, under partial information. We derive an objective to instead train the expert to maximize the expected reward of the imitating agent policy, and use it to construct an efficient algorithm, adaptive asymmetric DAgger (A2D), that jointly trains the expert and the agent. We show that A2D produces an expert policy that the agent can safely imitate, in turn outperforming policies learned by imitating a fixed expert.

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – Elton John might have said it best in his iconic song "Rocket Man" – "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." More than 50 years after we sent humans to the moon – the closest celestial body to Earth – the plan is still to head to Mars, something many astronauts who have flown in space thought we would have already accomplished. "I just assumed by the time I got to be old enough to go into the space program, you know we'd be living on Mars or I'd be working on Mars just as a scientist," Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, told university students at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in December 2019. But despite the fact humankind has been unable to send anyone to another place in the universe besides the moon, there are still many with the hopes and expectation that we will become a multi-planetary species in the near future, starting with our red next-door neighbor. Billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and aspiring young astronauts like Alyssa Carson, a sophomore studying astrobiology at Florida Tech, hope to one day live on Mars. "Eventually the sun will run out of fuel to burn … and conditions on Earth are going to be very different from our normal regular life now," Carson told Florida Today, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Autonomous flying'bug drones' that can spy on enemies more than a mile away and operate in strong winds of up to 50mph are being tested by the British Army. Developed by the British defence firms BAE Systems and UAVTEK, 'The Bug' is a fist-sized robot weighing just 6.7 ounces (191g) -- roughly the same as a smart phone. The drone has a 40 minute battery life and a'stealthy low visual profile' that makes it hard for the enemy to spot. The army is said to have taken delivery of 30 units. In the recent Army Warfighting Experiment, the Bug proved to be the only small drone tested that was capable of withstanding difficult weather conditions.