While western billionaires were busy sending rockets to space only for them to crash and burn, scientists in India were quietly doing something no one had accomplished before. Their Chandrayaan-3 moon lander was the first mission to reach the lunar south pole – an unexplored region where reservoirs of frozen water are believed to exist. I remember my heart soaring when images of the control room in India spread around social media, showing senior female scientists celebrating their incredible achievement. The success of Chandrayaan-3, launched in July 2023, showed the world that not only is India a major player in space, but that a moon lander can be launched successfully for $75m (£60m). This cost is not to be sniffed at but it is much cheaper than most other countries' budgets for a moon mission. July 2023 was an extremely busy month for space firsts.

A model human embryo with a heartbeat and traces of blood has been created by scientists in a move that could offer insights into the first weeks of life. The synthetic structure was created from human stem cells without the need for eggs, sperm or fertilisation. It replicates some of the cells and structures that would usually appear in the third and fourth weeks of pregnancy, but was designed to never have the ability to develop into a foetus. Despite the heartbeat, the structure does not have the tissues that go on to form the placenta and yolk sac in a natural embryo. 'I'd like to emphasise that these are neither embryos nor are we trying to make embryos,' said Dr Jitesh Neupane, from the University of Cambridge's Gurdon Institute.

With 2021 behind us, we're going down memory lane to highlight biotech innovations that shaped the year--with impact that will likely reverberate for many years to come. Covid-19 dominated the news, but science didn't stand still. CRISPR spun off variations with breathtaking speed, expanding into a hefty toolbox packed with powerhouse gene editors far more efficient, reliable, and safer than their predecessors. CRISPRoff, for example, hijacks epigenetic processes to reversibly turn genes on and off--all without actually snipping or damaging the gene itself. Prime editing, the nip-tuck of DNA editing that only snips--rather than fully cutting--DNA received an upgrade to precisely edit up to 10,000 DNA letters in a variety of cells.

Scientists in China created an AI robot system that cares for human embryos growing in artificial wombs, a report from The Independent reveals. When we think of AI-monitored humans in artificial wombs we think of the dystopian sci-fi future presented in'The Matrix'. However, the researchers behind the very real project believe their new system will be a force for good that will help to boost China's population -- the country is currently dealing with its lowest birth rate in six decades. The team, from Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology in China's eastern Jiangsu province, designed the robot to constantly monitor and care for human embryos by adjusting the nutrition, carbon dioxide, and other important factors in the artificial embryos. They claim the new robot-assisted artificial womb is a safer and more efficient method for growing embryos than a natural womb, though no human trials have been conducted so far. The researchers, who outlined their project in a paper in the Journal of Biomedical Engineering, explained how it could rank embryos based on their development potential.

Five cloned monkeys have been born with a host of genetic mental health conditions in a controversial experiment in China. The monkeys - all clones of one primate - have been specially bred to create a'diseased' population of animals to use in laboratory tests. All five have the same DNA altered, which has resulted in symptoms similar to the human conditions of anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. The quintet were born at the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai. Researchers used the same technique as was used last year to produce Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua – the first ever two cloned monkeys - and Dolly the sheep, famously cloned in the late 90s in Scotland.

Can robots and humans make babies together? This is a serious question inspired by some of the advances already achieved in the 21st century by researchers in cell biology and in a discipline variously known as biorobotics, synthetic biology, or bionanotechnology. Although it had long been a truth universally acknowledged that sexual intercourse was an essential precursor to conception, it was only around 150 years ago that early studies of embryology revealed the reason why, according to the dogma of the time, intercourse was "essential" in human reproduction. The reason was that only an egg from a female, fertilized by a sperm from a male, can result in a live birth. But thanks to the Nobel prize winning work of researchers like embryologist John Gurdon and stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, it has become possible during the past few years to create both sperm cells and eggs in the laboratory from skin cells, obviating the need for a human mother or father to kick off the reproductive process.

Yue Shao had never seen anything quite like it. Two years ago, Shao, a mechanical engineer with a flair for biology, was working with embryonic stem cells, the kind derived from human embryos able to form any cell type. As he experimented with ways of getting cells to form more organized three-dimensional structures by growing them in scaffolds of soft gel, he was looking for signs of primitive neural tissue. What drew his attention was that the cells seemed to change much faster than expected--they arranged themselves rapidly over a few days into a lopsided circle. Shao startled Googling to see if he could identify the structure.

The entirety of human knowledge has been leading to this point. Information technologies and life sciences are at an inflection. Two technologies that are the pinnacle of achievement in their domains are going mainstream. In the IT world, it's Artificial Intelligence (AI), super-powerful computers that can program themselves and learn without the assistance of humans. In Life Sciences, it's Gene Editing (CRISPR/Cas9), the ability to reprogram genomes and change the course of evolution.

At the International Astronautical Congress last September, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk convinced many die-hard space engineers he could get a fleet of private rockets filled with thousands of people to Mars. Musk's speech was long on orbits, flight plans, and fuel costs. But it was short on how any of those colonists would survive. In fact, the Mars journey would likely be a dead end. Bathed in radiation and with nothing growing on it, the Red Planet is basically a graveyard.

LONDON – Scientists in Britain have for the first time created a structure that resembles a mouse embryo using a 3D scaffold and two types of stem cells -- research that deepens understanding of the earliest stages of mammalian development. Publishing their results in the journal Science on Thursday, the team, based at Cambridge University, said that while the artificial embryo closely resembled the real thing, it would be unlikely to develop further into a healthy mouse fetus. For research purposes, however, the scientists were able to show how the artificial embryo followed the same pattern of development as a normal embryo -- with the stem cells organizing themselves in the same way. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor at Cambridge's department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience who led the work, said the success with mouse cells should pave the way for similar work with human cells, helping scientists overcome a major barrier to human embryo research -- a shortage of embryos. Currently, human embryos for research are developed from surplus eggs donated through fertility clinics, but Zernicka-Goetz said it should in the future be possible to use the stem cells and scaffold technique to make artificial human embryos for study.