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IBM has unveiled its annual “5 in 5” – a list of ground-breaking innovations that will change the way people work, live, and interact during the next five years.

In 1609, Galileo invented the telescope and saw our cosmos in an entirely new way. He proved the theory that the Earth and other planets in our Solar System revolve around the Sun, which until then was impossible to observe. IBM Research continues this work through the pursuit of new scientific instruments – whether physical devices or advanced software tools – designed to make what’s invisible in our world visible, from the macroscopic level down to the nanoscale.

“The scientific community has a wonderful tradition of creating instruments to help us see the world in entirely new ways. For example, the microscope helped us see objects too small for the naked eye, and the thermometer helped us understand the temperature of the Earth and human body,” said Dario Gil, vice president of science & solutions at IBM Research. “With advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, we aim to invent a new generation of scientific instruments that will make the complex invisible systems in our world today visible over the next five years.”

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There are a couple of reasons that scar tissue looks different than regular skin – it lacks hair follicles, and it has no fat cells. Recently, though, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Irvine succeeded in addressing both factors. They’re now able to get wounds to heal with regenerated skin, instead of with scar tissue.

Myofibroblasts are the most common type of cell found in healing wounds, and they’re associated with scar formation. Led by U Penn’s Dr. George Cotsarelis, the research team was able to get those cells to transform into ones known as adipocytes – these are the fat cells that are present in normal skin, but absent in scars.

Scientists in the Cotsarelis Lab already knew which growth factors were necessary for hair follicles to form in the skin. This knowledge previously allowed them to induce follicles to grow at wound sites on mice, although that would supposedly only be solving half of the problem.

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NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has completed the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time revealing the best picture ever at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang. The central region of the image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit into the area of the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky.

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