The beginning of every year is a time for people to start over, set new goals, and aim for new accomplishments. This gives people the chance to get a fresh start so they don’t live with the regrets, and mistakes that they made the years before.

  There are a few people who have hope that they can find new discoveries that will help the progression of human life faster in the upcoming years.

  In 2017, scientists discovered a new type of pistol Shrimp that uses large pink claws to create a noise so loud it can stun, or even kill a small fish. Also, they discovered 450 Stonehenge-like formations in the northwestern part of Brazil, and also Scientists found evidence for a new continent in the southwest Pacific beneath New Zealand, called Zealandia.

  Jacqueline Faherty is a PhD astronomer who recently joined the Department of Astrophysics and the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city. She is also the co-founder of the Citizen Science Project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, which is a system to look for dwarf planets in our outer solar system and for a planet closely related to Earth.

  Faherty is looking for this year to the be “The Year of the Milky Way.” She plans to make a very detailed map of the galaxy from the Gaia mission that measured the positions and distances of stars in April of 2017.

  Dr. Oren Etzioni is the Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a professor since 1991 at the University of Washington Computer Science Department. Etzioni received his Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and his B.A. from Harvard University in 1986.

  Etzioni plans to have artificial Intelligence play games, such as poker. He also wants to see them able to answer questions in many different categories like politics to science or even just simple questions.

  Esther Dyson is a Swiss-born American journalist, author, businesswoman, investor, commentator and philanthropist (the love of humanity, in the sense of caring and nourishing, it involves both the benefactor in their identifying and exercising their values). She is focusing her career on health and technology instead of government transparency, and space.

  Dyson is hoping to acquire more data and make it available through everything from health records and fitness apps to public data such as high school graduation rates and population demographics. She wants health to be monitored more, to make sure that people are healthy, and always knows what’s going on with them.

  Katherine Freese is a theoretical astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter that talks about the ordinary atoms that make up the universe, from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars.

  Freese wants to show the world the value of H0 which is the null hypothesis that means “no difference.” She discovered in a neutron star merge that gravity travels closely to the time of light. Scientist are discovering that there are many neutron stars and the masses of black holes are 30 times the mass of the sun. This is the year, she states, “We will learn more about relativity…we will learn what other masses are out there.”

  During this new year, many doctors, and scientist are hoping to accomplish great things, and discover more than any other year before. This will help humans in many different ways such as better health systems, better understandings of the universe, and so much more.

  If the world didn’t have these people that are willing to help society out and make new breakthroughs, the world could possibly still be in the Dark Ages.