The 10 Biggest Science Breakthroughs of 2025

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Every year, the journal Science crowns one Breakthrough of the Year. For 2025 it wasn’t a lab discovery at all. It was the moment renewables, from rooftop solar to a wind turbine turning breeze into power, out-generated coal across the whole world in the first half of the year.

Then come the runners-up, and three are worth the wait. At 1:37, one of humanity’s lost cousins finally gets a face: DNA recovered from the tartar on a 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, proved it was Denisovan. It’s the first nearly complete skull ever tied to the group. At 3:40, a baby named KJ Muldoon, born unable to safely process protein, becomes the first patient ever treated with a CRISPR therapy built for one person’s DNA. And at 8:53, a decades-old physics puzzle, a tiny particle whose magnetism didn’t match the theory, gets solved.