It’s a new year, but it’s not just any new year. 2015 is shaping up to be a huge year for scientific exploration and discovery plus science policy. There are some important decisions that will be made this year on climate change, three-parent in vitro fertilization, and more. Those momentous decisions will hopefully be matched by discoveries that are no less historic. Both the LHC and LIGO will be re-opening, possibly opening up new horizons for physics and astronomy, while NASA will be visiting dwarf planets and preparing another trip to Mars.

Beyond these big projects, other sophisticated labs will open, progress will be made in understanding our evolutionary history, and new medical advances promise to improve lives. With so much going on, we thought it’d be a good time to outline some of the developments we can look forward to in 2015.

Much of this information comes from two new pieces in the journal Nature, but we've expanded on them with our own sources.

Progress on the medical front

In 2015, Sally Davies, UK’s Chief Medical Officer, will push for an agreement to deal with antimicrobial resistance through the World Health Organization. She notes in a Nature piece that, as the effectiveness of antibiotics goes down over time, lack of preparedness is causing significant damage. But with strong diplomatic effort and the support of the UK government, Davies hopes to reach a global agreement on practices that will limit the problem and promote new treatments. “By the end of 2015, I want to see global action,” she writes.

Drug companies have been competing to bring drugs to the market that lower cholesterol, and two of them look like they might be approved this year. The drugs have already been shown in clinical trials to reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and both have been assured of a speedy review. The decisions are expected to arrive in the summer.

Progress on combating Ebola will continue to be made in 2015. Trials of vaccines are already in progress, with results expected in June. There are several drugs being tested, as well as treatments using blood from Ebola survivors, which is rich in antibodies that neutralize the virus. If proved effective, the blood treatments could be rolled out quickly and effectively. In the meantime, healthcare workers in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone will have to continue to expand the use of proven measures—such as rapid detection and isolation of people who are infected—in order to bring the Ebola epidemic to an end.

The LHC reboots

The Large Hadron Collider will restart in March after two years of inactivity. Incredible as the massive particle collider already was, the last two years (and £97 million/$145.9 million) have been spent to upgrade it. Before its refit, the LHC discovered the Higgs Boson, which plays a role in imparting mass to other particles.

The Higgs was the last particle predicted by the Standard Model that hadn’t been discovered, meaning we've completed the model’s set of particle predictions. Now that the model is a complete success, what's the next thing to do? Tear it down. OK, maybe the next mission isn't quite that dramatic, but researchers will now attempt to find particle behaviors that the Standard Model doesn't cover.

The upgraded LHC will produce collisions at 13 trillion electron-volts, nearly double its previous high. With such high energies, it’s possible that we can find some unpredicted particles or discover what's behind dark matter. "When we turn on again with these new higher energies we should have the capability to start producing new particles and look for new processes, if they're there," Dave Charlton, spokesperson of the ATLAS Project, told the BBC radio show Today.

One model that stands to be affected by the LHC’s next round of experiments is supersymmetry, which, despite its appeal among many physicists, has gotten no support from the last round of LHC experiments. Those experiments failed to find evidence for supersymmetry's predicted particles, as the model predicts a number of particles which are counterparts to the particles in the Standard Model (but with different spin values). If no evidence is found for supersymmetry's predicted particles in the LHC’s upcoming experiments, it could be the last nail in the coffin for some of the most popular versions of the model.

New labs

A number of new science laboratories will open in 2015. The Francis Crick Institute, a multidisciplinary medical research institute, will open in London in November. With 1,250 researchers, it will help us “understand why disease develops and find new ways to treat, diagnose, and prevent illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases,” according to the institute’s website.

Further north, the National Graphene Institute will open this Spring at the University of Manchester. The institute, as its name implies, will work with graphene, a carbon material that is astoundingly strong (about 100 times stronger than steel) despite being a single atom thick. By comparison, a sheet of paper is about a million atoms thick.

Graphene could be used to build all sorts of things, from lightweight components for aircraft to flexible touch screens. The new institute hopes to be a stepping stone to eventually creating a "graphene city."

Meanwhile in the United States, the Allen Institute for Cell Science will open its doors in Seattle, Washington. Funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, the site will host scientists interested in delving into the world of the human cell.

Climate Change deal

Amidst all the breakthroughs, landmarks, and discoveries we can look forward to in 2015, a darker milestone is inevitable: Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas whose presence traps heat in the atmosphere, should reach 400 parts per million this year. It's the first time carbon dioxide will reach that level in millions of years.

Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom on the climate change front. In 2014, the United States and China, the planet’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide, signed a historic agreement to reduce their emissions. And this December at the United Nations talks in Paris, it’s hoped that these and other nations will sign a legally binding, post-2020 agreement. “Never before has there been such public support to act and political will to take action,” wrote Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in a piece appearing in the journal Nature.

Whatever decision is made in December, it will be historic, and we’ll be feeling the effects for quite some time. “What happens in the run-up to Paris will do more to determine the quality of life for generations to come than anything before,” said Figueres.

Ancient humans

What about some actual science? Palaeogeneticists have been hard at work decoding the genome of an ancient, 400,000 year-old human. The specimen was found in the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) cave, located in northern Spain. In 2013, the specimen’s mitochondrial genome was decoded, a feat which required an incredible effort given the decayed state of the bones. Now the researchers want to go further and obtain its entire genome.

This will be even more difficult, since nuclear DNA is very scarce in the remains. But completing the task comes with a reward: the specimen could be key to sorting out the complex evolutionary relationships among humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans and how they are related to Homo erectus, the species that predated them.

LIGO upgrade

Gravitational waves are an exciting theoretical phenomenon. When objects with strong gravitational fields make vigorous motions, (such as, for example, two co-orbiting supermassive black holes), they can send out waves of gravity. These waves could travel at the speed of light and create very slight, nearly imperceptible distortions in the space they pass through. In order to detect such a wave, extremely sensitive instruments would be required. So far, efforts to do so have relied on powerful interferometers.

An interferometer is a device that can measure changes in distance very precisely. It does this by sending lasers down two identical arms and bouncing them back, eventually checking to see if one laser took longer than the other to make its trip.

To detect a gravitational wave, no ordinary interferometer is sensitive enough. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is an exquisitely sensitive interferometer, but thus far, it has failed to conclusively detect any gravitational waves. This is not entirely surprising, as even with LIGO’s sensitivity the waves would be difficult to detect. But like the LHC, the three facilities that are part of LIGO have been undergoing an upgrade. Toward the end of the year, they will emerge more sensitive than ever.

If gravitational waves are observed, not only would it provide crucial details for our understandings of how the Universe works, it would also be a new tool for doing astronomy, potentially giving astronomers a glimpse into phenomena they can’t observe by using various wavelengths of light. Among other things, it could enable us to get a closer look at the Big Bang.

Besides LIGO, the European Space Agency’s own gravitational wave detector, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), will begin testing similar technologies for detecting the waves this Autumn.