Each year, Technology Review selects what it believes are the 10 most important emerging technologies. The winners are chosen based on the editors’ coverage of key fields.
The question that we ask is simple: is the technology likely to change the world? Some of these changes are on the largest scale possible: better biofuels, more efficient solar cells, and green concrete all aim at tackling global warming in the years ahead.
Other changes will be more local and involve how we use technology: for example, 3-D screens on mobile devices, new applications for cloud computing, and social television. And new ways to implant medical electronics and develop drugs for diseases will affect us on the most intimate level of all, with the promise of making our lives healthier.
Here's the list of top 10 emerging technologies for year 2010:
1. Real-Time Search
Social networking is changing the way we find information. Real-time search is a response to a fundamental shift in the way people use the Web. People used to visit a page, click a link, and visit another page. Now they spend a lot of time monitoring streams of data--tweets, status updates, headlines--from services like Facebook and Twitter, as well as from blogs and news outlets.
2. Mobile 3-D
Smart phones will take 3-D mainstream. The technology can be used with the much-hyped 3-D televisions announced in January (which require glasses), but its biggest impact will be as a way to create content for mobile devices with auto stereoscopic 3-D displays, which work by directing light to deliver different versions of an image directly to each of a viewer's eyes. The effect works best over a narrow range of viewing angles, so it is ill suited to television or cinema screens. But phones are generally used by one person at a time and are easily held at the optimum angle. That's why mobile multimedia devices are likely to win the race to bring 3-D into the mainstream.
3. Engineered Stem Cells
Mimicking human disease in a dish. Scientists can create stem cells from the adult cells of people with different disorders, such as diabetes, and induce them to differentiate into the types of cells damaged by the disease. This could allow researchers to watch the disease as it unfolds and trace the molecular processes that have gone awry.
4. Solar Fuel
Designing the perfect renewable fuel. When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass--corn or switchgrass or algae? "What we wanted to know," Afeyan says, "is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?"
The answer seems to be yes, according to Joule Biotechnologies, the company that Afeyan founded (also in Cambridge) to design this new fuel. By manipulating and designing genes, Joule has created photosynthetic microörganisms that use sunlight to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel--the first time this has ever been done, the company says. Joule grows the microbes in photobioreactors that need no fresh water and occupy only a fraction of the land needed for biomass-based approaches. The creatures secrete fuel continuously, so it's easy to collect. Lab tests and small trials lead Afeyan to estimate that the process will yield 100 times as much fuel per hectare as fermenting corn to produce ethanol, and 10 times as much as making it from sources such as agricultural waste. He says costs could be competitive with those of fossil fuels.
5. Light-Trapping Photovoltaics
Nanoparticles boost solar power's prospects. Plasmons are a type of wave that moves through the electrons at the surface of a metal when they are excited by incident light. Others had tried harnessing plasmonic effects to make conventional silicon photovoltaics more efficient, but no one had tried it with thin-film solar cells. Kylie Catchpole, a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra found that nanoparticles of silver she deposited on the surface of a thin-film silicon solar cell did not reflect back light that fell directly onto them, as would happen with a mirror. Instead, plasmons that formed at the particles' surface deflected the photons so that they bounced back and forth within the cell, allowing longer wavelengths to be absorbed.
Catchpole's experimental devices produce 30 percent more electrical current than conventional thin-film silicon cells. If Catchpole can integrate her nanoparticle technology with the processes used to mass-produce thin films commercially, it could shift the balance of technology used in solar cells. Thin-film photovoltaics could not only gain market share (they currently have just 30 percent of the market in the United States) but sustain growth in the solar industry overall.
6. Social TV
Relying on relationships to rebuild TV audiences. The viewership for live television broadcasts has generally been declining for years. But something surprising is happening: events such as the winter Olympics and the Grammys are drawing more viewers and more buzz. The rebound is happening at least in part because of new viewing habits: while people watch, they are using smart phones or laptops to swap texts, tweets, and status updates about celebrities, characters, and even commercials.
Carriers, networks, and content producers hope that making it easier for viewers to link up with friends will help them hold on to their audiences rather than losing them to services like Hulu, which stream shows over the Internet. And opening TV to social networking could make it easier for companies to provide personalized programming.
7. Green Concrete
Storing carbon dioxide in cement. Making cement for concrete involves heating pulverized limestone, clay, and sand to 1,450 °C with a fuel such as coal or natural gas. The process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: making one metric ton of commonly used Portland cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of it. The 2.8 billion metric tons of cement produced worldwide in 2009 contributed about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.
Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, discovered the recipe for Novacem's cement as a grad student at Imperial College London. "I was investigating cements produced by mixing magnesium oxides with Portland cement," he says. But when he added water to the magnesium compounds without any Portland in the mix, he found he could still make a solid-setting cement that didn't rely on carbon-rich limestone. And as it hardened, atmospheric carbon dioxide reacted with the magnesium to make carbonates that strengthened the cement while trapping the gas. Novacem is now refining the formula so that the product's mechanical performance will equal that of Portland cement.
8. Implantable Electronics
Dissolvable devices make better medical implants. The next generation of implantable medical devices will rely on a high-tech material forged not in the foundry but in the belly of a worm. Tufts University biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto is using silk as the basis for implantable optical and electronic devices that will act like a combination vital-sign monitor, blood test, imaging center, and pharmacy--and will safely break down when no longer needed.
Implanted electronics could provide a clearer picture of what's going on inside the body to help monitor chronic diseases or progress after surgery, but biocompatibility issues restrict their use. Many materials commonly used in electronics cause immune reactions when implanted. And in most cases today's implantable devices must be surgically replaced or removed at some point, so it's only worth using an implant for critical devices such as pacemakers. Silk, however, is biodegradable and soft; it carries light like optical glass; and while it can't be made into a transistor or an electrical wire, it can serve as a mechanical support for arrays of electrically active devices, allowing them to sit right on top of biological tissues without causing irritation. Depending on how it's processed, silk can be made to break down inside the body almost instantly or to persist for years. And it can be used to store delicate molecules like enzymes for a long time.
9. Dual-Action Antibodies
Fighting cancer more efficiently. At Genentech's sprawling headquarters south of San Francisco, senior scientist Germaine Fuh has been genetically redesigning two of the company's most lucrative cancer drugs. One, Herceptin, is a monoclonal antibody that shuts down HER2, a growth accelerator in about 20 percent of breast tumors. The other, Avastin, is an antibody that blocks a protein that stimulates the formation of tumor- feeding blood vessels. Last year the drugs had combined sales of $11 billion; a full course of Herceptin at wholesale costs about $43,000, while treating a breast cancer patient with a full course of Avastin costs about $55,000. Fuh's goal: to show she can provide greater benefit for people fighting breast cancer by combining the action of the antibodies in one molecule. Last year, she and her coworkers showed that a modified version of the Herceptin antibody not only shut down the HER2 receptor in mice but also locked onto VEGF, Avastin's target.
10. Cloud Programming
A new language will improve online applications.Cloud computing offers the promise of virtually unlimited processing and storage power, courtesy of vast data centers run by companies like Amazon and Google. But programmers don't know how best to exploit this power.
Today, many developers are converting existing programs to run on clouds, rather than creating new types of applications that could work nowhere else. And they are held back by difficulties in keeping track of data and getting reliable information about what's going on across a cloud. If programmers could solve those problems, they could start to really take advantage of what's possible with a cloud. For example, an online music retailer could monitor popular social-media feeds; if a singer suddenly became a hot topic, advertising and special offers across the retailer's site could be instantly reconfigured to make the most of the spike in interest.
If you like this informative post, then please subscribe to my full RSS Feed.