These new inventions have come to stay. They will touch the world Politically, Financially, Socially, and otherwise. They will influence every aspect of human existence, including health, sports, entertainment, etc. some might take a decade or more to develop, but you should know about them now.
1.Reversing
Paralysis
Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain
implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take
away.
Availability: 10 to 15
years
· by Antonio
Regalado
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2
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“Go, go!” was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine’s
mind.
The French
neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one
end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the
animal’s spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he
could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a
recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a
pad of flexible electrodes around the animal’s spinal cord, below the injury. A
wireless connection joined the two electronic devices.
The result: a system that read the monkey’s
intention to move and then transmitted it immediately in the form of bursts of
electrical stimulation to its spine. Soon enough, the monkey’s right leg began
to move. Extend and flex. Extend and flex. It hobbled forward. “The monkey was
thinking, and then boom, it was walking,” recalls an exultant Courtine, a
professor with Switzerland’s École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne.
2.Self-Driving Trucks
Tractor-trailers without
a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this
mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?
Availability: 5 to 10 years
· by David H.
Freedman
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·
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Roman Mugriyev was
driving his long-haul 18-wheeler down a two-lane Texas highway when he saw an
oncoming car drift into his lane just a few hundred feet ahead. There was a
ditch to his right and more oncoming cars to his left, so there was little for
him to do but hit his horn and brake. “I could hear the man who taught me to
drive telling me what he always said was rule number one: ‘Don’t hurt
anybody,’” Mugriyev recalls.
But it wasn’t going to
work out that way. The errant car collided with the front of Mugriyev’s truck.
It shattered his front axle, and he struggled to keep his truck and the wrecked
car now fused to it from hitting anyone else as it barreled down the road.
After Mugriyev finally came to a stop, he learned that the woman driving the
car had been killed in the collision.
Could a computer have done better at the
wheel? Or would it have done worse?
3.Paying with Your Face
Face-detecting systems in
China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down
criminals. Will other countries follow?
Availability: Now
· by Will Knight
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Shortly after walking through
the door at Face++,
a Chinese startup valued at roughly a billion dollars, I see my face, unshaven
and looking a bit jet-lagged, flash up on a large screen near the entrance.
Having been added to a
database, my face now provides automatic access to the building. It can also be
used to monitor my movements through each room inside. As I tour the offices of
Face++ (pronounced “face plus plus”), located in a suburb of Beijing, I see it
appear on several more screens, automatically captured from countless angles by
the company’s software. On one screen a video shows the software tracking 83
different points on my face simultaneously. It’s a little creepy, but
undeniably impressive.
Over the past few years, computers have become
incredibly good at recognizing faces, and the technology is expanding quickly
in China in the interest of both surveillance and convenience. Face recognition
might transform everything from policing to the way people interact every day
with banks, stores, and transportation services.
4.Practical Quantum Computers
Advances at Google,
Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously
unimaginable power are finally within reach.
Availability: 4-5 years
· by Russ
Juskalian
·
·
One of the labs at QuTech, a
Dutch research institute, is responsible for some of the world’s most advanced
work on quantum computing, but it looks like an HVAC testing facility. Tucked
away in a quiet corner of the applied sciences building at Delft University of
Technology, the space is devoid of people. Buzzing with resonant waves as if
occupied by a swarm of electric katydids, it is cluttered by tangles of
insulated tubes, wires, and control hardware erupting from big blue cylinders
on three and four legs.
h
Inside the blue cylinders—essentially
supercharged refrigerators—spooky quantum-mechanical things are happening where
nanowires, semiconductors, and superconductors meet at just a hair above
absolute zero. It’s here, down at the limits of physics, that solid materials
give rise to so-called quasiparticles, whose unusual behavior gives them the
potential to serve as the key components of quantum computers. And this lab in
particular has taken big steps toward finally bringing those computers to
fruition. In a few years they could rewrite encryption, materials science,
pharmaceutical research, and artificial intelligence.
5.The 360-Degree Selfie
Inexpensive cameras that make spherical images are opening a new
era in photography and changing the way people share stories.
Availability:
Now
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Seasonal changes to vegetation fascinate Koen Hufkens.
So last fall Hufkens, an ecological researcher at Harvard, devised a system to
continuously broadcast images from a Massachusetts forest to a website called VirtualForest.io.
And because he used a camera that creates 360° pictures, visitors can do more than just watch the feed; they can
use their mouse cursor (on a computer) or finger (on a smartphone or tablet) to
pan around the image in a circle or scroll up to view the forest canopy and
down to see the ground. If they look at the image through a virtual-reality
headset they can rotate the photo by moving their head, intensifying the
illusion that they are in the woods.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603496/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-the-360-degree-selfie/,
click here for video.
Hufkens says the
project will allow him to document how climate change is affecting leaf
development in New England. The total cost? About $550, including $350 for the Ricoh Theta S camera that takes the photos.
6.Hot
Solar Cell:
By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
Availability: 10 to 15
years
olar panels cover a growing number of rooftops, but even decades
after they were first developed, the slabs of silicon remain bulky, expensive,
and inefficient. Fundamental limitations prevent these conventional
photovoltaics from absorbing more than a fraction of the energy in sunlight.
Click for video, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603497/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-hot-solar-cells/
But a team of MIT scientists has built a different sort of
solar energy device that uses inventive engineering and advances in materials
science to capture far more of the sun’s energy. The trick is to first turn
sunlight into heat and then convert it back into light, but now focused within
the spectrum that solar cells can use. While various researchers have been
working for years on so-called solar thermophotovoltaics, the MIT device is the
first one to absorb more energy than its photovoltaic cell alone, demonstrating
that the approach could dramatically increase efficiency.
7.Gene
Therapy 2.0
Scientists
have solved fundamental problems that were holding back cures for rare
hereditary disorders. Next we’ll see if the same approach can take on cancer,
heart disease, and other common illnesses.
Availability: Now
When Kala Looks gave birth to
fraternal twin boys in January 2015, she and her husband, Philip, had no idea
that one of them was harboring a deadly mutation in his genes.
At three months old, their son
Levi was diagnosed with severe combined immune deficiency, or SCID, which
renders the body defenseless against infections. Levi’s blood had only a few
immune cells essential to fighting disease. Soon he would lose them and have no
immune system at all.
Kala and Philip frantically
began sanitizing their home to keep Levi alive. They got rid of the family cat,
sprayed every surface with Lysol, and boiled the twins’ toys in hot water.
Philip would strap on a surgical mask when he came home from work.
8.The
Cell Atlas
Biology’s
next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Availability: 5 years
· by Steve Connor
In 1665, Robert Hooke peered down his
microscope at a piece of cork and discovered little boxes that reminded him of
rooms in a monastery. Being the first scientist to describe cells, Hooke would
be amazed by biology’s next mega-project: a scheme to individually capture and
scrutinize millions of cells using the most powerful tools in modern genomics
and cell biology.
The objective is to construct
the first comprehensive “cell atlas,” or map of human cells, a technological
marvel that should comprehensively reveal, for the first time, what human
bodies are actually made of and provide scientists a sophisticated new model of
biology that could speed the search for drugs.
To perform the task of
cataloguing the 37.2 trillion cells of the human body, an international
consortium of scientists from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Israel, the Netherlands,
and Japan is being assembled to assign each a molecular signature and also give
each type a zip code in the three-dimensional space of our bodies.
9.Botnets
of Things
The
relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side
effects that figure to get even worse.
Availability: Now
Botnets have existed for at least a decade. As
early as 2000, hackers were breaking into computers over the Internet and
controlling them en masse from centralized systems. Among other things, the
hackers used the combined computing power of these botnets to launch
distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood websites with traffic to
take them down.
But now the
problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video
recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.” Because th9ese devices
typically have little or no security, hackers can take them over with little
effort. And that makes it easier than ever to build huge botnets that take down
much more than one site at a time.
In October, a
botnet made up of 100,000
compromised gadgets knocked
an Internet infrastructure provider partially offline.
Taking down that provider, Dyn, resulted in a cascade of effects that
ultimately caused a long list of high-profile websites, including Twitter and
Netflix, to temporarily disappear from the Internet. More attacks are sure to
follow: the botnet that attacked Dyn was created with publicly available
malware called Mirai that largely automates the process of
coöpting computers.
10.Reinforcement
Learning
By
experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer
could teach them.
Availability: 1 to 2
years
· by Will Knight
Inside a simple computer simulation,
a group of self-driving cars are performing a crazy-looking maneuver on a
four-lane virtual highway. Half are trying to move from the right-hand lanes
just as the other half try to merge from the left. It seems like just the sort
of tricky thing that might flummox a robot vehicle, but they manage it with
precision.
I’m watching the driving
simulation at the biggest artificial-intelligence conference of the year, held
in Barcelona this past December. What’s most amazing is that the software
governing the cars’ behavior wasn’t programmed in the conventional sense at
all. It learned how to merge, slickly and safely, simply by practicing. During
training, the control software performed the maneuver over and over, altering
its instructions a little with each attempt. Most of the time the merging
happened way too slowly and cars interfered with each other. But whenever the
merge went smoothly, the system would learn to favor the behavior that led up
to it.
This approach,
known as reinforcement learning, is largely how AlphaGo, a computer developed
by a subsidiary of Alphabet called DeepMind, mastered the impossibly complex
board game Go and beat one of the best human players in the world in a
high-profile match last year. Now reinforcement learning may soon inject
greater intelligence into much more than games. In addition to improving
self-driving cars, the technology can get a robot to grasp objects it has never
seen before, and it can figure out the optimal configuration for the equipment
in a data center.
Be_Inspired!!!
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