Coming Soon
Technology Review has an article on 10 Emerging Technologies that will Change the World. Included are:
Each [mote] is about the size of its power source—a pair of AA batteries—and is equipped with a processor, a tiny amount of computer memory, and sensors that monitor light, humidity, pressure, and heat. There’s also a radio transceiver just powerful enough to broadcast snippets of data to nearby motes and pass on information received from other neighbors, bucket brigade–style.
[Ellsseeff] and her colleagues have developed a way to inject joints with specially designed mixtures of polymers, cells, and growth stimulators that solidify and form healthy tissue. “We’re not just trying to improve the current therapy,” says Elisseeff. “We’re really trying to change it completely.”
Paul Alivisatos, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley,...aims to use nanotechnology to produce a photovoltaic material that can be spread like plastic wrap or paint. Not only could the nano solar cell be integrated with other building materials, it also offers the promise of cheap production costs that could finally make solar power a widely used electricity alternative.
To improve everything from fuel economy to performance, automotive researchers are turning to “mechatronics,” the integration of familiar mechanical systems with new electronic components and intelligent-software control.
Now, fast emerging “grid protocols” might allow us to link almost anything else: databases, simulation and visualization tools, even the number-crunching power of the computers themselves. And we might soon find ourselves in the midst of the biggest explosion yet.
Molecular imaging—shorthand for a number of techniques that let researchers watch genes, proteins, and other molecules at work in the body—has exploded, thanks to advances in cell biology, biochemical agents, and computer analysis
Ultimately, nanoimprinting could become the method of choice for cheap and easy fabrication of nano features in such products as optical components for communications and gene chips for diagnostic screening. Indeed, NanoOpto, Chou’s startup in Somerset, NJ, is already shipping nanoimprinted optical-networking components. And Chou has fashioned gene chips that rely on nano channels imprinted in glass to straighten flowing DNA molecules, thereby speeding genetic tests.
Lynch and Garland have developed a computer language and programming tools for making software development more rigorous, or as Garland puts it, to “make software engineering more like an engineering discipline.”
The reason for the excitement around glycomics is that sugars have a vital, albeit often overlooked, function in the body. In particular, sugars play a critical role in stabilizing and determining the function of proteins through a process called glycosylation, in which sugar units are attached to other molecules including newly made proteins.
The technology relies on quantum physics, which applies at atomic dimensions: any attempt to observe a quantum system inevitably alters it. After a decade of lab experiments, quantum cryptography is approaching feasibility. “We can now think about using it for practical purposes,” says Richard Hughes, a quantum cryptography pioneer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Gisin—a physicist and entrepreneur—is leading the charge to bring the technology to market.