TR Picks 10 Emerging Technologies of 08

arktemplar suggests Technology Review for their annual list of 10 emerging technologies that the editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. Quoting: "This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, social interactions. Two of the technologies — cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers — are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five — surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications — represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three — graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power — are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new."

Re:How good were their 2001 picks?

[glittalogik]

On the other hand, they did pick up on nanosolar research in 2004 [technologyreview.com], which is coming into its own now [celsias.com].

sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oil : First the embargo of 1973, now it's over $100 a barrel. No significant progress has been made to end the oil age. I guess no one in the world, USA or otherwise, has the brains or concentration needed to do a "manhattan project" that would solve this problem once and for all. Cheap compact cars in the late 1980's got higher mileage than the latest compacts do now (excluding expensive hybrids). We're getting ripped off every-fsking-day, and hardly anyone seems to notice, let alone complain.

OK, let's see what we have here

[Animats]

1. Modeling Surprise May shake up the derivatives industry, but probably won't be of general interest.
2. Probabilistic chips This idea goes back to the 1970s, and it comes around every time the semiconductor industry has a yield problem. But so far, the fab people have solved their yield problem before this became necessary, except for memory. Huge architectural headache for limited gain.
3. NanoRadio Too early to say.
4. Wireless power Cordless recharging, really. Good idea, but there are at least four competing schemes, and if they don't get their act together and settle on a standard, none of them will go anywhere.
5. Atomic magnetometers Magnetic sensors that can be built in arrays with wafer fab technology. Very useful.
6. Offline web applications 1997 called; it wants its Java applets back.
7. Graphene transistors Maybe. But so far, every alternative to silicon has been worse.
8. Connectonomics Reverse engineer the nervous system. Eventually, someone will do that. But not too soon.
9. Reality mining Another Big Brother idea motivated by ad revenue.
10. Cellulolytic Enzymes This is the big one: cellulose to fuel, cheaply. Several groups are getting close to making it work. If this works, we have a permanent answer to the end of oil.

Re:My favorite.

[solafide]

Isn't that just HTML 5? [w3.org] "Persistent storage. Both key / value and a SQL database are supported. ... An API that enables offline Web applications. " - we don't need another program, we need spec-following browsers, unlike IE has been in the past. Sure, it'll be 10 years before HTML5 is widespread, but it's better to have a standard than use a proprietary, closed-source runtime enviroment. Look at how long Java took to become standardized.

Re:Holy Buzzowrds, Batman.

[Null Perception]

Nanoradio is not a 'buzzword'. It literally is what its name says. Look it up in a journal like nano letters or nature's nanotechnology. The physical apparatus is simply a carbon nanotube mounted on a cathode, with the tip being some distance from an anode. When an incoming signal (the modulating carrier wave) is at its resonant frequency (which is 'tuned' through changing the length of the tube), the nanotube begins to vibrate with a relatively large amplitude, while the pattern of the field emission acts as a demodulator. In essence, this acts as a antenna/tuner/amplifier/demodulator all rolled into one.

Re:My favorite.

[__aapspi39]

Its quite possible that you might not of heard of AIR unless you're a web developer or working in some associated area.

Imho the power of adobe flex combined with the hoards of flash developers out there will do a great deal to make AIR a success.

There has been talk of downloading it automatically with the next iteration of the Flash plugin. The ubiquity that this product would achieve at that point in time shouldn't need explaining.

As long as its kept (relatively) open, in the same way as flex and flash have been thus far, then there's every chance it will be very useful and popular.

For all the gritty details

[vikstar]

of the wireless power, you can download the paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0611063 [arxiv.org].

thin film PV

[phossie]

I have to apologize for this comment up front because my chemistry is really rusty and my biochem is non-existent, but here it is...

Thin-film PV was a problem last I checked due to the use of cadmium. While you get a nice solar product as a result, you also get a highly toxic, difficult to handle material to dispose of... somehow. (The nice thing about silicon is that it's not terribly reactive with much of anything.) AFAIK, CIGS *sometimes* uses a problematic form of cadmium. If there's one thing we need to remember from our experience with oil, it's that we need to check the life cycle analysis before jumping in whole-hog.

That said, the cadmium problem is probably easier than the emissions problem. Probably.