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:What's old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't see why this was modded flamebait. Tesla, for all his faults, did unequivocally demonstrate wireless power transmission a century ago. Hey, every time you use one of those high-school crystal radio kits you demonstrate wireless electromagnetic power distribution on a small scale - those things don't have batteries, they drive the speaker by power from the wave. Shrug.

How good were their 2001 picks?

[Izabael_DaJinn]

Let's test their past! From 2001: [technologyreview.com]

Brain-Machine Interface | Flexible Transitors | Data Mining | Digital Rights Management | Biometrics | Natural Language Processing | Microphotonics | Untangling Code | Robot Design | Microfluidics

DRM hasn't really changed my life other than add one more annoyance.

"Data Mining" sounds basically like "Reality Mining" in the new list.

I'm sure there has been great strides in "Robot Design" that help in manufacturing, but what about the others?

I don't think these technologies have changed my life at all seven years after they were predicted, or have they?

*iza

Re:My favorite.

[Rei]

I can't believe that this beat out CIGS [com.com]. 10-13% efficient in mass production (2/3rds that of silicon cells), but only $0.50-$1.50/W (cheaper than coal power even in Alaska), with almost no solar degradation or even radiation degradation (a big deal for satellites). And very lightweight at the same time. There are about two dozen companies working on different mass production methods, so them making it to market is pretty much a certainty. Nanosolar is already selling to Germany for $0.90/W, and reportedly makes its cells for $0.30/W. How could this not be a top 10 emerging tech?

A few others, among many:

  * Long-lifespan, passively safe lithium-ion batteries hitting the market
  * Vastly more energy dense energy storage techs in the lab
  * The resurgence of the electric car (for example, the $27k highway-speed Aptera [wikipedia.org]).
  * Rocket launch costs for less than half what even the Russians, Chinese, and Indians are selling via SpaceX

Re:My favorite.

[Namors]

Offline Web Applications [technologyreview.com] AIR is a "runtime environment," an extra layer of software that allows the same program to run on different operating systems and hardware. (Java is another example.) With AIR, developers can use Web technologies such as HTML and Flash to write software for the desktop. Users won't have to seek out AIR to enjoy its benefits; they'll be prompted to download it along with the first AIR applications they want to use.

I thought it was a joke at first. This line actually made me check the date

Cellulolytic Enzymes = Goodbye Corn Ethanol

[Zymergy]

This is the coolest thing on the list: *Cellulolytic Enzymes*
This "technology" basically involves feeding bacteria or protozoa on plant materials (AKA "Biomass") which are primarily composed of cellulose (which is really just chains of varying lengths of beta-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules).
(NOTE: We call the Alpha-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules STARCH, and we can eat those, but NOT the Beta-bonded variety.)
The 'Cellulolytic' Enzymes are from genetically-engineered Bacterium or Protozoans which are utilized to cleave the glycosidic linkage in the Cellulose and are additionally modified and/or chemically engineered into Butanol, Ethanol, Methanol, and other biofuel 'alcohols'.
Think of the process like a big container full of termite guts that basically partially digest (break the beta-glycosidic bonds of) the cellulose from your yard waste, grass trimmings, leaves, logs, switchgrass, tree bark, recycled paper, etc.. into their base glucose sugars which can then be easily modified into alcohols by the same (or different) single-celled critters.
This process will truly reveal the hyped artificial market (largely tax-subsidy supported) of the Corn Ethanol "market". POOF! it will go away and foodstuffs will be affordable again (and the price of beer will drop from farmers planing more cereals again!). Jimmy Carter did this with the Peanut in the 1970's... Take away the artificial market, Poof! Farmers plant what is in actual demand, not what is only profitable due to tax subsidies. (And yes, there is a $0.50 per gallon tax subsidy for ethanol production.) Cellulolytic Enzyme tech can produce alcohols without the need for those subsidies. (oh, but you can bet they will still be there... that is, unless the ADM, et al "Corn Lobby" does not set a caveat in the law subsidizing only ethanol produced from corn (you call it maize)! ) -Sort of reminds me of Zymergy (AKA Zymurgy)... but then again, that is the (yeast) anaerobic fermentation of sugars/starches, a similar yet very different process.

Re:How good were their 2001 picks?

[jdigriz]

I don't think those 2001 techs were intended to change your life in particular. The title on the article says they were intended to change the world. And they have..

Data Mining: Remember Total Information Awareness? Just about every government anti-terrorist intelligence program that isn't intercept-based or human intelligence based is a data mining program

Biometrics: Fairly important, gotta give those data mining programs something to mine. The ability to authenticate a tape from Osama Bin Laden has been in the news. Facial recognition software has been burgeoning. And cheap thumbprint drives are available off-the shelf. Not to mention new governmental requirements for passports and driver's licenses

Natural Language Processing: Apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking now works really well with just a minimum of training. Internet translators are getting better, but still are pretty awful. I won't speculate about NSA and Echelon's abilities to focus in on keywords.

DRM: It's everywhere, and it sucks.

Robot design has made great strides. iRobot is selling ton of bots for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they've been proven to save lives. Predator and Global Hawk drones are critical tools in both wars. We've got two robots wheeling around on Mars exploring new things every day. And another robot craft in orbit around Saturn.

Microfluidics are becoming important in biotech from what I hear, but it's not my field.

No idea bout microphotonics.

BMI hasn't made it out of the lab, except for the Braingate chip which is still in limited use

Untangling code is not in wide-scale use.

Flexible transistors have not thus far proven important. There's only one device that I know of out there with a flexible screen and it uses digital ink tech,

So, all in all, I'd say MIT did a pretty good job of prediction in 2001.

   

Re:OK, let's see what we have here

[arktemplar]

7. Connectonomics Reverse engineer the nervous system. Eventually, someone will do that. But not too soon.

Well, we are currently working on somthing like this, only thing is we are doing circuit (RLC) simulaitons of the pathway, we are basically checking to see if an impulse is given at a point how it will propagate, so yeah, it is happening. It will not of course be a commercialsed/used in hospitals tomorrow type of a product but I am sure it will happen.

** If it doesnt I'm screwed with my pet project.

Major error in the very first one mentioned...

[Jane Q. Public]

Quote: "The ambitious plan faces a significant hurdle, however: no one has yet demonstrated a cost-competitive industrial process for making cellulosic biofuels."

False.

This is an example of a specialist like Arnold having her head buried in her own specialty, and ignoring what is going on in other specialties around her.

The new "thermal reactor" method of making biodiesel is already under way commercially, and can (and does) make biodiesel cost-competitively from nearly anything organic, including cellulosic materials. The difference is that this process bypasses ethanol entirely, and produces oil instead.

The corporation behind the first large thermal biodiesel plant has claimed that they could create more NET USABLE energy (i.e., production minus cost) via oil from waste cornstalks than could ever be produced via ethanol from the kernels. And probably cheaper... they are economically viable now while ethanol is still shaky even with subsidies.

This is not to say that advances made by people like Arnold are not valuable! Of course they are. But they do need to poke their head out of their offices once in a while to find out what else is going on in the world.

Disney world of emerging technologies

[ingo23]

Most of the list (although being a cool technology and may become practical in the next 10 years) is perhaps more suitable for the Disney's World of Tomorrow (with it's regulars like smart homes, flying cars, etc).

The only real thing that will take off in the next two years is the offline webapps. And no - it's not Java applets. And I have doubts about the Adobe's AIR platform. My bet would be on Mozilla.

Graphene

[vashdot]

Graphene: the 2D hexagonal carbon lattice made in every pencil scratching... boring, right? It seems everyone, myself included, in Condensed Matter (Solid State) Physics is working on this one. It's like high-Tc superconductivity, very promising. Unlike that field, however, it's open to much more reliable experiments and slightly simpler theory. The upload rate on arxiv is over 1 paper/day on this material*.

The key to graphene (from a theoretical standpoint) is that its band structure is gapless and electrons (ok, quasi-electrons) are massless, moving at ~10^6 m/s! Normal (Si-based, GaAs, ...) semiconductors are gapped, meaning there is some energy associated with the valence and conduction bands and there is an energy gap between them. Experimentally we can control certain parameters (doping, primarily) to change electron/hole occupation of the bands and thus make things like p/n junctions, transistors and so on. With graphene, there's no gap. On one hand, this means ballistic transport is approximately possible. Graphene has a ridiculously high mobility (ludicrous speed even). However, we need to come up with tricks to make it into traditional electronics. Ribbons are one approach. The edges break rotational symmetry and give rise to edge states, which can be manipulated to create a gap. Some other types of topological defects can do it too. There are probably over 1000 papers on the subject and in some sense the field is less than 5 years old. I'm glad to see the recognition this is getting and hopefully we'll be a part of some new groundbreaking tech.

*I'm currently working on a pretty interesting theory which may or may not solve the switching issue mentioned in the article; alas, the proof is too small to fit in the margins of this post!

Why not Solar Energy?

[Anonymous Coward]

[Animats [slashdot.org] wrote: ]If this works, we have a permanent answer to the end of oil.

On the NPR show "Talk of the Nation (Science Friday)" airing February 1, 2008, host Ira Flatow spoke to two guests who believe that the construction of a very large solar array in the Nevada desert could generate enough electricity to power the entire United States (with some caveats about the distribution system technology). Therefore, one could also imagine a society of electric vehicles all powered by the sun.

Unfortunately I don't have the transcript, but you can listen to the radio program in its entirety online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18595746 [npr.org]

Re:Cellulolytic Enzymes = Goodbye Corn Ethanol

[Jon_S]

This whole process was essentially perfected in the 1980's [google.com]. I worked in that lab at the time. When oil prices fell through the floor in 1986, nobody cared about it any more. Now that oil is $100/barrel, people do.

However, you still have the problem of finding enough biomass to produce enough liquid fuel. Even if you are growing cellulose instead of corn starch, it's still a lot of biomass. And there still is the energy needed to run the process.

Re:What's old is new again

[electrictroy]

The only technology I care about:

- cloning arteries to replace the my current, aged, clogged-with-cholesterol pipes.

Also a new cloned heart and lungs would be good, but without clean pipes to carry the blood, they won't get the oxygen they need to survive. We need to be able to clone brand-new arteries! (Alternatively they could design little nanobots that "eat" cholesterol off the walls of arteries, and use said cholesterol for the bots' power sources, thereby making my pipes nice & clean again.) (Kinda like cleaning the sludge out of your engine's oil lines.)