New technologies are developed daily. Around the world, scientists, engineers, and innovators are working hard to make everyone’s lives better. There are so many new technological improvements that keeping up with which ones are relevant and which aren’t can be a real headache.
To help you stay on top of things, here are 20 of the most exciting technologies that experts agree can change the world.
1. Genetic Cures
Editing genes has been the holy grail of medicine since the genome was first sequenced. And finally, after decades of trial and error, scientists have achieved it.
In 2023, the FDA approved a treatment for sickle cell disease that uses CRISPR, a gene editing technology. With one treatment on the market, others are sure to follow soon.
2. AI Science
Artificial intelligence has been a long-standing part of science fiction. Recently, it has crossed over into the real world.
While AI chatbots and image makers have stolen the show, machine learning models have helped make discoveries in dozens of scientific fields. The main drawback is that scientists have to build or program a new AI for almost every experiment.
Scientists are now building what they call a “Polymathic AI,” an AI that is trained in multiple disciplines. This will allow them to use one model for many purposes, advancing experimentation by leaps and bounds.
3. Hydrogen Planes
Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. Finding a way to safely use it as fuel has been a dream for clean fuel advocates for decades. The Aerospace Technology Institute in the U.K. may have cracked part of the puzzle.
A new project called Fly Zero is testing a plane design powered only by liquid hydrogen that can carry 279 passengers nearly halfway around the globe.
4. Direct Air Capture
Plants have taken the lead in capturing carbon from the air for centuries. Now, scientists have developed Direct Air Capture (DAC), a technology that sucks the carbon out of the air using far less space and time than it takes to grow a mature forest.
The carbon can be combined with hydrogen to create synthetic fuels or be stored in special facilities. DAC uses a lot of energy, but scientists are working to lower the energy requirements and develop new power sources.
5. Sonic Fire Extinguishers
It turns out it’s possible to put fires out by screaming at them loudly. Or rather, mounting a speaker on a drone that produces a loud bass frequency does.
Since sound is a pressure wave in the air, concentrated sound can deprive a fire of oxygen. Someday, drone fleets may respond to forest fires by blanketing them in bass waves, starving the fire of oxygen, and extinguishing it.
6. Floating Farms
According to the United Nations, another two billion people will be added to the population by 2050. And all those people will need something to eat.
Farms that float on water allowing them to be parked off shore or in lakes near cities, may be the solution. Javier Ponce of Forward Thinking Architecture has designed a miniature farm that has solar panels on top, a hydroponic farm in the middle, and a fish farm on the bottom. The nutrients from the hydroponics drop down and feed the fish.
Coming in at 2.2 million square feet, the farm can produce over eight tons of vegetables and nearly two tons of fish yearly.
7. Green Funerals
Cremation is not good for the environment, producing almost 600 pounds of carbon per body burned. Burial isn’t a great solution, involving toxic chemicals that can leach into soil, carbon, and energy-hungry concrete.
New methods allow a body to be returned to the soil through composting or fungus. There are also less carbon-intensive methods, like alkaline hydrolysis, which breaks the body down into chemical components instead of ash.
8. Living Concrete
Concrete is Earth’s second most used resource after water. Improving concrete’s energy footprint and resilience is critical to constructing better, cheaper, and longer-lasting buildings.
The University of Colorado Boulder is home to one of many teams developing self-healing concrete, which seals cracks and other damage to preserve buildings and lower maintenance costs. The UBC team believes their work will soon allow for concrete that can self-heal and remove environmental toxins.
9. Better Energy Storage
Energy storage is one of the significant challenges facing humanity today. Current energy technologies can produce far more power than we can use, but much of that power is wasted without good storage options.
Scientists are developing a host of novel approaches. One exciting idea involves pulling weights up high using generated electricity and running dynamos when lowered, like oversized grandfather clocks.
Other approaches use compressed air, specially formulated concrete that can hold a charge, and even bricks to store heat for thermogeneration.
10. 3D Printing
Most people now think of 3D printers as weird gadgets that use special plastic to make fun things. However, 3D printing technologies that can use metal, concrete, or even food are being developed.
Not only does 3D printing lower manufacturing costs, but it also allows for customization on a level unheard of before. With concrete and metal coming into play, printers are being developed to create whole houses in days or even hours.
11. Augmented Reality
Imagine that instead of using a search engine to look up directions or check the reviews on a restaurant, you could wear a pair of glasses that display that information with a glance.
That’s the goal of augmented reality, a technology that seeks to overlay the human experience with an interface that can display real-time information about whatever the user is looking at.
The information technology already exists, but the interface is proving to be a tough nut to crack. To make it work, scientists are developing better displays, batteries, and ways to accept user input so the AR technology knows what it should search for.
12. Quantum Computing
While microprocessors are getting smaller and faster, there’s a limit to how small we can make them. Microprocessors rely on binary, which makes each bit either 1 or 0, allowing them to store complex information.
Quantum computers can store each bit as both 1 and 0 simultaneously. This doesn’t make them twice as fast; it makes them up to millions, or even trillions, of times faster than a similar computer using traditional technology.
Quantum computers are already a reality in laboratories, but the problem is they like to be kept very, very cold. However, the hunt is on for a room-temperature configuration or better refrigerant.
13. Internet of Things
The Internet of Things refers to a web of all the digital and digitized technologies around us. From smart homes to smart cars, the Internet of Things allows users to connect to and control everything from a phone, computer, or tablet.
Users can view home security cameras from the other side of the world, start their cars when their planes land on the tarmac, and play pranks on their roommates by adjusting the thermostat from the bar down the street.
As the Internet of Things grows, users may soon be able to access every part of their lives from anywhere in the world, solely with the phone in their pocket.
14. Personalized Medicine
Personal genome mapping is here to stay, but doctors want to expand the technology. By mapping a person’s genes, they hope they’ll soon be able to scan the gene map to make more accurate diagnoses and know better which medicines and treatments will work for each individual.
In the future, developing specific gene treatments, or even regular medicine, for each patient may be possible, ending the tedious trial and error of testing mass-market medications one at a time.
15. Water From Air
With droughts spreading and growing more severe every year, finding potable water and getting it where it needs to go is a growing issue.
U.S.-based start-up Source has developed an answer. Called ‘hydropanels,’ this technology uses unique fans to draw moisture from the air and convert it to potable water. Source has installed hydropanels in 50 countries and is scaling up operations yearly.
16. Space Catapults
Getting anything into space requires a massive amount of fuel. Not only do engineers need to use enough fuel to launch the payload, but there also has to be extra fuel to lift the fuel. A vicious cycle ensues whereby the more fuel you need, the more fuel you need to lift that fuel.
SpinLaunch wants to use a more straightforward method to get satellites into orbit. As the name implies, a launcher spins the payload up to nearly 5,000 mph and throws it at the sky. It still needs small rocket engines to achieve a stable orbit, but the fuel costs are far lower, and the launch is much more environmentally friendly.
17. Drawing Fuel From Air
Hydrogen fuel is a serious contender for clean energy, but getting it can be costly and energy-intensive. Fortunately, scientists in Switzerland think they can get it right from the air.
Based on leaves, the technology takes in sunlight for power and uses that power to separate hydrogen from the water molecules in the air. It’s still experimental, but clean fuel can be extracted nearly anywhere on Earth if scaled up.
18. Quiet Supersonic Flight
A supersonic flight can get a passenger from New York to London in under three hours. By contrast, a normal plane takes around seven hours to do the job. So why don’t we use supersonic planes to get everywhere?
The problem is the booms. Breaking the sound barrier produces a 110-decibel bang, roughly the same sound as a clap of thunder. And hearing thunderclaps every time a plane goes overhead isn’t something anyone wants to deal with.
NASA is developing a new plane architecture that they believe can solve the problem and return supersonic flight to the passenger plane game. The X-59 has special tails, wings, and a lot of fins that should stop the air pattern that makes the boom. They hope to test it over public spaces sometime in 2024.
19. Digital Twins
Doctors have been using charts to track patient health for decades, but the system has a lot of limitations. Q Bio, a U.S. company, wants to improve that system by creating a digital “twin” of a patient that doctors can use to track health, plan preventative medicine, and get a whole-body view of their patient’s health.
The system depends on a special scanner that takes about an hour per scan. It measures hundreds of things, big and small, and comprehensively overviews the patient’s body. A digital avatar is then created, which doctors can use to see almost anything about the patient, while subsequent scans can be added to the data pool or contrasted to detect new problems.
20. Blockchain
Cryptocurrency is hit or miss, but it’s here to stay. The biggest and best thing to emerge from the crypto boom is the technological backbone it’s built on: the blockchain.
Blockchain technology allows records to be stored in nearly tamper-proof systems. And a blockchain that has been tampered with is immediately apparent, making tampering impossible to cover up. They are also challenging to take down, existing in multiple places simultaneously.
Patient, business, legal, and educational records that use blockchain technology are more secure, nearly disaster-proof, and almost unhackable.
One timely use for this technology is securing voting systems, using the blockchain to ensure that data has not been tampered with, and preventing tampering in the first place by decentralizing records.
