10 breakthrough technologies that have not yet found widespread use but may become generally available in 2018.
1. Metal 3D printing
3D printing itself has been around for a very long time, but it was used mainly for working with plastics. All other materials - especially metal - were too expensive for this technology. Now 3D printing of metal products has become affordable, widely applicable and will soon change the very system of mass production.
In particular, the missing part can simply be printed on a printer in a single copy, instead of organizing large-scale production. For old cars, TVs and other rare equipment, the problem of lack of spare parts will disappear. Plants will be able to diversify the range of their mechanisms, adapting them to the specific needs of customers. And for this you will not need to purchase new equipment.
For example, in the UK, a patient was fitted with ribs printed from titanium. The French company Stelia Aerospace has printed a self-reinforced fuselage panel. And Dutch shipbuilders presented the first fully printed ship propeller. And these are just a few of the dozens of examples of successful metal 3D printing over the past year.
2. Artificial embryos
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Scientists from Cambridge completely change the very concept of creating new life. They managed to grow a mouse embryo in a test tube using only stem cells. Neither eggs nor sperm were required for this. Stem cells somehow self-organized into an embryo, which, however, is still unable to develop further. Nevertheless, this is the first step towards creating viable human embryos in this unconventional way.
Such research will help scientists understand how to grow artificial organs and edit genes, prevent hereditary diseases and study the development of embryos at the earliest stages. True, a number of ethical issues arise that must be addressed before the technology can be improved to the desired level.
3. Smart cities
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google, will build an 8 sq. M. Smart Quayside neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. km. It will be located along the eastern coastline of the city, and the local division of the Internet search engine Google Canada will move its headquarters there. The company will become an anchor resident there and will invest $ 50 million in the development of the area.
The project will cost Sidewalk approximately $ 1 billion, with an additional $ 1.25 billion added to the Toronto government. The plan implies a complete renovation of the transport system (all cars will be unmanned and ride-sharing), as well as the creation of affordable housing. There will be strict requirements for the protection of the right to privacy, especially with regard to government interference. In addition, autonomous transit lines and the most environmentally friendly energy systems will appear in the "smart" area.
An extensive network of sensors will help improve infrastructure, collecting information on everything from air quality and noise levels to the daily activities of citizens. Sidewalk Labs will make all of its software free so that IT companies can create new, interesting applications based on it.
If the Toronto project is successful, smart neighborhoods will be built in San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles and Boston.
4. AI for everyone
The AI market today is dominated by Amazon, Baidu, Google and Microsoft. But tech giants have begun to host some of their designs on cloud platforms so that other companies can use machine learning for their own purposes. This will allow the industry to grow much faster and help revolutionize medicine, manufacturing and energy.
The problem is that few people can afford to hire AI specialists. Therefore, even the availability of information does not guarantee that it will be properly used. Google and Amazon understand this and offer consulting services to help prepare new AI talent.
5. Competition of neural networks
Neural networks have learned to recognize millions of images, but for a long time they could not come up with anything on their own. They simply had no imagination. The solution was invented by Ian Goodfellow of the University of Montreal by creating a generative adversarial network (GAN). It represents two neural networks (simplified mathematical models of the human brain) that play cat and mouse with each other.
First, both neural networks are trained on the same data. Then one of them, which is called a generator, adds a new feature to the already familiar image - for example, a pedestrian has a third hand. The second neural network - the discriminator - must understand whether she has seen a similar image before, or whether it is a fake. That is, she must understand whether a three-armed person can be real. Over time, the generator learned so skillfully to fake images that the discriminator could not distinguish them from real ones. It turns out that the neural network imagined and created something new and realistic.
GAN has become one of the most disruptive technologies this year. Developers from Nvidia, having compiled hundreds of thousands of images of celebrities, have created human faces that are indistinguishable from real ones - despite the fact that these people never existed. Another group of research was able to make paintings indistinguishable in style from paintings by Van Gogh, which he never painted. The technology opens the door for high-quality counterfeits, but at the same time allows you to give AI the imagination necessary to better work with the surrounding reality.
6. "Babylonian fish"
Google released the $ 159 Pixel Buds, an analogue of the "Babylonian fish" from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They are able to automatically translate from 40 languages, you just need to press a button or say something like: "Help me speak Spanish!" True, this function is only available in a bundle with another new product - the Google Pixel 2 smartphone.
One person puts on headphones, the other holds a smartphone in his hands. A person with headphones speaks his own language - the smartphone automatically translates his speech over the speakerphone. A man with a smartphone answers - simultaneous translation is heard in the headphones. It is clear that communicating in this way on noisy streets will be problematic, since it is not easy for the system to recognize speech among hundreds of other sounds. Still, it is better than talking via Google Translate, since each of the participants in the dialogue can control the microphone in the headphones and in the phone, zooming in as needed.
7. Gas power plant with zero emissions
Startup Net Power has built a zero-emission gas-fired power plant in Houston. The technology is based on a fundamentally new turbine of 1/10 size of a conventional turbine, which fits into a 5.6 sq.m. room. At the same time, it remains the same powerful, thanks to more efficient heat transfer using the supercritical fluid.
In a small turbine, natural gas is burned in a combustion chamber under pure oxygen, and only water vapor and carbon dioxide are produced. Moreover, the chamber is already filled with supercritical carbon dioxide under high pressure and temperature. The combustion chamber produces carbon dioxide and some water vapor. This high-temperature, high-pressure mixture is then sent to a gas turbine where the pressure energy spins the shaft and generates electricity. The cooled gas mixture leaves the turbine, where it is separated into parts.
The required amount of carbon dioxide is compressed to a supercritical state and returned to the chamber to maintain the necessary gas circulation in the system. The remaining stream of carbon dioxide can be buried underground or sold to other businesses, and the clean water is discharged. The fuel efficiency of such a power plant will be 80% (for comparison, the efficiency of many Russian power plants does not exceed 21-22%, for American ones it is about 60%).
Despite the popularity of renewables, Net Power believes that with the massive shift to electric cars, the demand for electricity will increase more than ever. Therefore, natural gas may have a good prospect: if a power plant remains equally efficient but does not pollute the environment, why not use fossil fuels?
8. True online privacy
The new internet identification system can verify your identity without requiring you to provide your date of birth or other personal information, thanks to a protocol called zero-knowledge proof. Despite the fact that the developers have been working on its creation for decades, special interest in it woke up only last year, thanks to the Zcash cryptocurrency.
The developers emphasize that the currency is based on an advanced cryptography system that allows money to be sent anywhere in the world without being traced. This is the main difference between Zcash and Bitcoin. Each owner of bitcoin receives an address made up of letters and numbers, and any transactions go through a distributed ledger - the blockchain. Law enforcement agencies can use data analysis to find out who owns this address and track the progress of transactions. Blockchain has repeatedly helped investigators find drug dealers who sell goods on the black market.
Zcash is based on the zk-Snark cryptography method, developed by Israeli scientists in collaboration with colleagues from MIT. All transactions are confirmed on the network, but it is impossible to trace the addresses of the participants in the operation.
However, for all the advantages of zk-Snark, it is a very complex and slow technology. Therefore, developers are now looking for ways to simplify it and make it more accessible.
9. Genetic predictions
The day is not far off when children will receive a genetic passport at birth. It will indicate what the likelihood of getting a heart attack in the future, a tendency to certain types of cancer or diabetes. Examining a colossal amount of data, scientists derive "polygenic risk assessments" that in the future will help identify serious diseases in the early stages and successfully treat them.
Pharmaceutical companies will also need this information to test drugs to prevent Alzheimer's or cardiovascular disease. For trials, they can recruit patients who are prone to these diseases in order to create the most effective drugs.
10. Quantum computers
Chemists are waiting for the appearance of quantum computers the most. They are already anticipating how they will use them to create new molecules. New proteins for much more effective drugs, new electrolytes for batteries, and compounds that can turn sunlight directly into liquid fuel. Conventional computers do not have enough computing power to build such computers, and with the advent of quantum computers, this will become part of the daily life of chemical scientists.
California-based startup Rigetti Computing has proven that a quantum computer can be used for machine learning. The company also opened access to its Forest quantum computer, located in the cloud and capable of performing calculations using a 19-qubit processor.
Olga Gogoladze