As the end of the year approaches, it is time for all walks of life to take stock of the achievements and regrets of the past 12 months. As a sister publication of Nature, Scientific American recently convened a panel of top international technology experts together with the World Economic Forum to select the "Top Ten Emerging Technologies" of 2019.
Compared with the professional scientific publication "Nature", "Scientific American" is positioned more as a popular science publication and is more popular. This journal does not review manuscripts in a peer-reviewed manner similar to Nature. Instead, it provides an open forum to present scientific theories and new scientific discoveries. Its audience includes business owners, senior managers, policymakers and opinion leaders, and Nature has a complementary academic audience.
Therefore, the top ten emerging technologies in 2019 selected this time are not purely the most advanced and cutting-edge achievements in the academic field, but also focus on their integration with the current industry. Criteria for this selection include the following questions: Do the nominated technologies have the potential to generate significant social and economic benefits? Can they change current production methods? Are they still in the early stages of development but attract research labs, companies or Massive interest from investors? Are they likely to make significant progress in the coming years?
After 4 virtual meetings, technology experts selected the following 10 emerging technologies that are likely to grow rapidly in recent years:
1. Bioplastics
The ecological environment has been a hot topic in recent years. Among them, plastic waste has become a major factor threatening the world's ecology. According to the World Economic Forum, 311 million tons of plastic were produced globally in 2014, and this number is expected to triple by 2050. However, only 15% of plastics are recycled, and most of the rest are burned, landfilled, or even simply discarded in nature.
Because traditional plastics are difficult to degrade, they may exist in the natural environment for hundreds of years. If they are thrown into the sea, the problem will be more serious - they may be accidentally eaten by marine life and then enter the human body through the food chain. . According to observations of the feces of volunteers at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, it is estimated that each person eats about 73,000 pieces of microplastics every year.
The plastic crisis is imminent, which may promote the development of the biodegradable plastic industry and create a "circular" plastic economy.
The so-called biodegradable plastics refer to plastics produced under the action of microorganisms based on natural substances such as starch. Their sources and transformation results are biomass. Like chemical plastics derived from petrochemicals, bioplastics are composed of polymers (long-chain molecules) that can be molded into various shapes when in their liquid state.
Earlier research focused on how to make plastics from corn, sugar cane or waste grease and cooking oil. However, the products usually do not have the mechanical strength and visual properties of traditional plastics, making them difficult to apply on a large scale. However, a turning point has occurred. Recently, scientists have begun to study how to produce plastics from cellulose and lignin (dry matter in plants) to overcome the above shortcomings.
Cellulose and lignin are the most abundant organic polymers on Earth and are the main components of plant cell walls.
Among them, lignin monomers are composed of aromatic rings, which are also the structures that provide mechanical strength in some traditional plastics. Lignin is insoluble in most solvents, but researchers have found ways to separate it from wood and woody plants using ionic liquids. Genetically engineered enzymes similar to those from fungi and bacteria can break down dissolved lignin into its components.
At present, the industry has focused on this breakthrough, and many biotechnology companies, including companies affiliated with Imperial College London, have invested huge efforts in this field. It can be expected that as long as the cost and land and water problems are solved, this industry will usher in explosive growth.
2. Social robots
In industry, medicine and other fields, robots have been widely used, but there is still a big gap between this and people's imagination of "human" machines.
However, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in recent years has given humans the opportunity to transform the psychology and neuroscience knowledge accumulated over thousands of years into algorithms, allowing robots to not only recognize voices, faces and Emotions, and the ability to respond appropriately to complex verbal and non-verbal cues. In addition, they will also be able to make "eye" contact with humans in the future. Generally speaking, robots are becoming more and more like "people" and their ability to communicate with people is getting stronger and stronger.
Therefore, social robots have good development prospects. In fact, related industries have begun to take shape. For example, the “Pepper” robot launched by SoftBank Robotics has shipped more than 15,000 robots. This kind of robot can already recognize human faces and basic human emotions, conduct conversations through the touch screen of the "chest", and provide guidance and communication services to customers in major hotels, airports, and shopping malls around the world.
Technical experts’ confidence in the growth of the social robot industry also comes from a special field-elderly care. The aging trend is intensifying in many regions around the world. This is an excellent field for robot application, and many companies are eyeing this hot spot. In addition, there is room for social robots in both the consumer and parenting fields.
According to Scientific American, global consumer robot sales are estimated to reach US$5.6 billion in 2018. By the end of 2025, this market will grow to US$19 billion, with 6,500 robots sold annually. Thousands of robots.
3. Micro-optical equipment
As a niche field, not many people seem to care about technological breakthroughs in the optical industry, but in fact, the applications of related products have always been closely related to our lives. For example, it is difficult to create tiny lenses using traditional glass cutting and glass bending technologies. Therefore, when the lenses of mobile phone cameras are stacked for accurate focusing, it is difficult for mobile phones to continue to be thinner and lighter. In addition, advanced optical tools such as microscopes also suffer from this problem.
Engineers have discovered a magical way to use metal instead of glass to create optical instruments. This technology requires the use of an extremely thin metal plate, less than 1 micron thick. On its surface, engineers use nano-level processes to add different protrusions, depressions, and perforations.
When incident light hits these locations, the polarization, intensity, phase, direction and other properties of the light will change. By precisely positioning objects at the nanometer scale, it is possible to ensure that the light emitted by metallic materials has selected characteristics. The most outstanding feature of this "metal lens" is that it is very thin. Engineers can stack several metal shells together to make small components.
In the past year, scientific researchers have made a major technological breakthrough in this technology, solving the chromatic aberration problem of new lenses. This problem stems from the fact that when white light is imaged through a typical lens, light of different wavelengths has different refractive indexes, causing different colored lights to have different propagation light paths, thus showing aberrations caused by differences in the optical paths of different colored lights.
The new metal lens can focus all wavelengths of white light at the same point through precise shooting. In addition to this metal lens itself having no chromatic aberration, similar products also have the potential to help other products correct chromatic aberration. , which can eliminate image distortion, blur, astigmatism and other problems.
More importantly, in addition to reducing the size of the optic, metallization ultimately reduces the cost of the optic. It is reported that this small metal lens can be manufactured using off-the-shelf semiconductor industry equipment. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why it was selected as one of the top ten emerging technologies of the year.
The current problem is that with existing technology, the cost is still very high to accurately arrange nanoscale objects on centimeter-level chips. At the same time, metal lenses are not yet able to transmit light as effectively as glass lenses.
In the next few years, metal lenses may first replace glass lenses in some small and simple devices, such as endoscopic imaging equipment and fiber optics. This is intriguing enough that at least Google and Samsung are working on it.
4. Disordered proteins
Decades ago, scientists discovered a special class of proteins that may be important for a range of serious diseases from cancer to neurodegeneration. reason.
This kind of protein is called "intrinsically disordered protein" (IDPs), which is a kind of disordered protein. The so-called whiskerless means that it is different from the common proteins with rigid structures in cells and does not have a stable three-dimensional structure. Because there is no stable state, IDP often serves as a "component" and participates in various other biological reactions, such as DNA transcription.
Research results show that this loose structure gives IDP the biological advantages of easy combination, spatial superiority and high coordination, and can combine various types of biological processes at critical moments (such as cells' response to stress). Such molecules come together. However, when they are misexpressed, they may also cause changes in cells, and various serious diseases will ensue, including some cancers and Alzheimer's disease, which are thought to be related.
Although the relevant mechanism has been discovered, scientists were helpless before. Because most drugs currently in use need to target stable protein structures, and IDP does not allow drugs long enough to work, some well-known disordered proteins that may cause cancer—including c-Myc, p53, and k-ras ——It’s all too elusive.
However, this situation changed in 2017, when French and Spanish scientists discovered that an FDA-approved drug called trifluoperazine (used to treat mental illness and anxiety disorders) , which inhibits NUPR1, a disordered protein that plays a role in pancreatic cancer. This result proves that it is possible to target and attack IDPs in an "obscure" state.
In subsequent studies, scientists screened and evaluated thousands of drugs on a large scale. They found that there are many drugs that can inhibit c-Myc, and there are also molecules that can act on beta-amyloid and other IDPs related to diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
This discovery sparked enthusiasm in the industry. Now, biotech IDP Pharma is developing a protein inhibitor to treat multiple myeloma and small cell lung cancer; Graffinity Pharmaceuticals has identified a small molecule that targets Alzheimer's disease pathology. Related tau protein; Cantabio Pharmaceuticals is looking for small molecules to stabilize IDP involved in neurodegeneration.
5. Controlled-release fertilizers
In order to feed the world's growing population, the global use of fertilizers is bound to increase. But traditional chemical fertilizers are not only inefficient, but also cause huge damage to the environment.
In the past, farmers applied fertilizer in two ways: either spraying ammonia, urea and other substances into the fields to supplement nitrogen elements to the crops; or spreading potassium carbonate or other mineral particles to generate phosphorus when reacting with water. However, with these two methods, the efficiency is very low, and only a relatively small part of the nutrients enter the plant. The remaining large amounts of nitrogen will enter the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, while phosphorus will flow into waters, causing excessive growth of algae and other organisms, causing economic losses.
In this case, new fertilizers emerged.
In the past, agricultural scientists invented something called a slow-release fertilizer. They make nitrogen, phosphorus and other required nutrients into small capsules according to a certain ratio. The existence of the capsule shell slows down the speed of the combination of water and internal nutrients and the speed of the nutrient products escaping from the capsule, allowing crops to have Time to fully absorb.
This year's new research goes a step further, turning "sustained release" into "controlled release", that is, controlled release - using complex materials and manufacturing techniques to make and adjust the shell so that nutrients can be released at any time. Released by changes in soil temperature, acidity or moisture. At present, this technology has achieved preliminary results. For example, the controlled-release fertilizer launched by Haifa Group is linked to temperature. When the temperature rises, the growth rate of crops and the rate of fertilizer release increase simultaneously.
Industry insiders generally say that in the future of "precision agriculture", controlled-release fertilizers are an indispensable part. It is envisioned that controlled-release fertilizers will be precisely delivered using technologies such as data analysis, artificial intelligence, and new sensors to increase crop yields and minimize excessive release of nutrients.
However, since several other technologies require large capital investments and take a long time, controlled-release fertilizers may be the first to emerge in the next few years.
6. Telepresence
There is a scene in the movie "Kingsman". When the protagonist puts on high-tech glasses, the originally empty room is filled with people. , and these "people" present are actually virtual images projected by people far away. This is a typical telepresence scenario.
Just as video calling apps like Skype and FaceTime moved from the commercial world into the mass market, and massively multiplayer online games fundamentally changed the way people interact on the Internet, collaborative telepresence technology may Transform the way people interact virtually in and outside of business.
Imagine a group of people in different parts of the world interacting fluidly and even being able to feel each other's touch. This type of collaborative telepresence could change the way people live in the future, making physical location irrelevant.
Advances in several areas make this prospect possible. First, AR/VR technology is gradually getting better. According to data compiled by the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, the high-end VR equipment market has continued to grow in recent years, and VR technology has begun to penetrate from personal applications to enterprise-level applications in industry, education, medical, retail and other industries.
Secondly, the world is rapidly building 5G networks, which ensures future data transmission capabilities without delay. The application of new technologies will reduce the delay of VR products by nearly 10 times and increase network efficiency by 100 times, providing guarantee for consumers to experience scenes remotely. It's impossible to completely eliminate latency with remote transmission, but predictive AI algorithms can make up for this shortcoming.
In addition, innovators are also perfecting technologies related to remote interaction, such as tactile sensors that allow people to feel what the robots they control touch.
"Scientific American" stated that everything needed for telepresence technology is ready, and related industries will usher in transformative development within 3 to 5 years. For example, companies such as Microsoft are working hard on technologies that are expected to support an industry worth billions of dollars by 2025.
7. Blockchain tracking technology
According to statistics from the World Health Organization, about 600 million people suffer from food poisoning and 420,000 people die every year. After an outbreak occurs, it will take investigators days to weeks to trace the source. During this time, more people may be affected and much food may be disposed of indiscriminately.
To reduce or even eliminate food poisoning and food waste, the application of blockchain technology is crucial.
Blockchain is a distributed accounting system in which entries are recorded sequentially in multiple identical "ledgers" stored on computers in multiple locations. This redundant arrangement Tampering with any "account book" will not affect the records of the entire system, thus creating a highly credible transaction record.
By integrating growers, distributors and retailers on a public chain, a set of trusted records of a given food’s path through the end-to-end supply chain can be created. With this record in hand, retailers, restaurants, etc. can immediately remove contaminated food from circulation and accurately destroy problematic inventory.
Earlier, IBM has developed a blockchain-based cloud platform - IBM Food Trust, which has been adopted by large sellers, such as Carrefour, Walmart, Sam's Club, Albertsons, Smithfield Foods, et al. In one test, Walmart identified the source of a "contaminated" item in seconds, something that would have taken days in the past.
8. New Nuclear Reactors
After Fukushima, people around the world changed their minds about nuclear energy. Nuclear power projects in many countries were cancelled, and the development of nuclear energy technology fell into a trough. However, as issues such as carbon emissions have become increasingly popular in recent years, the development of nuclear energy, as a typical example of clean energy, has been put on the agenda again.
In the past few decades, the principle of mainstream light water reactors is to accumulate small particles of uranium dioxide in long cylindrical rods wrapped with zirconium alloy.
Zirconium allows the neutrons released by fission in the core to pass through, thereby maintaining the continuation of the nuclear fission reaction.
The problem is that if the control fails and the zirconium overheats, it will react with water to produce hydrogen gas, which can explode. This situation led to two of the world's worst reactor accidents - the 1979 explosion and partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States, and the 2011 explosion and radiation leak at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Currently, nuclear energy giants Westinghouse Electric and Pharmatom are developing so-called accident-tolerant fuels that reduce the chance of the fuel overheating, and even if it does, it will produce little or no hydrogen. One direction is to improve the zirconium alloy coating to reduce reactions. Other companies are trying to replace zirconium and uranium dioxide with different materials.
According to reports, this new technology does not require major changes to existing reactors, so it can be gradually put into use starting now. However, "Scientific American" mentioned that nuclear power in the United States has been suspended, and many developed countries such as Germany also have heavy restrictions. For a new generation of nuclear power technology to come to fruition, it may be up to Russia and China to set an example.
Russia is also deploying other safety measures; the state-owned enterprise Rosatom has recently installed newer "passive" safety systems at home and abroad, even if the nuclear power plant loses power and the coolant cannot circulate effectively, These systems also suppress overheating. Westinghouse and other companies are also incorporating passive safety features into their latest designs.
Also manufacturers are experimenting with "generation 4" reactor models, which use liquid sodium or molten salt instead of water to transfer heat from fission, eliminating the possibility of producing dangerous hydrogen. China reportedly plans to connect a demonstration helium-cooled reactor to the grid this year.
9. DNA data storage
According to data from the software company Domo, in 2018, people around the world conducted 3.88 million searches on Google and watched 4.33 million videos on YouTube every minute. videos, sent 159,362,760 emails, posted 473,000 tweets, and posted 49,000 photos on Instagram.
It is estimated that by 2020, each person in the world will generate 1.7MB of data per second, which is 418MB for the whole year. Based on the world's population of 7.8 billion, if this continues, the current magnetic or optical data storage resources for storing 0s and 1s will be exhausted within a century. Additionally, running a data center consumes a lot of energy. In short, we have a serious data storage problem that will only get worse over time.
There is a storage technology that sounds amazing and is developing: DNA-based data storage.
DNA is the material for storing life information. It is composed of long chains of nucleotides A, T, C and g, and stores data in different sequences. Whether it's regular sorting (reading), compositing (writing), and exact copying, it's fairly simple. In addition, the stability of DNA is high enough. For example, people today can sequence the complete genome of fossils from more than 500,000 years ago.
What really deserves attention is the storage capacity of DNA. DNA can store data accurately and in large quantities at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. For example, according to calculations published earlier by Harvard University scholars in the journal Nature Materials, the storage density of E. coli is approximately 1019 bytes per cubic centimeter. In other words, a DNA cube with a side length of about 1 meter can well meet the world's current storage needs for one year.
This idea is not just theoretical. In 2017, Church’s team at Harvard University used CRISPR technology to record images of human hands into the genome of E. coli, and then successfully read it. The accuracy rate is over 90. Recently, the University of Washington and Microsoft Research jointly developed a system that can automatically write, store and read DNA-encoded data.
Currently, the cost of reading and writing DNA needs to be further reduced if it is to compete with traditional electronic storage methods. But even if DNA storage doesn't become widespread quickly, it will almost certainly be used in certain industries.
10. Renewable energy storage
In the past few years, the cost of wind energy and solar energy equipment has plummeted, and the world has paid increasing attention to carbon reduction, prompting huge changes in the global power generation structure. . According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. renewable energy power generation has doubled in 10 years. In the next two years, wind energy, solar energy and other renewable energy sources will still be the fastest growing parts of the electricity mix.
The problem people are facing now is that there is no suitable energy storage method.
The current mainstream clean energy power generation methods are quite unstable. On the year scale, wind power generates more electricity in spring, autumn and winter, and less in summer. Solar power generates more electricity in summer and autumn, but less in spring and winter. On the day scale, wind power generates more electricity in the morning and evening, but less at noon and midnight. Solar power generates more electricity during the day and does not generate electricity in the evening and night. .
Such characteristics, if connected to the power grid without treatment, will bring huge instability to the power grid. There is a lot of electricity consumption in summer, and wind power cannot keep up. There is a lot of electricity consumption at night, and solar power generation cannot satisfy it. need.
Therefore, unstable and unsustainable primary energy must first be sent to the energy storage system through accumulation and storage, and then connected to the grid in a manner suitable for grid operation.
For decades, pumped hydro has been one of the world’s main large-scale energy storage methods. The principle is very simple, it is to build a reservoir. When the power generation is high and the electricity is sufficient, the water pump is started to pump the water to a higher reservoir. When it is necessary to generate electricity, the gate is opened to release water. The water flows through the turbines along the way, driving the turbines to rotate and generate electricity. This method is simple in principle and effective, but it has big problems. First, building dams is very expensive. Second, it relies heavily on terrain and is difficult to popularize.
Therefore, in the past year or two, research on battery technology has become a new hot spot in the industry. The EIA said that by February 2019, the scale of utility-scale battery storage in the United States had jumped from a few megawatts 10 years ago to 866 megawatts. Wood Mackenzie estimates that the energy storage market doubled from 2018 to 2019 and will triple from 2019 to 2020.
Lithium battery technology will become a new trend in the energy industry in the next 5-10 years. This is the common knowledge in the industry. By then, we may be able to see that the lithium battery system can store energy for 4-8 hours, enough to supply solar power during the day to the peak power consumption period in the evening.
The problem is that this may be the limit of lithium-ion batteries. For renewable energy to truly play a major role in the power generation system, there must be better energy storage systems and stronger mobilization capabilities, and scientists must achieve the transcendence of lithium-ion battery technology.
Possible directions currently include flow batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. At present, many companies in the industry are tackling key problems, and some have already received investment. Unfortunately, there are currently no finished products that can be used in large-scale mass production. The EIA said that by the end of 2017, only three large-scale flow battery energy storage systems had been deployed in the United States, while utility-scale hydrogen power systems were still in the demonstration stage.
However, as the pressure for global emission reductions increases, and driven by the development of the renewable energy market, it is certain that energy storage technology will advance and become popular.
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