Each September as we plan our January tech forecast challenge, IEEE Spectrum’s editors survey their beats and search out promising tasks that would remedy seemingly intractable issues or remodel complete industries.
Usually these tasks fly below the radar of the favored expertise press, which today appears extra within the personalities driving Big Tech corporations than within the expertise itself. We go our personal means right here, getting out into the sphere to carry you information of the hidden gems that genuinely—because the IEEE motto goes—advance expertise for the good thing about humanity.
A glance again on the final 20 years of January points reveals that whereas we’ve actually coated our share of giant tech tasks, just like the James Webb Space Telescope, lots of the tales contact on topics most individuals would have in any other case missed.
Final January, Senior Affiliate Editor Emily Waltz reported on startups which are piloting ocean-based carbon capture. This challenge, she’s again with one other CO2-centric story, this time targeted on grid-scale storage, which is poised to explode—actually. Waltz traveled to Sardinia to take a look at Milan-based Energy Dome’s “bubble battery,” which might retailer as much as 200 megawatt-hours by compressing and decompressing pure carbon dioxide inside an inflatable dome.
This sort of modular, easy-to-deploy energy storage could possibly be particularly helpful for AI data centers, says Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, who curated this challenge and wrote about gravity energy storage again in January 2021.
Huge bubbles might assist with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancer tumors.
“After we take into consideration vitality storage, our minds normally go to grid-scale batteries,” Moore says. “But these bubbles, that are in some ways extra succesful than batteries, might be sprouting up in all places, typically in affiliation with computing infrastructure.”
For his story on this challenge, Moore dove into the competitors between two startups which are growing radio-based cables to replace conventional copper cables and fiber optics in data centers. These radio methods can join processors 10 to twenty meters aside utilizing a 3rd of the ability of optical-fiber cables and at a 3rd of the price. The subsequent step is to combine the radio connections straight with GPUs, to ease cooling burdens and assist knowledge facilities and the AI models working on them proceed to scale up.
Huge bubbles might assist with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquify most cancers tumors, as Greg Uyeno discovered when reporting on HistoSonics’ ultrasound treatment. Feared for its aggressive nature and intensely low survival fee, pancreatic most cancers kills almost half a million people per yr worldwide. HistoSonics makes use of noninvasive, focused ultrasound to create cavitation bubbles that destroy tumors with out dangerously heating surrounding tissue. This yr, the corporate is concluding kidney trials in addition to launching pancreatic most cancers trials.
During the last twenty years, Spectrum has recurrently coated the rise of drones. In 2018, as an example, we reported that the startup Zipline would deploy autonomous drones to ship blood and medical provides in rural Rwanda. As we speak, Zipline has a market cap of about US $4 billion and operates in a number of African international locations, Japan, and the United States, having accomplished virtually 2 million drone deliveries. On this challenge, journalist Robb Mandelbaum takes us contained in the Wildfire XPrize competition, geared toward offering one other life-saving service: dousing wildfires earlier than they develop uncontrolled. Zipline succeeded as a result of it might make deliveries to distant places a lot sooner than land autos. This yr’s XPrize groups plan to detect and suppress fires sooner than typical firefighting strategies.
Along with these emerging technologies, we’ve packed this challenge with a dozen others, together with Porsche’s wireless home charger for EVs, the world’s first electric air taxi service, neutral-atom quantum computers, interoperable mesh networks, and robotic baseball umpires. Let’s see which of this yr’s picks make it to the large leagues.
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