Each September as we plan our January tech forecast challenge, IEEE Spectrum’s editors survey their beats and hunt down promising initiatives that would remedy seemingly intractable issues or rework whole industries.
Usually these initiatives fly below the radar of the favored know-how press, which nowadays appears extra within the personalities driving Big Tech firms than within the know-how itself. We go our personal approach right here, getting out into the sector to convey you information of the hidden gems that genuinely—because the IEEE motto goes—advance know-how for the advantage of humanity.
A glance again on the final 20 years of January points reveals that whereas we’ve definitely lined our share of big tech initiatives, just like the James Webb Space Telescope, most 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 may very well 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 may assist with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancer tumors.
“Once we take into consideration vitality storage, our minds often go to grid-scale batteries,” Moore says. “But these bubbles, that are in some ways extra succesful than batteries, will likely be sprouting up all over, typically in affiliation with computing infrastructure.”
For his story on this challenge, Moore dove into the competitors between two startups which are creating radio-based cables to replace conventional copper cables and fiber optics in data centers. These radio techniques can join processors 10 to twenty meters aside utilizing a 3rd of the ability of optical-fiber cables and at a 3rd of the associated fee. The following step is to combine the radio connections instantly with GPUs, to ease cooling burdens and assist information facilities and the AI models working on them proceed to scale up.
Huge bubbles may 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 price, 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 20 years, Spectrum has usually lined the rise of drones. In 2018, for example, we reported that the startup Zipline would deploy autonomous drones to ship blood and medical provides in rural Rwanda. At the moment, 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, aimed toward offering one other life-saving service: dousing wildfires earlier than they develop uncontrolled. Zipline succeeded as a result of it may make deliveries to distant places a lot quicker than land automobiles. This yr’s XPrize groups plan to detect and suppress fires quicker 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 massive leagues.
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