Each September as we plan our January tech forecast difficulty, IEEE Spectrum’s editors survey their beats and search out promising initiatives that would clear up seemingly intractable issues or rework whole industries.
Usually these initiatives fly beneath the radar of the favored expertise press, which nowadays 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 sector to convey 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 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 difficulty, she’s again with one other CO2-centric story, this time centered 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 type of modular, easy-to-deploy energy storage might be particularly helpful for AI data centers, says Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, who curated this difficulty and wrote about gravity energy storage again in January 2021.
Massive bubbles may assist with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancer tumors.
“Once we take into consideration power storage, our minds often go to grid-scale batteries,” Moore says. “But these bubbles, that are in some ways extra succesful than batteries, will probably be sprouting up in every single place, typically in affiliation with computing infrastructure.”
For his story on this difficulty, 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 programs 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 following step is to combine the radio connections instantly with GPUs, to ease cooling burdens and assist knowledge facilities and the AI models operating on them proceed to scale up.
Massive 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 very low survival fee, pancreatic most cancers kills almost half a million people per 12 months worldwide. HistoSonics makes use of noninvasive, focused ultrasound to create cavitation bubbles that destroy tumors with out dangerously heating surrounding tissue. This 12 months, the corporate is concluding kidney trials in addition to launching pancreatic most cancers trials.
Over the past 20 years, Spectrum has frequently coated 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 present, Zipline has a market cap of about US $4 billion and operates in a number of African nations, Japan, and the United States, having accomplished nearly 2 million drone deliveries. On this difficulty, 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 may make deliveries to distant areas a lot sooner than land autos. This 12 months’s XPrize groups plan to detect and suppress fires sooner than typical firefighting strategies.
Along with these emerging technologies, we’ve packed this difficulty 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 12 months’s picks make it to the massive leagues.
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