The future is here: mind-blowing technological advances

Emerging technologies that we never imagined possible are already a reality and helping to shape the future. Join us as we examine a list of the latest tech advancements prepared by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Image: Christopher Burns/Unsplash

According to MIT, 2022 will mark the beginning of the end of (annoying) passwords when accessing internet services. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are already working so that user authentication is done through facial recognition, instant messages, or other means that eliminate the tedious numbers that we often forget.

Image: Towfiqu barbhuiya / Unsplash

Storing renewable energy is a challenge that companies such as ESS or Form Energy are trying to solve by developing iron batteries. More sustainable than batteries made of other materials (iron is abundant and easy to obtain) and, in some cases, with the capacity to store energy for 100 hours. The future of renewable energies (such as solar) is linked to the existence of long-lasting batteries that allow their use.

Image: Christian Dubovan/Unsplash

Approximately, according to MIT estimates, 2% of the PCRs carried out in the world were sent to laboratories to carry out a genomic study that would alert us to new variants of Covid. A scientific feat carried out through tools such as GISAID, Nextstrain or Illumina, which share global data between researchers. This way of working is a very important step forward in the fight against Covid, but it also opens the door for other battles that science must undertake.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) program from the company DeepMind achieved an incredible breakthrough in 2020: quickly predicting the so-called "folding of proteins". In other words, the program was able to predict the exact behavior of proteins with a speed that exceeded any process with computers in the laboratory (months of work) and, in this way, great pharmacological advances have been achieved that can still go further.

Image: Jackson So / Unsplash

The current malaria vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline and approved by the WHO, is future technology because (even though its effectiveness does not reach very high percentages and four doses must be administered), it has been proven that it can save thousands of lives.

The current cryptocurrency system requires complex security, which is currently done by "miners" (people who decipher a kind of riddle to check if the algorithm has a sufficient level of protection or can be circumvented - in case the " riddle" is deciphered). This supposes an enormous expenditure of energy because it needs endless computers running. Proof of stake is a technology that would eliminate this "mining" process and save, according to MIT, more than 99% of the energy that the cryptocurrency system now needs.

Image: Shubham Dhage / Unsplash

Developed by Pzifer, this pill reduces the possibility of hospitalization by 89% if administered in the first days of infection. Vaccines have been crucial in stopping the pandemic, but this medicine is key to making deaths from Covid practically disappear.

A project of Commonwealth Fusion Systems that has managed to create a superconducting electromagnet with a force in its magnetic field of 20 Tesla. This could be the basis for achieving fusion reactors that generate clean, waste-free and practically inexhaustible energy. This path would be the alternative to nuclear fusion with which China is trying to light an "artificial sun" that will never go extinct .

Image: Etienne Desclides/Unsplash

The very concept of this technological innovation is dizzying: it would be data that an Artificial Intelligence would create where there are information gaps. That is, by calculations and deductions. Data that emerged "out of nowhere". Or not exactly. Built using other nearby data, by proximity.

Image: Markus Spiske/Unsplash

Clean the planet through factories that capture CO2 from the air. In Reykjavík (Iceland) there is a factory of this type that captures 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Which sounds like a lot but it is not if we take into account the immense amount of CO2 that human beings emit. In any case, these types of factories, as their technology improves, can help with the problem of climate change.

The emerging technologies that MIT points out in this list point in several directions for our future.

Image: Werner Duplessis/Unsplash

A revolution in progress that may, perhaps, in the coming years represent a true scientific leap. By applying AI to certain research processes, progress can be accelerated.

Image: Fabio / Unsplash

The Covid pandemic has shown that humanity is vulnerable and that the new technology in vaccines (messenger RNA) and new drugs is essential.

Climate change is already here and mitigating its effects is an obligation of science if we want to survive as a species.

The most doubtful chapter of our future: will cryptocurrencies be one more innovation, assumable and rationally developable, or a bubble that causes financial cataclysms? Only time will tell....

Image: Bermix Studio / Unsplash