From anti-ageing treatments to space-based solar power, the UK’s innovation agency has selected 50 emerging technologies that look set to outline the country – and the world – in 2040 and beyond.
In this statement, we are not looking for to forecast the future, but to arouse curiosity, share information and reflect the art of the possible, says Indro Mukerjee, chief executive of Innovate UK.
The 50 technologies may not be the utmost well-funded or the newest in R&D circles, writes Simone Boekelaar, head of horizon scanning at Innovate UK, but they have commercial and society-shaping possibility. Our expectation is that these technologies may stimulate new applications or resolutions to societal challenges.
One of the most eye-catching progressive materials offers the opportunity of a invisibility cloak. Metamaterials are engineered at the atomic level to curve and manipulate electromagnetic waves in precise ways, giving them uncommon properties not found in ordinary materials, such as a negative refractive index, negative electric permittivity and negative magnetic permeability. As extremely efficient absorbers, they could significantly improve solar power generators and, since their novel structure stores and re-radiates energy, they could result to more influential telecommunications antennae. They could also be used as optical screens or to make medical imaging more accurate.
When it comes to energy and the environment, the statement highlights new hydrogen storage and manufacture technologies as having important potential impact, while nuclear fusion also gets a reference. Compelling together atomic nuclei offers a way of creating possibly limitless volumes of energy but faces enormous practical difficulties such as the huge temperatures required. To get about this, scientists use a super-heated plasma inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field. An advancement last year put the technology under the limelight again. Scientists at the UK Jet laboratory set a new best for the quantity of energy collected after bringing together two isotopes of hydrogen, doubling energy production over what was formerly achieved.
In bioengineering, the emphasis is on bioelectronics and electroceuticals. These technologies use implantable strategies to deliver electrical encouragement to nerves to regulator a wide variety of bodily functions or to substitute drug treatments, and could screen and treat disease in real time. Possible applications include pacemakers, deep-brain encouragement for Parkinson’s disease and nerve stimulus to combat arthritis. Other biotechnologies to watch comprise artificial cells (synthetic blood could decrease the need for blood donations and improve safety), programmable cells (chemical changes placed within synthetic gene circuits regulator a variety of cell functions), and hybrid microbe biotechnology comprising both artificially formed microbes and those made by the combination of artificial and biological components.
In health and medicine, the statement highlights emerging replacements to antibiotics as a global urgency. Other technologies here concentrate on new ways to treat disease such as deploying the gut microbiome or using modified RNA therapeutics. Developments in electronics and implants are powering the development of devices that can distinguish sensations (in prosthetic limbs, for example), or reinstate or increase the senses and match human physiological responses to drugs to possibly transform clinical trials.
https://www.ukri.org/news/revealed-the-50-new-technologies-that-could-shape-the-future/
