Future Technology Trends

The strategies for engineered negligible senescence program is searching for novel methods to overcome the aging process. While medical technology has progressed an astounding amount over the last 100 years, lifespans have not increased as much as many previously had hoped. One apparent target for longevity medicine is to get rid of extracellular junk that may cause various biological breakdowns as someone gets older. AmyloSENS is the name of this undertaking. The goal is to remove amyloid plaques that begin to accumulate within the body. The heart receives damage due to these products over the course of decades. This can lead to coronary issues later in life. The proteins that may aggregate in the region include senile systemic amyloidosis (SSA), isolated atrial amyloidosis (IAA) and “cardiac amyloidoses”. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, is also associated with too much of a specific substance. Destruction of neurons in key areas involved with memory possibly happens because of these things. Stopping this process early could potentially help maintain a person’s normal cognition.  Read More »

In the future, bacterial sensors could take readings from their immediate environment and perform various rudimentary tasks. This sort of technology seems like it would approach certain futurist’s visions for nanorobots. These organisms may have numerous beneficial applications like killing cancer cells, tissue regeneration, drug delivery or boosting the immune system. Synthetic biology has many potential negative outcomes as well. Intelligent cells could swiftly do considerable damage to the body by coordinating their movement and destroying healthy organs. Targeting neurons might enable them to be a powerful neuroweapon that would alter brain activity in a specific manner. The biological avenue appears to be a more likely method in the coming decades as opposed to nanomachines. Bacterial biocomputing is an emerging trend. Genetically manipulating an organism can enable it to process signals and carry out logical operations. Some nanoscientists lament the idea of reducing biology to software. However, there is still a push to enable these small structures to have some of the basic functionalities of computers. Automating the process of building the synthetic cells using software is also a main goal. Programmable biology may often be just a buzzword, but researchers are discovering innovative routes to obtain something analogous to this capability. While there are challenges to making a direct comparison to how digital machines work and the way this other medium operates, I think there is no reason to be overly skeptical about what can eventually be done.  Read More »

Computers of the future may route data at an ultra-fast rate. Plasmonics is a way to create optical interconnects smaller than 100 nanometers wide. There are drawbacks to other methods. An electrical signal begins to degrade as the frequency goes above a certain amount of gigahertz. This limits the number of bytes that transfer across a wire at any given time. Conventional photonics, on the other hand, cannot shrink down past a specific size (hundreds of nanometers). A new European project called NAVOLCHI is seeking to develop nanometer scale chip-to-chip connections that utilize plasmon polaritons as a carrier of information. There is hope that this channel will overcome a few of the restrictions of other types of technology. Electronic, photonic and plasmonic combinations may become easier to carry out.  Read More »

A European project is developing computer simulations of the human heart. The four-year undertaking will end in 2012. The digital models can allow doctors to ascertain the progression of various diseases. The disorders that they are emulating include coronary artery disease and heart failure. In the European Union, more than 1.9 million deaths each year are due to cardiovascular conditions. There are enormous costs associated with these afflictions. Any way of lessening those dollar figures would be beneficial. The EU facilitates collaborations between many countries. Scientists are collecting information about biology at a tremendous pace. Unfortunately, not a lot of this work has translated into payoffs at the clinic. The euHeart venture seeks to rectify a few of these shortcomings and give patients better personalized medicine. Eventually, integrating these results into a hospital setting will help to guide a physicians treatment plan. The level of software detail ranges from sub-cellular components up to the entire structure of the heart. Read More »

Emerging technologies often tend to hit engineering roadblocks that hamper them from being useful. In the past year, there have been claims that “twisting” radio waves could significantly enhance the capacity of wireless bandwidth. Exploiting orbital angular momentum (OAM) is allegedly a unique method to transmit a larger amount of bytes. There are tons of portable devices available. Finding new ways to enhance their performance is desirable. Consumers have a voracious appetite to download media, but the laws of physics put a damper on how much data appliances can gather. The press releases pertaining to the novel discovery seemed too good to be true. A few researchers were making several ambitious statements about obtaining a huge number of different channels and an order of magnitude improvement. There are reasons to be skeptical of such proclamations. Scientists from Lund University in Sweden have published a paper, which indicates that the assertions relating to this breakthrough may be overblown.  Read More »

Biological cellular-based nanorobotics may be able to piggyback on what evolution has already accomplished. Instead of miniature machines, these would be genetically engineered “intelligent” artificial cells. They may have a greater range of abilities than their evolved counterpart as they would be designed to fulfill specific niches. There has been recent work on genetic logic gates for robust digital-like synthetic biology. This is dissimilar to how an electronic circuit runs. The operation happens by way of signal transduction, instead of the flow of current. It might be easier to function in a messy environment. Another mechanism for computation is microbial nanowires derived from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens. The filaments conduct electricity. They are 3 to 5 nanometers in size and can be several micrometers in length. Perhaps these could be utilized in a cell to provide information-processing capabilities. A protein memristor might even enable a nano-neural network for a tiny brain.  Read More »

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to develop novel theoretical models to help explain how intelligence arises from complex systems. This will allow them to construct electronic circuitry that mimics neurological functioning. Researchers located at the California NanoSystems Institute in the University of California are working on this undertaking. They are creating what they call self-organized critical (SOC) states of open dissipative nonlinear systems. This is a route to go beyond binary CMOS technology. The system may achieve a wide range of behavior in an unstructured environment due to built in plasticity. It sounds like someone just threw a bunch of interesting buzzwords together to cook up a new idea. Perhaps this will succeed where others have failed. They are looking into four different approaches to accomplish this. These include a ferroelectric cellular lattice, a nickel-copper ferromagnetic system, optical rogue waves and an atomic switch array. Those components appear to be novel and they have not been proven to the same degree as other options. The academics are building hardware-based neural networks, as opposed to ones modeled with software. This is somewhat similar to other neuromorphic attempts. A recent paper published in the journal “Advanced Materials” details their progress on making the atomic switch arrays. Read More »

Blasting the brain with high frequency sound waves is shaping up to become a future neuromodulation tool. Transcranial ultrasound stimulation is an emerging technology. A few papers in scientific journals indicate that this may be a novel method to modify neuron functioning (see previous posts). Recently, new work on utilizing this neurotechnology to alter anesthesia time in animals was published in the journal Neuroreport. For this study, researchers gave rats ketamine (and xylazine) to knock them out quickly. These medications interact with a number of proteins in the brain. Ketamine is an NMDA antagonist. By blocking that receptor, the drug prevents calcium ions from entering a neuron. It may cause dysregulated neural activity in regions like the thalamus to induce a loss of consciousness. The combo is a useful anesthetic. After giving rats the chemicals, they bombard the animal’s brain with focused ultrasound beams targeted to the thalamus. This help to test how these waves affect behavior.  Read More »

The Allen brain atlas project is devoted to publishing an enormous amount of data. The underlying operations of the mind are gradually being uncovered. Scientists are performing an analysis on neurons. Depending on the environmental circumstances, an individual cell expresses different proteins at varying rates. The quantity of information to sift through makes this a challenging venture. Taking samples over the course of neurological development helps academics to discover how the brain grows. They are investigating other aspects such as the axonal branches of the neural networks. Recently the scientists have launched the Allen mouse brain connectivity atlas. A main feature of this work includes higher-resolution axonal projection maps. The axons are the tendrils that link one brain cell to another. The action potential signal propagates down these pathways to reach a target destination. A rAAV virus tracer labels the structures. Then they utilize 2-photon tomography to visualize 27 brain regions. The researchers can compare that data to the conventional tracers.  Read More »

Superconducting materials have been employed in a variety of domains. The technology can be used to build appliances that produce giant magnetic fields. Since the currents face no resistance, the electrons keep moving for a long time. This feature means that the invention requires less juice to maintain. Scientists from the national high field magnetic laboratory have set a new record. They have constructed a superconducting insert magnet that has a 35.4 Tesla field. To accomplish this milestone, they utilize a strip of a ceramic yttrium-barium-copper-oxide. They nest the YBCO coil within a 31-tesla resistive magnet. This adds an additional 4.4 Tesla to the other device. The hybrid coils have benefits that exceed either one alone. YBCO sustains its special properties above the boiling temperature of nitrogen (77 kelvin). The lab has beaten their past record for this kind of combination. The academics have been pushing the boundaries forward with a number devices. In a previous article, they have said that their power bill is 7 million dollars a year because of the resistive magnets. Any way of lessening that figure is desirable.  Read More »