[ 2013-12-29 ]

Ten amazing science and technology innovations coming up in 2014
From the world's largest underground hotel to Star
Wars-style holographic communication, the coming
year is set to unveil an array of incredible
advances in science and technology

1. Beam yourself across the world
The growth in video communication has been
exponential. Skype now boasts 300 million users,
and a 2012 Ipsos/Reuters poll revealed one in five
people worldwide now frequently “telecommuted”
to work. But Star Trek fans will be happy to hear
that incoming technology will add a further
dimension to international conference calls. Known
as holographic telepresence, it involves
transmitting a three-dimensional moving image of
you at each destination – allowing you to
converse as if you were in the room. One system
from Musion, based in Britain, uses Pepper’s
Ghost, an effect popular with illusionists, to
beam moving images onto sloped glass. Musion has
already digitally resurrected rapper Tupac Shakur
at a music festival. But full 3D holographic
communication is not far behind – in the shape
of the Polish company Leia. Named after the Star
Wars princess, its Leia Display XL uses laser
projectors to beam images onto a cloud of water
vapour. The result is a walk-in holographic room,
in which 3D objects can be viewed and manipulated
from every angle. An IBM survey of 3,000
researchers recently named holographic video calls
as one technology they expected to see in place in
the next year or so.

2. Formula E-racing
If you think the atmosphere at a Formula 1 grand
prix is electric, you’re going to love the new
motor sport starting next year. Formula E will see
drivers racing around city-centre circuits -
including London - in battery-powered electric
cars. The new championship, which is backed by the
FIA, motor racing’s governing body, promises
cars as sexy as those driven by Lewis Hamilton,
Sebastian Vettel et al, but with lithium-ion
batteries and electric motors instead of fuel
tanks and pistons. And, while their top speed is
expected to be 155mph, slower than Formula 1, the
event will compensate with exciting street
circuits and brightly-lit night events. The pit
stops will be different too: with the batteries
running out of juice after 20 minutes, drivers
won’t just change their tires, they’ll jump
into new cars. The season is scheduled to start on
13th September in Beijing, with further races in
the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Los
Angeles amongst others, before the final event in
the centre of London on 27th June 2015.

3. Faster online deliveries
In this age of instant gratification, waiting days
for internet purchases to arrive suddenly seems
very 2013. So, from next year, behemoths like
Amazon and eBay will be stepping up their efforts
to deliver goods on the same day they’re bought,
even if that day’s a Sunday. Eventually, Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos envisions unmanned drones
bringing products to our doors within
half-an-hour. In the meantime, he’s increasing
his number of warehouses and overhauling his
partnerships with couriers to get us what we want
as quickly as possible. It’s another nail in the
coffin of traditional bricks-and-mortar stores.

4. Virtual reality is no longer a joke
Virtual reality used to be ridiculed. But, thanks
to Palmer Luckey's new Oculus Rift, industry,
medicine and the military are now taking it very
seriously indeed.

The decade’s most exciting development in
computer hardware looks a little like a fat black
envelope stuck to a pair of ski goggles, and I had
one strapped to my face two months ago as I sat at
a desk in the Earls Court Exhibition Centre
preparing to fly a Spitfire under a bridge.

Headphones over my ears replaced the thumping bass
of the surrounding trade show with the spluttery
growl of a Merlin engine. Looking down, I saw a
pair of khakied knees and a gloved hand gripping a
control yoke; above and to either side, the sun
glittered through the cockpit canopy. As I flipped
the aircraft into a turn and dive, my senses
insisted that I was soaring, upside down, under an
iron bridge and into a canyon. But my body and
brain remained obstinately upright in a chair in
west London, at the glorious mercy of a technology
that promises to bring back that most laughable of
Nineties computing obsessions: virtual reality.

This device is called the Oculus Rift, and it has
come a long way since 2011, when Palmer Luckey, a
19-year-old Californian student, built the
prototype from scavenged parts in his parents’
garage. Luckey was an enthusiastic collector of
old VR hardware the clunky headsets that had
enjoyed a brief tenure in Nineties amusement
arcades and had long dreamt of bringing back the
technology in a useful form.

But despite the colourful cyber-predictions of
films such as Lawnmower Man, there were good
reasons that the virtual reality craze had fizzled
out by the millennium. The headsets were too heavy
to wear for long, and immersion in the blocky
graphics of these early virtual worlds came at a
price: a stiff neck, motion sickness and the
feeling of wading through treacle.

By 2011, however, the magic combination of
accurate motion-sensing with lightweight,
high-resolution displays no longer seemed so far
off. As Luckey realised, the technology was by
then integrated into most decent smartphones. So
his prototype Rift used the equivalent of a large
smartphone screen to display offset moving images,
one for each eye, which the brain combined into an
illusion of 3D depth. Head movements were tracked
with phone-equivalent gyroscopes and
accelerometers, adjusting the view so the user
could look freely around a 3D world.

5. Virgin Galactic launches. Yes, really
Despite delays in testing – the first flights
were promised by 2011 – Sir Richard Branson’s
dream of making money in space is nearing reality.
A test flight was completed in April, and it was
announced in November that television network NBC
has agreed to televise the first ever public
flight from New Mexico “sometime in 2014”.

6. The Swiss Army knife of credit cards
According to a recent survey, one in five
consumers in America no longer carry any cash on
them. From next year, they won’t need their
ever-growing collection of plastic payment cards
either. San Francisco company Coin has invented a
device the same size as a credit card that holds
the information of up to eight debit, credit,
loyalty or gift cards. Customers press a button to
choose which one they want to use and then simply
swipe their Coin in the usual way. And if you lose
your Coin? The card is synched to your smartphone
and when the two are separated your phone receives
a notification. In other words: you can’t leave
home (or a shop, or a restaurant) without it.

7. Shanghai’s underground hotel
In an abandoned quarry at the base of China’s
Tianmenshan Mountain, 30 miles outside Shanghai,
an extraordinary hotel is taking shape. At a cost
of £345 million, the InterContinental Hotels
Group is building a five-star resort that will
boast two floors above the top of the 330ft rock
face and another 17 storeys below ground level,
two of which will be underwater. If construction
goes to plan, the first guests at “the world’s
lowest hotel” will check-in by the end of 2014.

8. Countdown to Mars
As it stands, if you felt the urge to make the
54-million-mile trip to Mars, it would take you
nine months. That’s around 39 weeks dealing with
cosmic radiation, asteroids and wastage to your
bones and muscles.

But VASIMR could change all that. Set to be tested
aboard the International Space Station in late
2014 to early 2015, the Variable Specific Impulse
Magnetoplasma Rocket is an experimental engine
that, if it works, could get us there in three
months.

To simplify enormously: existing chemical rockets
only produce short bursts of speed as they burn a
vast amount of fuel in one go, but at a relatively
low velocity. By contrast, VASIMR takes a tiny bit
of propellant (plasma), heats it to very high
temperatures (two million degrees centrigrade)
using radio waves, then uses magnetic fields to
push it out at extremely high velocities. The
result is a steady, continuous acceleration to
higher speeds, using far less fuel.

In theory. One current problem is the power
required to heat the plasma. For short flights
near Earth, solar panels suffice. But a mission to
Mars would require a far bigger continuous power
supply – and that means a wider initiative to
build a nuclear reactor small and safe enough for
the trip.

But manufacturers Ad Astra – lead by former NASA
astronaut Dr Franklin Chang Díaz – say VASIMR
is a game-changer. Better still, for the sci-fi
fans among us, VASIMR even burns with the same
bluish tint and luminescence of fictional
spaceships engines. Which is what scientists like
to call “the clincher”.

9. More transparent shopping
For some people, it’s about whether the factory
workers are being treated ethically. For others,
it’s about the impact upon the environment. For
a great deal more of us, it’s about checking
whether you’re about to feed your child a Turkey
Twizzler made out of freshly-slaughtered Romanian
horse. Either way: in the age of globalisation,
knowing where your product has been made or grown,
and its route to market, has taken on a new
importance.

Embracing this shift in consumer priorities is
Provenance (www.provenance.it) - a new type of
search engine attempting to chronicle just that.
From chocolate bars to jackets to shoes to
chef’s knives, Provenance tells you where a
product is made, who the manufacturer is and what
the product is made from.

But while Provenance includes vivid personal
stories from farmers, workers, craftspeople and so
on, there’s no attempt to catch out corporations
with their hands in the sweatshop, Roger Cook
style. Instead, the site works in collaboration
with everyone from small-batch producers to large
multinationals in the hope that, by simply taking
the mystery out of supply chains and worldwide
commerce, the site will help shoppers make better
choices. As well as gently forcing companies to
improve their environmental and social impact.

10. Fecal bacteriotherapy
Not every emerging scientific advance is complex,
or sophisticated. Or, for that matter, something
you'd discuss at the dinner table. Fecal
microbiota transplantation (FMT) – the process
of transferring fecal bacteria from a healthy
individual into a sick recipient - has been around
since 1957. But it’s only in the last decade
that FMT has been seen as simple, safe, low cost,
low risk, accessible, and, apparently, a permanent
treatment alternative to increasingly
high-strength antibiotics.

To explain: when a patient is given broad-spectrum
antibiotics, the effect is to carpet-bomb all the
healthy bacteria that live in our guts, leaving
the patient open to infection by other bacteria -
such as the potentially fatal Clostridium
difficile. Since 2000, hypervirulent strains of C.
difficile have developed, and now kill over 2,000
people a year in the UK alone. But FMT is the
shock troops: a quick, easy way of restoring
healthy bacteria into your guts to fight the
infection. And fight they do: an incredible 89% of
patients are instantly, and permanently, cured.

And new research suggests FMT might also offer
cures for not just IBS, colitis, constipation and
colonic ulcers – but also a growing number of
neurological and auto-immune conditions such as
Parkinson's. In October it was announced FMT was
now available in pill form, making it slightly
more appealing.

Source - The Sunday Telegraph

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