The need to adapt keeps us in sync with the world that keeps turning. Without innovation, we would still be plagued by polio and rushing to find a cure for it in a horse-drawn carriage! 2017 ushers in some ground-breaking advancements in science that shall change our lives for the better. Some are in the field of medical science, while some just wish to make life easier with machine-based automation! It truly is riveting to wonder how this might also make life expectancy longer, global currency more uniform and the cost of living in any given nation cheaper! So, let us have a look at those 10 major breakthroughs in technology in 2017 that shall be life-changing:
Even though we might be almost a decade away from a possibility where even the most fatal accidents and the resultant paralysis that many unfortunate victims suffer from can be overcome, Neuroscientist Dr. Gregoire Courtine and his team have planted the seeds for that possibility to become reality with an experiment. An injured macaque had a recording device planted underneath its motor cortex and electrodes sutured around the animal’s spinal cord, where the injury occurred. A wireless connection catered the two electronic devices. As a result, once the system came alive, it read the monkey’s intention and allowed it’s so-far vegetative limbs to allow it to move about! Courtine, a professor with Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne looks to end the heartbreak of many with further experiments being done on rats.
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We are already aware that renewable, less-detrimental sources of fueling cars is underway. In less than a decade, we might also have automobiles that redefine the role of the ‘auto’ prefix. Otto, among many other renowned companies are investing heavily on self-automated trucks and such. This looks to end the morbid affair of vesting the control of a 16-wheel monster-machine from plying down the road and possibly being a bigger danger to those it runs into, should the driver lose focus. What remains to be seen is if coding and sensors can replace the occupation of millions of truck drivers worldwide and if electronics is a better master than experience.
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You may be familiar with the phrase “moneymaker”, being used to describe the visage of a person who earns with the help of their facial attributes. Facial recognition is not a mystery waiting to be fathomed, but is something in application now. With the initiation by China, your face might soon be used as a means of validation payments, provide access to facilities and such. Facial recognition is more commonly used in smart-devices and laptops, but China’s Face++, a booming start-up has introduced the novel idea of having one’s face take the literal meaning of the word ‘identity’. Their software is also used in public services, to track individuals, to provide public the right to information on a public servant among others.
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Panorama shots are a virtue exclusive to the primary-back cameras on smart-phones. However, Koen Hufkens, a professor of ecology at Harvard, has designed a system that documents live feed upto 360 degrees around the device itself, and broadcasts it to the website virtualforest.io. The images are streamed live every 15 minutes in the EST time zone. The VR was developed with the motive of capturing the changing of the seasons. The outcome, once this kind of camera function becomes standard-issue is somewhat similar to that of the Periscope app. 360-degree selfie images have been used by news agencies to capture natural disasters to refugee camps.
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Because of their form factor, solar cells are infamous for only being able to capture a minor fraction of the solar energy they are exposed to. A team of MIT scientists are however looking into maximizing the potential of the solar cell. They intend to make the system capture light energy, convert it back into light energy, within the spectrum that the solar cells are capable of handling. The thermophotovoltaic cells that are being calibrated to capture more energy than its quota might take almost a decade or half to meet fruition though!
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The map of the basic cell anatomy has been long made a part of our elementary science syllabus. However, what may amaze the buddying biologists of tomorrow is that the atlas to the entire cellular mark-up inside the human body shall be available within the next 5 years. Cataloguing 37.2 trillion cells is no easy task and hence is demanding the collaboration of scientists from USA, UK, Netherlands, Israel, Sweden and Japan among others. The scientists are tasked with assigning a molecular signature and a zip code of sorts to the cells for identification.
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Our lives may not be that sci-fi yet, however botnets, or malware that phishes a victim’s computer such that all its resources are at the mercy of the attacker are rampant in this day and age. The most popular of this malware’s variants would be the Mirai worm which has been responsible for causing DDOS (distributed denial of services) attacks on entire networks that caused a snowball effect and temporarily affected Netflix and Twitter’s service. The logical step, to incorporate encryption in the most minor of activities, has begun. We are far from an age where hackers are not breaking down our systems for entertainment or digital anarchy.
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Hereditary diseases have been a bane of human evolution. The study of genetics strived long and hard over the century to weed out the negative traits in a lineage so that the progenies could live healthier and more diverse lives. Fortunately, of recent scientists have mastered gene therapy to the extent that a single session can cure an individual of rare genetic diseases or dormant diseases that affect them later in life. There have been recent documentations in experimental genetics where individuals with immuno-deficiency disorders have been cured from a single session. Hopes of making the same available for patients of Alzheimer’s, heart diseases and cancer prone lineages saved at nominal costs, are alive.
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No top 10 scientific breakthroughs list can be complete without a hint of artificial intelligence thrown in for good measure. Not breaking the mold, it should be made known that scientists at AlphaGo, a computer developed by DeepMind, pitted itself against an expert human player, in a complex board game called ‘Go’, and won. Reinforcement learning or the process where an individual can make educated decisions based on what they have learned, is the key to sentience in computer machinery. The ability to associate desire with action and thus lead the same to an outcome has been achieved by the code running on the computational device. Conventional coding cannot judge the validity of a move as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in game as complex as ‘Go’.
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Humming in solitary in a lab at Dutch research institute Delft University of Technology, is a quantum computer whose components connect to each other, a few degrees shy of absolute zero! The quasi-particles produced at this temperature are the building blocks of the quantum computer. To call it a quantum computer would be a misnomer as it is far from completion. However, should the computer become the first of its kind, it shall make immediate breakthroughs in the fields of materials science, pharmaceutical research, and artificial intelligence.
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CONCLUSION:
We are in the Golden Age of technology and are about to unearth more paradigm shifts that make this age look like the Silver or even the Bronze age in a few decades.