2022 wrapped edition - My top 7 technological advancements.
Roughly 100 years ago, in 1922, the 29th US president, Warren G. Harding, introduced the first radio in the White House and Sir Frederick Grant Banting, a Canadian medical scientist, physician and Nobel laureate, discovered insulin and its therapeutic potential. The same year, the first commercial 3D movie,?The Power of Love, premiered at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in Los Angeles on September 27 and Clarence Birdseye invented a way to quickly freeze foods so people could eat foods that still tasted fresh.
Fast forward 100 years and the speed of innovation has accelerated considerably. We are in the midst of the?sixth wave of innovation, marked by clean and alternate energy, artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IOT) and #robotics. This wave will be unlike anything we've experienced throughout history. 2023 will be an interesting year. Although the world is heading into an economic slow down and political tensions continue, several of the following technologies will continue become main stream.
Robotics
1. Zoomlion?revealed the most advanced and comprehensive intelligent construction machinery fleet
Zoomlion's intelligent construction equipment has 11 pieces that can coordinate full-process, unmanned construction. It autonomously carries out tasks like covering excavation, concrete pumping, hoisting and installation.
This novel innovation uses full-information digital connection, full-task intelligent scheduling, full-process autonomous coordination and full-scenario three-dimensional visualization. Read the Dec 24 issue to see in detail how the robots work together.
Globally, employees don't want laborious and repetetive jobs anymore and employers are also finding it hard to recruit workers for construction jobs. The solution to this is automation. Businesses will continue finding ways to become safer, more productive and profitable. People in the labour force will continue to up-skill and find opportunities elsewhere.
2. MARM: The three-legged Robot that can transport weights end manipulate components in space
Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT—Italian Institute of Technology) revealed MARM - a new?#robotic?platform for?#space?applications. It has "three limbs that can be used to walk, move, grasp and transport payload modules while self-relocating itself on the space infrastructure under a microgravity environment."
MARM will primarily assist astronauts in maintenance and assemble tasks in space. The prototype will be tested in a simulated environment before being launched into space.
The MARM has a central body, three limbs and a docking device (useful for both powering and sending/receiving data). It was built using a computational design approach, which optimizes the robot's mobility and flexibility. The MARM platform can thus use its three limbs to move around, grasping the standard interconnections on the station's surfaces and crawling over them. It can also to assemble and position components (in particular modular hexagon tiles, 1.2 m wide and 0.2 m thick, weighing about 12 kg) and to manipulate the so-called Orbital Replacement Units (ORUs).
We've seen increased interest and launched projects from several countries this year. The momentum will possibly continue in 2023 and we will see more robots for space applications. Given the long-range nature of space missions, these machines will have the ability to self-heal and even physically re-configure to adapt to various circumstances in space.
Artificial Intelligence
3. DeepMind & Meta's AI can predict all known protein structures
Earlier this year in July, an AI program called AlphaFold—built by the Google-owned company DeepMind—solved the 3D structures of the roughly 200 million proteins known to science. Similarly, in November, researchers from Meta AI (formerly Facebook) announced they used AI to predict the structures of roughly?617 million?proteins from bacteria, virus, and other microorganisms that haven’t been fully characterized. It took Meta just two weeks to achieve this and the structures and underlying code are open source - they're freely available for public use.
Teams of researchers and scientists from around the world are using DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 software to conduct research on COVID-19, cancer, and antibiotic resistance. This is all significant because the human body relies on proteins to perform most functions. According to futurist Peter Diamandis, "understanding both the structure and function of individual proteins is crucial for understanding disease and drug development. By scaling up 3D structure prediction capacity, the root causes of disease can be precisely pinpointed, and drugs can be developed with enhanced safety and efficacy."
4. Chat GPT?#ai?hits 1M users
In Q4 this year, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced on Twitter that Chat GPT had already clocked a million users only a few days after its launch. No tech company has ever been able to achieve this.
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Based on the?GPT-3.5 architecture,?#chatgpt?interacts with humans using natural language processing. The chatbot has achieved impressive levels of intelligence and since its release, it has brought new life to conceiving AI-human interaction. The results have been far better than its previous models because this version offers longer-form output, better overall quality and has proven to be much better at instruction-following. The beta version of the model is free to use but will soon be monetized because “the compute costs are eye-watering.”
Chat GPT is a defining moment in technological evolution. People and enterprises who use this technology as a co-pilot, will produce more volume and better quality of work than those who don't. Just like societies were radically transformed after inventions like the internet, emails and smartphones, Chat GPT is a technology that will disrupt several industries like marketing, writing and education. It has the potential to make Google search irrelevant.
Energy
5. Net Positive FUSION Achieved!
Scientists at California's National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National?Laboratory achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reactor for the first time (resulting in?a net energy gain of 1.5 megajoules).?
In this fusion reaction, two hydrogen nuclei are fused to form Helium. A small amount of mass is converted into exorbitant amounts of energy. Research on fusion has been pursued for decades but this is the first real breakthrough moment.
Fusion requires a very tiny amount of hydrogen. The equivalent of hydrogen in a glass of water could provide enough energy for your lifetime. Unlike fission (which splits atoms), fusion creates NO radioactive waste, making it suitable for decarbonization.?While this particular form of fusion will require a lot more work to reach commercial utility - specially in missions to send rockets and aircraft further into space, it inspires us to show what is possible in the future.?
Food
6. Global Transition to No Kill Meat
Global population hit 8 Billion this year and demand for energy continues to increase. The upward trend will continue. In order to meet food demands by an ever-increasing population of humans, companies are innovating. Lab-grown meat or cultivated meat is the solution and has the potential to address a number of challenges associated with traditional livestock farming, including animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and food security.
Companies like?Vow and Upside?have figured out a new technique to grow meat without having to raise livestock on farms and slaughtering them. This isn't the same product?Beyond Meat's?plant based aburgers, however. Teams of biologists, biochemists, engineers and foodies can now extract cells from an animal (via a needle biopsy), place them in tanks, nourish them with nutrients they need to grow, like fats, sugar, amino acids and vitamins. Within weeks, they go from cells to delicious, nutritious and sustainable meat. There are more than 80 companies staking a future in the space.
Earlier this year in November, California-based startup, Upside Foods, became the first U.S. company to receive a FDA approval for lab-grown chicken. This regulatory clearance is a promising start, however, more obstacles remain. This marks the second time a country has approved lab-grown meat. In December 2020, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) granted Eat Just Inc. (USA) with approval to sell its lab-grown chicken created from cultured chicken cells in Singapore.
Health
7. Embryos grown without eggs, sperm and womb
Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel were able to grow mouse embryos in a lab without the use of sperm, egg, or a womb. They achieved this by growing the mouse embryos inside a bioreactor that was made up of stem cells cultivated in a petri dish. Using a mechanical uterus combined with a combination of various stem cells—some of which were chemically programmed to over-express genes that switched on the development of the placenta and yolk-sac— the team produced embryos with gene expression patterns 95% similar to natural mouse embryos of the same age.
The embryos developed normally, elongating on Day 3, folding their neural tubes and budding tails by Day 6, and developing beating hearts by Day 8. This is the?first time ever?that scientists have successfully managed to grow fully synthetic mouse embryos outside the womb.
Observing the embryos in a lab instead of a uterus is an immense opportunity for scientists to better understand how to prevent pregnancy failures and even supply real organs?for transplants. This breakthrough has the potential to pave the way for new treatment strategies in diseases like cancer and producing bone marrow for patients in need.