Farm Drones
That sound you hear is a swarm of drones,
revving their tiny engines as they wait for the Federal Aviation Administration
to update its rules on commercial UAV flight. The biggest beneficiaries may be
farmers who hope to use cheap UAVs armed with cameras to monitor the health of
their crops, employing aerial photography—digital and infrared—to fine-tune
delivery of water, fertilizer, and other chemicals. To tap that hungry market,
companies such as Indiana-based PrecisionHawk have developed simple
plug-and-play sensors and data-processing software for use with their 3-pound
GPS-guided Lancaster UAV. For now the FAA rules governing farm use are vague
(no one has gotten into trouble yet), but the agency is expected to clarify
things this year and issue final rules in 2015.
In-Memory Computing
In traditional computer architecture,
there's memory (the 6 GB of RAM in your laptop that provides lightning-quick
access to the data required to run your applications), and then there's storage
(a 1 TB hard drive, slow and inefficient to access but spacious enough to
archive your many files). The same dichotomy holds true for massive-data
centers, which makes it hard to analyze big-data sets without the delays
inherent in retrieving each piece of data from the clunky spinning disk where
it's stored. But now that flash memory is relatively inexpensive and getting
cheaper by the year, companies such as SAP and Oracle are experimenting with a
radical alternative: stowing all your data right in memory. This in-memory
computing offers dramatic increases in speed and, by some estimates, energy
savings of up to 80 percent for big-data centers. With the release of Violin
Memory's inexpensive in-memory storage cards, individual servers can now take
advantage of those benefits too.
IPv6
In February 2011 the Internet officially
ran out of IP addresses. You probably didn't notice, because new devices
continue to connect to the Web via address-sharing work-arounds. But those are
stopgap measures. It's time for a wholesale shift from the 32-bit,
4.3-billion-address IPv4 system developed in the 1970s to the 128-bit IPv6 and
its mind-boggling 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. To complete the
change, every website and Internet provider has to buy in, updating equipment
when necessary. At the moment only about 2 percent of Google's traffic arrives
via IPv6. Will the world get its act together in time to avoid missed
connections? Many holdouts are looking to Washington for the answer: The White
House has mandated that all government servers switch to IPv6 by October.
Muon Tomography
Though very similar to computed tomography
(better known as CT scanning), muon tomography offers one key advantage:
Instead of assembling images with radioactive X-rays, it uses particles created
naturally in the upper atmosphere by the cosmic rays that constantly bombard
Earth. These particles, known as muons, penetrate much more deeply than X-rays,
which means they can pass through shielding materials like lead—and that makes
them perfect for detecting nuclear material hidden in shipping containers.
Virginia-based Decision Sciences, working with Los Alamos National Lab, has
developed the Multi-Mode Passive Detection System, which can scan a 40-foot
shipping container in 30 seconds, looking for the telltale ways in which muons
are deflected by uranium and plutonium. And before year's end, the company
plans to introduce a software upgrade that will enable the device to detect
conventional electronics and other contraband. It comes as no surprise that the
departments of Defense and Homeland Security have already signed up to use the
technology.
Personal-Data Auctions
In 2000 a public outcry forced Yahoo and
eBay to cancel their plans to auction personal data collected from 200,000
people by a marketing company. Today that data is more accessible and more
valuable than ever, but people still strive to protect it. Public sentiment may
be changing, though. Last year an NYU student served up two months' worth of
private data mined from his digital devices in a Kickstarter campaign. The
stunt raised $2733 from 213 amused backers. Now startups such as Washington,
D.C.–based Personal are betting that others will follow suit, lumping their
online accounts together in one place for convenience and for profit. Once
their data is collected, they can choose whether to part with chunks of it—in
exchange for special deals and other enticements, that is.
Organ-On-A-Chip
Drugs that work well in a petri dish—or
even in a mouse—often turn out to be ineffective or dangerous in humans. That's
why researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering set out to create computer chips capable of simulating the
functions of real organs. The lung-on-a-chip has a membrane lined with human
lung cells on one side and blood-vessel cells on the other. Air flows across
the lung-cell side and a blood-like liquid flows across the other. The device
even expands and contracts as it "breathes." Scientists are currently
working with the Food and Drug Administration to test counter-radiation drugs
on bone marrow, gut, and lung chips. The next step is bolder yet: a $37 million
DARPA-funded plan to link various chips in what amounts to a
whole-human-body-on-a-chip.
3D Counterfeiting
In February a series of 3D-printer patents
will expire, clearing the way for a flood of cheap professional machines.
That's good news for small manufacturing shops but bad news for companies that
make highly desirable—and easily copied—objects such as jewelry and sunglasses.
Rogue websites like thepiratebay.sx have already added sections to distribute
the printing specs, pulled from pirated blueprints or 3D scans of the
originals, for such objects. While designers wrestle with how to insert digital
rights management codes in 3D-printer files, some experts predict that by 2018
companies will be losing $100 billion a year in intellectual property. The more
immediate issue for everyone, though, is figuring out exactly what is protected
by copyright (for creative work) and patent (for useful devices). A screw? No
big deal. A replacement part for your car? That's trickier.
Semiautonomous Driving
We still have a way to go before cars pilot
themselves to the office, but, little by little, technology is now assisting us
with the driving. Ford, Audi, and Volvo have designed vehicles that can park
themselves. GM's hands-free Super Cruise control will adjust the steering and
the brakes to keep your car at a safe remove from the SUV ahead. The Direct
Adaptive Steering system in Nissan's Infiniti Q50 uses circuits to sidestep the
rack-and-pinion system, speeding up the response time between steering wheel
and tires, maybe even paving the way for vehicles operated by joysticks. Cool?
You bet, but advances like these also have the potential to make for safer
roads, fewer bottlenecks, and, yes, hands idle enough for you to enjoy a donut
with your coffee.
Bioprinting
Imagine taking an inkjet printer, filling
it with bio-ink made from stem cells, and printing a new kidney for anyone who
needs a transplant. The process is a little more complicated than that, of
course, particularly when working with multiple cell types or tubular
structures, but after years of research that incredible scenario is almost
within our reach. San Diego–based Organovo, which unveiled the first commercial
3D bioprinter in 2009, expects to release functional human liver tissue in 2014
that drug companies can use for medical research. Scientists are also working
on printable bone and wound-healing materials. It's still a big leap from there
to a fully transplantable organ, but take heart: Now you don't have to be a
science-fiction fan to believe it's possible.
Active Cyber Defense
Even the walls of classified military
networks are vulnerable to hackers. So in 2012 DARPA launched an Active Cyber
Defense program. Think preemptive strikes. Proponents aim to identify and
disarm would-be attackers with, say, fake data. The startup CrowdStrike is
bringing the same aggressive approach to the private sector, promising to use
big-data analytics to monitor real-time activity in client networks. Some
advocates are even pushing for changes in privacy laws for permission to hack
into an adversary's network to retrieve or destroy stolen data.
