Ten emerging technologies that will change humanity in 2021

There are many huge challenges facing the world today: climate change, energy depletion, food production, life and health, etc. The "Top Ten Emerging Technologies" selected by the World Economic Forum in 2021 mainly focus on the main issues currently facing the world. Unfolding, these ten technologies are expected to profoundly change the future of mankind.

The international community’s comprehensive commitment to combating global climate change will further lead to the creation of new technologies. Carbon dioxide is the main culprit of the greenhouse effect, and various countries and industries have been making active efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Major developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, as well as major developing countries such as China and India, have made commitments to the international community to achieve a significant reduction in total carbon emissions by 2030.

At the same time, the agricultural and food fields will further develop the market supply of protein substitutes such as artificial meat (Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat). Sensor data connected through the Internet of Things will increasingly support intelligent management of land, crops, fertilizers, irrigation water, etc., which will help further reduce carbon emissions.

Phosphate fertilizer is the main fertilizer used for food in the world. The preparation of phosphate fertilizer depends largely on the use of nitrogen-containing industrial fertilizers. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world requires approximately 110 million tons of nitrogen each year to maintain global crop production. Nitrogen fertilizers are usually produced by converting nitrogen in the air into ammonia. Ammonia-containing fertilizers maintain about 50% of global food production, and the process of preparing ammonia-containing fertilizers consumes 1% of the world's main energy needs, and industrial process emissions of carbon dioxide accounts for 1% to 2% of global carbon emissions.

In order to reduce this part of carbon emissions, researchers are using natural methods to obtain solutions for manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers. For example, major food crops such as corn and cereals rely on inorganic nitrogen in the soil. The roots of leguminous plants interact with soil bacteria to form root nodules, which convert nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia through the ability of bacteria to fix nitrogen. These natural nitrogen fixation methods give Researchers are very inspired.

At present, the investment of governments and social capital in developed countries has provided strong support for research and development in the field of engineered nitrogen fixation. In the future, crops that utilize natural nitrogen production may soon become more sustainable. Key elements for sustainable food production.

New technology will promote the detection of human breath for disease diagnosis. This sampling method is far more time-consuming than drawing blood. The use of new technologies for biometric detection is similar to the alcohol breathalyser used by police to detect drunk driving. In the future, disease diagnosis can also be carried out in this way.

Human breath contains more than 800 compounds, and recent research has shown strong correlations between the concentrations of different compounds in exhaled air and disease. For example, an elevated concentration of acetone is a strong sign of diabetes, an elevated nitric oxide concentration can be used as a biomarker for respiratory diseases, and elevated levels of various aldehyde indicators indicate a high probability of lung cancer.

Moreover, the use of breath detection will greatly reduce the waiting time for detection. It usually only takes a few minutes for the data from the breath detection sensor to be analyzed by an external computer to generate a detection report.

In addition to producing results faster than drawing blood, the breath sensor uses a non-invasive detection method. In countries with limited medical resources, its ease of use, portability and cost-effectiveness will provide more Good medical coverage. Breath testing can also help mitigate the spread of the virus in communities, in a similar way to how individuals' temperatures are checked before entering public spaces such as supermarkets or restaurants.

In March 2020, Israeli researchers have completed exploratory clinical applications, using breath testing to detect the new coronavirus (COVID) with 95% accuracy and 100% sensitivity. The technology is currently undergoing extensive clinical trials, but it still needs further maturation before it can be widely used.

If you go to the pharmacy and the pharmacist does not fill your prescription with pre-made medicines, but uses a customized method to prepare medicines that best suit your physical symptoms according to your diagnosis, this sounds like Doesn’t it look amazing?

Due to the special nature of drugs, drug production has traditionally been concentrated in qualified manufacturers and completed through mass production. The composition and dosage of medicines are standardized and it is not possible to customize medicines with different compositions and dosages for individuals. Yet the latest technologies in microfluidics and on-demand drug manufacturing promise to make this idea a reality.

On-demand drug manufacturing, also known as continuous process drug manufacturing, can produce drugs in one go. Its working principle is to input drug ingredients into small synthesis equipment through fluid means, and the synthesis equipment will prepare the ingredients according to the requirements, so that the drugs can be customized for patients.

The greater significance of this technology is that it can be deployed in remote areas or field hospitals to produce drugs at any time according to demand. It also means fewer resources are needed to store and transport drugs, and doses can be tailored to individual patients.

In 2016, MIT and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) successfully developed a refrigerator-sized drug synthesis equipment and prepared 1,000 doses of a commonly used drug: hydrochloric acid within 24 hours. Diphenhydramine, used to relieve allergy symptoms; diazepam, used to treat anxiety and muscle spasms; the antidepressant fluoxetine hydrochloride; and the local anesthetic lidocaine hydrochloride.

Current portable devices for on-demand drug manufacturing cost millions of dollars, hampering widespread rollout. New quality assurance and quality control standards are also needed to regulate the personalization of formulations and single-person preparation of medicines. However, as costs fall and regulatory frameworks improve, on-demand drug manufacturing will bring disruptive changes to the pharmaceutical industry in the future.

Today the wireless devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) have become the backbone of the networked world. IoT wireless devices are deployed as lifestyle tools in homes, biomedical wearables, and sensors in hazardous and hard-to-reach areas. With the development of the Internet of Things, it will be more widely used in agricultural water-saving irrigation and pesticide spraying, smart grids, bridge or concrete infrastructure defect monitoring, and early warning of disasters such as mudslides and earthquakes.

It is estimated that by 2025, 40 billion IoT devices will be online around the world. Providing convenient on-demand power supply for these devices is a new challenge. 5G wireless signals emit more radiated energy than 4G transmissions, which means many low-power wireless devices will never need to be plugged in for power.

At present, scientific researchers have successfully collected the radiated energy from Wi-Fi routers and microwave radio frequency equipment to power low-power Internet of Things devices. This emerging technology will bring radiation energy collection to a new level and provide power for Mass deployment of IoT devices provides energy solutions.

In the future, life sciences will focus more on increasing "healthy lifespan", not just lifespan.

According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of the global population over 60 years old will increase from 12% to 22% between 2015 and 2050. Chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis pose huge challenges to the health and social development of the elderly. Reversing aging or finding the "fountain of youth" has always been mankind's desire.

Through genome coding technology, scientific researchers have quantified the activity of all genes, the concentration of proteins and metabolites in cells, and combined with genetic research, have become more and more clear about the key mechanisms of human aging. Scientific researchers have discovered the biological processes of the human body. Identifiers of school age are key predictors of risk of disease and death in humans.

Recently, scientific researchers have actively promoted the development of targeted treatments through their continuous understanding of the aging mechanism of the human body. For example, a recent preliminary clinical study showed that taking a cocktail of drugs including human growth hormone for one year could turn back the body's "biological clock" by 1.5 years. Scientists also found that injecting proteins from the blood of young humans into older mice improved age-related brain dysfunction. The results show that diseases such as age-related cognitive decline in humans can be reversed through scientific methods.

Currently, through genetic engineering methods for analysis and design, coupled with the strong promotion of government and medical capital, drugs developed by more than 100 companies around the world have entered the preclinical stage or early clinical trial stage. This new technology makes humans more and more hopeful to fight against aging, and even challenge "the ultimate issue of life---death."

The synthesis of ammonia on an industrial scale is arguably one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. Ammonia is used to produce fertilizers that fuel 50% of global food production, making it key to global food security. However, ammonia synthesis is an energy-intensive chemical process that requires a catalyst to fix nitrogen with hydrogen.

Hydrogen must be produced synthetically, currently using fossil fuels, natural gas, coal or petroleum distilled at high temperatures to produce hydrogen. The problem is, this process produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide, accounting for 1 to 2 percent of total global emissions.

Green hydrogen produced by splitting water using renewable energy could change that. In addition to eliminating carbon emissions from the hydrogen production process, this method produces purer hydrogen without the chemicals that are incorporated when using fossil fuels, such as compounds containing sulfur and arsenic that can poison catalysts. Reduce reaction efficiency.

Cleaner hydrogen also means better catalysts can be developed and the toxic chemicals in fossil fuels no longer need to be tolerated. Now, Danish companies have announced the development of new catalysts for green ammonia production.

The current main obstacle to green hydrogen production is high cost. In order to solve this problem, European energy companies have launched scientific and technological innovation research and development, aiming to provide green hydrogen at a price of 1.5 euros per kilogram by 2030.

Continuous, non-invasive monitoring of chronic diseases has always been the expectation of the medical community. The good news is that wireless, portable and wearable monitoring sensors will soon be available for clinical use. Monitors use a variety of methods to detect biomarkers in sweat, tears, urine or blood, and wearable monitoring sensors use light or low-power electromagnetic radiation (similar to a cell phone or smart watch) to monitor chronic diseases.

For example, electronic contact lenses can capture cancer biomarkers or blood sugar levels through tears for diabetes monitoring; mouthguard saliva sensors with radio frequency identification technology can monitor saliva biomarkers for oral ulcers, respiratory Early warning of systemic inflammation, HIV, intestinal infections, cancer and COVID.

According to United Nations estimates, using 3D printers to build houses could help solve the challenge of insufficient housing for 1.6 billion people around the world.

The concept of 3D printed houses is not new. It was inspired by the Mars immigration project, because Mars does not have most of the materials needed to build houses. Printing a mixture of concrete, sand, plastic, adhesives, etc., through large-scale 3D printers can serve as a relatively simple and low-cost construction method that seems well suited to alleviating housing problems in remote and poor areas.

Today, at least 10 billion active devices make up the Internet of Things (IoT), and this number is expected to double in the next 10 years. To maximize the benefits of IoT in communication and automation, devices need to be distributed around the world and data collected. The data is processed in cloud data centers, using artificial intelligence to identify anomalies in the data to provide early warnings to humans. Such as climate anomalies and natural disasters. But here’s the problem: Terrestrial cellular networks cover less than half the world’s surface, leaving a huge gap in connectivity.

Space-based IoT systems can fill these gaps using a network of low-cost, low-weight (less than 10 kilograms) nanosatellites hundreds of kilometers from Earth. From the launch of the first nanosatellite in 1998 to today, there are approximately 2,000 nanosatellites used for orbital surveillance. Companies such as SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon and Telesat are already using nanosatellites to provide global internet coverage.

The construction of space Internet of Things still faces many challenges. Nanosatellites, for example, have a relatively short lifespan of about two years and must be supported by expensive ground infrastructure. To combat the growing problem of orbital space debris, international space agencies are planning to automatically deorbit satellites at the end of their functional life or use other spacecraft to collect them.