Science, technology & design

Extraordinary answers to ordinary problems

Think about the more mundane aspects of life – using electricity, commuting to work, putting the garbage out, taking time off for illness. Companies are working on ways to improve each of these in the future and, in some cases, their ideas are already in practice.

Many people would like to use solar panels for electricity but they can’t afford the upfront cost, even if their bills will be lower overall. One financing innovation is they get free solar panels and then pay for power as they go. Banks or municipal bond holders invest in solar panels and then homeowners pay for their electricity at a rate lower than normal. One American company, SolarCity installs solar panels, leases them to householders and gives the electricity for free. Meanwhile, SunRun sells the electricity rather than leasing the panels. Each option saves users from the upfront cost, as well as saving them money down the track.

More people live in cities than in the countryside, so the need to move them around – without cars – is becoming more urgent. One simple idea combines buses with subways to create Bus Rapid Transit, which uses existing roads with concrete dividers. Passengers wait in enclosed stations, the doors of the bus slide open to admit them, and they don’t have to wait in traffic. This has been working well in Colombia since 2001 and has reduced both fuel consumption and pollution.

Here is a solution to the landfill – plasma gasification. Plasma gasification is like lightening in a bottle. Its scorching heat converts organic compounds into syngas and everything else is trapped in a solid called slag. Syngas can be used as fuel for a turbine to generate electricity, while slag can be made into materials for construction use. The plasma method could, in the USA, replace 25 nuclear power plants or all its hydropower output!

Finally, satellites can track the spread of contagious diseases by monitoring the environment for heat, rainfall and animals that spread disease, such as migratory birds. Satellite data showed the advance of bird flu in Asia, which spread because of the domestic duck. Of course, it is important to have data on people, for example, who was raising poultry for consumption. But overall, satellites can help us keep one step ahead in public health by predicting disease.

Ideas such as these are a reminder that even the things we take for granted can always be improved upon and the human brain can create an infinite number of ideas from what it already knows. While it is easy to be pessimistic about the future – where we are going to put all our waste, for example – we can still be optimistic about the ability of humans to find a solution.

A few things you might need one day – or never

How often have you wished someone could read your mind (or was glad they could not) One American student wore an electroencepahlography (EEG) cap fitted with electrodes so that a computer could read his mind. He tweeted 23 characters – “using EEG to send tweet” - just by thinking them! This could be a godsend for people with locked-in syndrome, if not you.

Blind people may be able to regain partial eyesight, thanks to MIT researchers, using a titanium-encased chip that can be implanted on their eyeball. They wear eyeglasses with a minute camera that transmits images to that chip and then to their brains. People with knee problems are often too poor to receive a titanium replacement but Stanford University students have developed a $20 knee made of self-lubricating, oil-filled nylon that is flexible and stable. Already, 300 people in India are testing it. Meanwhile, Italian scientists are working on artificial bone replacements using woods, such as red oak, rattan and sipo. The wood is spongy so live bones can grow into it more quickly than with titanium or ceramic implants. This is currently being tested with sheep.

If Star Trek put you in mind for teleporting (and after all, telephoning is a bit pass these days), then scientists at Joint Quantum Institute are already working on it. They have teleported data from one atom to another in a container one metre away via quantum information processing. Atom-to-atom teleportation might not get you from A to B just yet, but it bodes well for ultra-speedy computing.

One innovation from a Texan company that might not have the same wow factor as teleporting is vertical farming. But with the crisis in agriculture – not enough land to feed the world’s growing population – using a hydroponic farming system that grows plants in rotating rows on top of each other seems like a fine idea. The plants receive all the light and nutrients they need, while reducing demand for water. And let’s face it, that seems a lot more practical than tweeting 23 characters to a computer.

Computing is cloud headed

Some geeks do seem as if they have their heads in the clouds, but the future of computing is cloud headed. Rather than store all our data on personal computers, it will be held on remote servers in data centres, in the so-called “cloud”. This is already the case for email, social networking and shared documents, and some photo albums or calendars, thanks to web browsers and web services.

The upside of cloud computing is that the user’s computer becomes less important (and may just be a mobile phone), and there is no need to keep buying and installing new software. It matters less if your computer breaks down, because all information is held remotely, and everyone gets a huge boost in computing capacity. Meanwhile, providers of cloud services, like Microsoft, Google and Apple (all US companies), will benefit from economies of scale. The question is whether one of them will come to dominate the cloud space.

Other potential problems may arise. Rival companies may promote incompatible formats so that it becomes difficult to switch providers. Second, there is a risk to privacy, especially if users are encouraged to give information to advertisers in return for free services. Third, data stored on servers needs to be ironclad safe (witness the recent debacle with Danger, which managed to lose the personal data of tens of thousands of people).

The recent launch of Windows 7, an operating system with far fewer features, is a sign of things to come. The operating system (OS) is no longer the important platform it once was and technological power is once again returning to central hubs, away from personal computers. Smaller devices, like netbooks or tablets, will become much more usable. Google is probably the first cloud company, because it encouraged people to get used to web services, such as search engines and email, and now other applications, like word processing and spreadsheets, Android for mobiles, and Chrome, a browser and OS for PCs. Microsoft, on the other hand, has relied on sales of software and since people will expect cloud services to be free, it wants to join forces with Yahoo! for its search and advertising business. Apple has relied on selling hardware and online music sales, and has never been keen on sharing its operating system or indeed, its internal R&D. There is likely to be a shakeout among the three big players in cloud computing.

The shift to cloud computing is a move away from the individual to centralised hubs of computing power. Today’s computing networks are akin to public utilities like electricity or gas grids and therefore it does not matter what type of computer someone has. This frees us up from having the right gadgets, but also promotes more dependence on external networks. It seems likely that we will come to accept this, as we have public utilities, but the difference is that the main providers of cloud services are not public. Legislators will have to keep an eye on them to make sure that their services are in the public interest.

The clever cloud – or rapture of the herds

Cloud computing is a sign of technology to come, but what will happen if the cloud becomes too clever by half? There are fears that networked computers will eventually become so sophisticated they will be more intelligent than we are and literally take over the world. This is dubbed “the singularity” and there is even an Institute devoted to this possibility.

It may sound like science fiction, but the story of computing has all along. A high profile figure in the singularity world is Raymond Kurzweil, who is a maverick or a genius depending on your point of view. He says Moore’s Law is just the beginning. The combination of increasing computing power and the creation of cyborg humans will lead to an unprecedented opportunity to “address humanity’s grand challenges”. He claims it will even be possible to upload the contents of our brains to a computer, thus creating a kind of immortality.

The prospect of such powerful computers may seem frightening now, but imagine the response of someone in the 19th century to a laptop computer or mobile phone. They could not have imagined such a concept. In the same way, we may view superintelligent machines as devils, out to overthrow us. Computers will certainly continue to evolve at a rapid rate, but that does not mean we will lose the capacity to control their influence on our lives. Can we really create something more intelligent than ourselves? Isn’t that akin to saying we can create God?

Sentiment analysis, with feeling

While robots are being programmed to recognise and show feelings, and neuroscientists are anxious to explain where feelings come from, the latest idea is “sentiment analysis”. This is the science of mining feelings on the internet about a product, service, or company. It has already begun. Companies, like people, always want to know what is being said about them online and other companies are already helping them do it. Scout Labs monitors blogs, news articles, forums and networking sites, to find out who is saying what. The Financial Times just introduced Newssift, a service that tracks business topics in the news, organised by topic, organisation, place, person or theme.

Of course, programming a computer to look for feelings has its problems; when someone says they “love” their computer, do they really mean it? “Sinful” is a negative word, unless applied to chocolate cake! Certainly sentiments are much harder to pin down than facts and even the best algorithms cannot be more than 70-80% accurate. They have to look for polarity, intensity and subjectivity, as well as the words in the statement itself. In the future, sentiment analysis may become part of search engines, so that people can key in “happiest holiday destinations” and stand a chance of finding the answer. Not sure how we feel about that one.