Short Wave - 10 Technologies To Watch

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In a world brimming with innovation and limited time, it can be hard to tell what technology has the potential to really shift life. Yet, every year, MIT Technology Review undertakes this very task and puts out an annual list to magazine readers of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Today, host Regina G. Barber hops through highlights from the list with Amy Nordrum, an executive editor at the publication.Check out the full list here.Another tech topic on your mind that you want us to discuss on an upcoming episode? Let us know by emailing [e-mail]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Sometimes I marvel at the speed our technology is advancing, from AI and medicine to the most recent scientific breakthroughs and the newest tech. But it's also hard to know which ones are just hype and which ones may be game changers. Little did I know there's a whole magazine dedicated to this topic called MIT Technology Review. We're a magazine that is focused on charting out the future of emerging technologies and seeing what's coming up on the horizon in areas like artificial intelligence, biotech, and climate change.

That's Amy Nordrum, an executive editor of the publication. And she said a couple of decades ago, the editors were trying to make predictions about which emerging technologies would be the most impactful that year, for better or for worse. They decided to make a list of their top 10. And we've done that annual exercise every year since. It's called 10 Breakthrough Technologies, and it's our list. look at the future of tech and our attempt to say which of these emerging technologies our newsroom thinks matters most right now. And they've made some spot-on predictions in their 24-year history. In 2009, we put intelligent software assistance on the list. Specifically, Siri, which was released

in February 2010. On their first list, they included natural language processing, which is the AI technology that's underpinning Chad GPT and generative AI. Satellite mega constellations, were on their 2020 list. One year they predicted virtual reality headsets. Another year, they included data mining when you extract different bits of info from large datasets. As a practice that is still happening today, and has underpinned the growth of online advertising

and driven lots of personalization across the web for decades. But then there were also some misses. So in 2010, we really thought social TV would be popular. So these were platforms that allow you to like, watch a show with your friends from different locations and I'll chat about it right there on the screen together. And that still kind of exists. Like there's watch party apps out there, but it never got as big as we predicted it would. But in a sea of innovation, it can be hard to tell what tech is the real deal and what could shift our society. So today on the show, we break out the crystal ball. We're exploring some of the top technologies MIT tech review predicts will be breakout stars this year.

from increasing our view of the cosmos to decreasing methane-filled cow burps. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Amy, let's just dive into the top 10 technologies of 2025 per your publication, MIT Tech Review. We don't have time to go through all of them, so for the rest of this episode, we're going to like spotlight a few, starting with my favorite as an astrophysicist of the Vera Rubin telescope in Chile. So let's just start off, how is this telescope different from the other? others. Yeah, this is so, such a cool one. It's one of my favorites as well on the list. So this is a huge telescope now being completed in Chile, and it's going to contain the world's largest digital camera. I hear that camera is as large as a car. Exactly. Yeah, it's massive, and it took quite a while

to build. This has been in the works for more than a decade, but it's almost done now. It's being completed down there on a remote mountaintop and should be up and running toward the middle of this year, and we should be getting our first images back from it around that same time. Yeah, and I'm very excited about it, but from the scientists that you've talked to and you've, you know, done this research, what are they excited about that, like, this telescope is now going to allow them to do that they couldn't do before? Well, the biggest mission of this telescope is to complete this 10-year survey of the southern sky. So every night it'll be taking photos of the sky over and over and over. It's called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It goes till 2035.

And this will just be a comprehensive survey of the sky in a way that we've never really done before. And that will allow astronomers to do all kinds of stuff like discover many, many new asteroids and galaxies and make a time lapse video of the sky and how all the different objects move around. Maybe also lead to more discoveries that way. And it'll also help them create the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way that we've ever had. That's so cool. And they're building some platforms and interfaces that will allow anybody anywhere to have access to this information. Specifically, they're going through this platform called Zuniverse, which is a big place where a lot of community science projects happen.

And there's a couple already set up there that are going to start using Ruben's data whenever it does become available. Cool. Yeah, there's one to classify galaxies by their shape, and there's one to try and spot a certain kind of asteroid that has a comet-like tail. And there's another project that's got volunteers trying to spot cases of gravitational lensing, which is where light is actually bending around a massive galaxy and allowing you to kind of see what's behind it. I'm so excited. Okay, let's do the next one. And this is also very, like, close to my heart.

And it is because it's about a technology to reduce cow burps. Can you tell me more about this? Right. Well, cows burp a lot as they digest their food. and it's a problem because in every burp they give off methane. It's a byproduct of their digestion, and that's a very powerful greenhouse gas, which contributes to climate change. So it's a problem we need to solve if we're going to reduce emissions and keep climate change somewhat under control. But it's a tough one because we do eat a lot of meat in this world and people are getting wealthier, and usually that means they're going to want to eat more meat. So rather than trying to reduce demand and have people eat less meat, although that is still a very good thing,

some companies are trying to come at this from a different angle and produce supplements that you can mix into a cow's food or water or make into like a capsule-like form that actually prevent the cows from giving off methane in the first place. Like gas X for cows. Yeah, kind of. Right. So how much does it reduce their burbs? Well, there's one on the market now called Beauvier. It's available in already more than 50 countries, and it reduces methane,

by about 30% in dairy cattle and can do higher in beef cattle. And then there are a couple startups working on new formulations that they say could reduce methane emissions by more than 50%, perhaps up to 80, 90%. Jeez. So I, yeah, so 30% seems to be on the low end, which is still pretty great, but we could get even higher. So when you say like 30% reduction in the ones that are already here and like above 50%, like how much of a dent can we put in?

you know, our emissions. That's a great question and it's kind of a tough one because the estimations for agricultural emissions are notoriously difficult to really nail down. But livestock emissions, which includes cows but also sheep and goats, are somewhere between 11 and 20 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions and these methane emissions from cows are a good chunk of that. So it would certainly help a lot. It would not solve the whole problem. There's other emissions that come from other areas of agriculture like fertilizer production and land. clearing. But this would definitely put a big din in one of the worst sources. Okay, next one. How about generative AI search? Search engine companies like Google and Microsoft, which makes

Bing, are incorporating large language models, these new AI models, into their search engines, which means you can go and type in a query, and in Google's case, it's going to give you what's called an AI overview at the top. And this is that AI model's summary of the topic or an answer to your question that was just generated for you in that moment. Yeah, I've seen that a lot, and I'm like, how much can I trust this? Right. And I mean, the concept is that it's maybe more conversational, hopefully more useful and easier to find the info that you want rather than having to go look through all those, you know, individual links. But exactly as you say, like the model doesn't actually know if the overview it's giving you is right or wrong. It's just assembling that answer

based on all the things that it's been trained on, all the material it's ingested from the internet before. And so you cannot completely rely on it. You know, it's pretty good a lot of the time, I will say. But, you know, this is really a fundamental change to the way that we search people already, according to Google and OpenAI, people are asking longer questions. They're asking more follow-ups when using these tools. You can ask a bunch of stuff and put a bunch of instructions into one query instead of, you know, going back to it again and again. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think that just, I think it does fundamentally change the way we interact with an inquiry.

engage with these searches. And I don't really know what that means yet. Like kind of the jury's still out, I guess. Yeah, we don't know what this will actually, what the consequences will be. Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's such, I mean, I searched the internet how many times a day? I'm sure, you know, you probably do as well. It's like many, many times. And it's just such a fundamental part of most of our lives and seeing this shift happen in the way that information is, you know, served up and organized. I think we just think is like a very interesting, you know, important moment that we really honestly don't know what the implications of that might be yet. Right. Okay, so Amy, because we are in a super long podcast and we can't go over everything on this list, to end,

we're going to go into rapid fire with three honorable mentions. So first up, long acting HIV prevention minutes. Yes. So for a long time, we've had very effective preventative treatments for HIV called PrEP, but that's a pill that you have to take. And now there's a new drug that can be injected just once every six months from Gilead, and it's had some really promising clinical trial results. Wow. This could be a big deal because more than a million people are infected with HIV every year around the world. And so in order to really end the AIDS crisis, which is the condition that develops from HIV, we do need much broader access and treatments that can be made more accessible

and maybe not taken as often. Okay, green steel. The way we make steel today requires a lot of lot of coal. And now there are a few companies building plants that are going to come online in the next year or so. They're going to replace coal with hydrogen made from renewable sources. And that could really cut back on greenhouse gas emissions from this very dirty process. Okay, Robo Taxis, like one of my last favorites. These have been around for a while, but now they are moving into new cities without safety drivers. And there are cities where the service will be launched the first time in the coming year. Waymo is moving into Austin and Atlanta. A company called Zooks will be in San Francisco, Miami, and Austin. So we expect many, many more people will get the firsthand experience,

maybe their first rides in a robo taxi in the coming year or so. So amazing. Amy, thank you so much for bringing us the new technologies that are going to happen in 2025. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. The full MIT technology review of 10 Breakthrough technologies is out now. We'll link to it in our episode notes. Shortwavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to. And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.

Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. This is something that my producer wrote for me, so get ready. I'm gassy. Can I take these supplements? These are only four cows.

So we should just go back to gasex. I think you've got to stick to that, yeah.