MIT Technology Review Officially Released 2022 Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies in the World

In the past year or two, the world we live in has undergone an unprecedented and dramatic transformation.

On the one hand, the new crown epidemic has revealed to us that everyone is equal before the disease. Infectious diseases are no longer just a moniker for less developed regions, but a real crisis that has claimed millions of lives worldwide. The ravages of the New Coronavirus have compounded the difficulty of fighting other diseases. Malaria, one of the most horrific killers in human history, is making a comeback in places where half the world's population lives.

On the other hand, the threat of climate change to our lives is becoming more and more pronounced. Over the past few years, records for the "worst natural disasters" and "highest temperatures" in history have been set around the globe. Just one extreme weather event can wipe out a year of GDP growth in a developed economy. The latest data show that it will only take two decades for climate change to reduce global GDP by nearly 20%.

In addition, the information technology revolution, which has brought us great surprises in previous years, has entered a "deep water" area that needs to be overcome. Many previously unresolved issues are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore: the application of artificial intelligence in industry and science is encountering practical difficulties, and the mining of cryptocurrencies, which many believe represents the future of human finance, already emits more greenhouse gases than a medium-sized developed country.

However, as long as there are problems, someone will step up to solve them.

Beginning twenty-one years ago, MIT Technology Review released its annual "10 Breakthrough Technologies" list. Many of the technologies that made their debut back then have now profoundly changed our lives. Data mining (2001) has made data the productivity of the new century, intelligent software assistants (2009) have become Siri, various assistants, elves and other small partners to accompany us, deep learning (2013) has brought artificial intelligence into millions of households, and recoverable rockets (2016) have revolutionized the face of the space industry.

Since Bill Gates joined the selection in 2019, we have begun to focus more on new technologies that seek and enhance human well-being. A prime example of this is the mRNA vaccine (2021), a revolutionary, custom-developed vaccine technology that has saved hundreds of millions of lives in the New Crown epidemic.

This year is no exception.

The human "arsenal" is growing in the face of infectious disease. New Coronavirus mutation tracking technology is constantly monitoring the mutation of the virus, making it the most sequenced organism in history; easy-to-use oral New Coronavirus drugs are attempting to build a solid barrier against this disease and many more to come; and the malaria epidemic is on the rise again, with advances in malaria vaccines expected to reduce the death rate by as much as 70 percent.

In the face of climate change, humanity is finally beginning to tackle the challenge with unprecedented unity, courage, and determination. Long-term grid storage batteries are attempting to break through the cost bottleneck of batteries and make more renewable energy available to provide clean power for humanity; practical fusion reactors are one step closer to producing a nearly inexhaustible supply of safe, clean energy; and decarbonization plants are focusing on humanity's historical emissions, hoping to put the carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere back into the ground.

In computer and information science, progress has never slowed down, either: AI protein folding uses algorithms and arithmetic to solve a problem that has plagued the life sciences for 50 years; AI data generation attempts to confront a fundamental problem that has not received enough attention: data bias; terminal passwords promise to bypass already weak passwords and continue to keep our information secure; and PoS for cryptocurrencies proof-of-interest technology, on the other hand, attempts to disrupt old proof methods and make transactions significantly less energy-intensive.

Our judge, Bill Gates, is convinced that the future is still bright and we should continue to fight for a brighter future. We also hope that after reading the results of this year's selection, you will feel the same way and gain the same strength.

The launch of MIT Technology Review's "Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies in the World" in 2022 will be hosted by the Management Committee of Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City (HSTC) and co-organized by DeepTech.

Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City is one of the four major national science and technology cities, with several major science and technology innovation platforms, and is a gathering place for high-tech enterprises and high-tech talents. Especially in recent years, according to the strategic action plan of the new round of high-quality development, Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City focuses on the construction of a "cradle for the growth of thousands of talents, strategic allies of ten thousand enterprises, and industrial platform with trillions of revenue", which is accelerating the gathering of talents and projects, and constantly bursting with innovative vitality, thus promoting the continued growth of economic strength.

The release of the "Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies" in 2022 will open up a new path for the Future Science and Technology City to build a high-end matrix of scientific and technological talents and seize the "peak" of science and innovation; at the same time, it will also accelerate the Future Science and Technology City to become the main engine of the national scientific and technological innovation curatorial function and the leading engine of high-quality economic development. the engine of national science and technology innovation and the main force leading the high-quality economic development.

Figure | MIT Technology Review's "World's Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies" list for 2022 includes: New Crown Oral Drug, Practical Fusion Reactor, End Code, Protein Folding, PoS Proof of Entitlement, Long-Term Grid Energy Storage Battery, AI Data Generation, Malaria Vaccine, Decarbonization Factory, New Crown Mutation Tracking

The following is a detailed explanation of the list.

A Pill for COVID

Significance: An easy-to-take pill for severe COVID-19 may also have a role in the next pandemic.

Principal Investigators: Merck, Pfizer, Pardes Bioscience

Technical realizability: Achieved

Remember hydroxychloroquine, which Donald Trump took for malaria, and ivermectin, the equine dewormer that sent people to poison control centers? These drugs are not effective against the new coronary pneumonia COVID-19. Still, people desperately want them to be effective. It was a simple wish that one pill swallowed would make the virus disappear.

Now that wish has become a reality: by using a very different approach to designing pills to stop the new coronavirus. The new approach proved to be really effective. Patients infected for a few days with one of Pfizer's antiviral drugs reduced their chances of being hospitalized by 89 percent. The U.S. government has ordered $10 billion worth of this new drug, called Paxlovid.

The new pill wasn't just a lucky try in the dark. Chemists designed the drug to disrupt the virus' ability to replicate itself, and the drug locks in and block a protein called protease, which is central to the threatening replication of new coronaviruses.

Similar proteases are present in other types of coronaviruses, meaning that Pfizer's drug is also expected to ward off the next pandemic. And scientists are convinced that more pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2 virus (neo-coronavirus) are lurking in bat-inhabited caves and industrial farms.

New antiviral drugs are taking longer to develop than viral vaccines to design, synthesize, and test (one of them is from Merck, a drug that focuses on a different mechanism of viral replication). But these antivirals are still setting records. Never before had an entirely new disease-beating molecule gone so quickly from the chemist's lab into the mouths of volunteers and been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, said he was "in tears" when he got the news in November 2021 that the drug worked.

The pill will prevent many people from dying from COVID-19, including those with weakened immune systems against whom the vaccine is ineffective. If a new variant emerges that can defeat the vaccine, antiviral drugs may be our last resort.

Practical Fusion Reactors

Significance: Fusion promises to produce cheap, carbon-free, always-on energy with no risk of nuclear reactor core meltdown and virtually no radioactive waste.

Principal Investigators: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, Helion Energy, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion

Technology achievability: approximately 10 years

In September 2021, researchers at Commonwealth Fusion Systems slowly charged a 10-ton D-magnet and boosted its field strength until it exceeded 20 Tesla (T). This is a new record for a magnet of its kind. The company's founders say the feat solves a major engineering challenge in developing a compact, inexpensive fusion reactor.

For decades, fusion power has been a dream of physicists. At temperatures well above 100 million degrees Celsius, as in the sun, nuclei fuse together, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. If researchers can achieve these reactions in a controlled and sustained manner on Earth, it could provide a cheap, continuous, carbon-free source of electricity using a nearly unlimited source of fuel.

In one approach, magnets are used to confine a gas of ions and electrons, known as plasma, inside a donut-shaped reactor. Stronger magnets mean less heat loss, which allows more fusion reactions to occur in a smaller, cheaper facility. The change is more than just a little: doubling the strength of the magnetic field reduces the volume of plasma needed to produce the same amount of energy by a factor of 16.

Despite billions of dollars of investment in research over the past few decades, no one has yet built a fusion plant that produces more energy than the reactor consumes. But Commonwealth Fusion Systems and its backers are hopeful, and other fusion startups and research efforts have reported recent progress.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building a plant to mass-produce magnets and lay the groundwork for a prototype reactor. If all goes as planned, the startup plans to provide fusion energy to the grid by the early 2130s.

The End of Passwords

Significance: Major companies are finally changing the way they authenticate and no longer use extremely insecure letters and numbers.

Principal investigators: Microsoft, Google, Okta, Duo (owned by Alphabet)

Technical implementability: Implemented

In the early 1960s, MIT professor Fernando Corbató was developing a new shared computer system and wanted a way for people to protect their private files, and his solution was to use passwords. Over the years, Corbató's solution has triumphed over other technological means and has become the standard way we log in almost everywhere.

So what's the problem? A password is inherently insecure. It can be stolen, guessed, or brute-force broken. But for the most part, people use some low-level passwords. Worse, they reuse them.

Password managers like Dashlane and 1Password can keep track of all those different alphanumerics for you, and can even replace those weak passwords. But when it comes to security, password management is only half the measure; the real action is to eliminate passwords altogether.

That process is already underway. Enterprise-oriented companies like Okta and Duo, as well as personal identity providers like Google, offer ways for people to log in to apps and services without having to enter a password. Meanwhile, Apple's facial recognition system has brought biometric sign-in into the mainstream. Most notably, Microsoft announced in March 2021 that some of its customers could do away with passwords altogether, and then in September, told people they could remove their passwords altogether. The "other" authentication methods, as they are called, have finally triumphed.

You've probably experienced this firsthand. You go to log in to a website or launch an app, but instead of being asked to enter a password, you're prompted to enter a six-digit code from the authentication app, click a notification on your phone, or click a link sent to your email, or just hold your phone up to your face. These actions are simple.

As for entering a bunch of characters and symbols that you have to recall, write down or store in a database? Get rid of it all.

AI for Protein Folding

Significance: DeepMind is opening new paths for drug discovery and design by solving a problem in biology that has plagued researchers for 50 years.

Principal Investigators: DeepMind (part of Alphabet), isomorphic Labs (part of Alphabet), Baker Lab (University of Washington)

Technology Achievability: Achieved

By the end of 2020, DeepMind, an artificial intelligence lab in the United Kingdom, has already achieved many impressive accomplishments in artificial intelligence. However, when the group's program for predicting protein folding was released in November of that year, biologists were shocked at how well it worked.

Almost everything your body does is done through proteins. Thus, knowing what individual proteins do is crucial to most drug development and to understanding many diseases, and what a protein does is determined by its three-dimensional structure.

Proteins are made up of amino acids that fold into a complex and twisted knot. Determining this shape, and thus the function of the protein takes months in the lab. For years, scientists have been trying to make this process easier with computer predictions. However, no technique has come close to the accuracy achieved by humans.

AlphaFold2, developed by DeepMind, changes that. The software uses an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning to predict the shape of proteins, even down to the atom, the first time a computer has reached a level comparable to the slower but accurate results used in the lab.

Scientific teams around the world have begun using it to study cancer, antibiotic resistance, and new coronaviruses.

DeepMind has also built a public database that it populates when AlphaFold2 predicts protein structures. The database currently has about 800,000 entries, and DeepMind says it will add more than 100 million entries in the next year, containing nearly every protein known to science.

DeepMind has incubated this work into a company called Isomorphic Labs, which will reportedly work with existing biotech and pharmaceutical companies. the real impact of AlphaFold2 may take a year or two to become clear, but its potential is rapidly unfolding in labs around the world.

Proof of Stake

Significance: An alternative method of securing digital currencies could end the energy consumption dilemma of cryptocurrencies.

Principal Investigators: Cardano, Solana, Algorand, Ether

Technical Realizability: Ether 2022

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use a lot of electricity. in 2021, the Bitcoin network consumed over 100 terawatt-hours, more than the annual energy consumption of Finland.

Proof-of-stake offers a way to build networks that don't consume too much energy. If all goes according to plan, Ether, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency and running a variety of applications, will transition to this model in the first half of 2022. This transition is expected to reduce energy use by 99.95%.

Cryptocurrencies run on a blockchain, with a digital ledger generated through transactions whose security must be guaranteed against cheaters, fraudsters, and hackers. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently use proof-of-work algorithms to ensure security: "miners" solve cryptographic puzzles and thus compete for the right to verify blocks of new transactions. Successful "miners" are rewarded with cryptocurrency for their work.

Proof of workload means finding solutions to mathematical puzzles, which requires a lot of computing power and therefore electricity.

With proof-of-stake, verifiers do not have to compete with each other and invest heavily in energy and computing hardware. Instead, their cryptocurrency cache, or equity, allows them to enter sweepstakes. Those selected gain the power to validate a set of transactions (and receive more cryptocurrency as a result). In some networks, validators who exhibit bad behavior are penalized and thus lose a portion of their entitlement.

Ether will be the largest network to use proof of stake. It has already created a new blockchain for the system, and the system has been running in parallel. What needs to happen now is a "merge" that moves the Layers that actually perform the transactions and hold the user's assets over, and in the process discards the proof of work.

If successful, Ether's proof-of-stake blockchain could set the stage for a widely used energy-efficient technology. Other networks have considered the switch, but they seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach.

Long-lasting Grid Batteries

Significance: Cheap, long-lasting iron-based batteries could help spread the pressure on renewable energy supplies and expand access to clean energy.

Principal Investigator: ESS, Form Energy

Technology Achievability: Achieved

On a sunny afternoon in April 2021, renewable energy broke records on California's main grid, providing enough power to meet 94.5% of demand. The moment was hailed as a milestone on the road to decarbonization. But what happens when the sun goes down and the breeze stops?

Handling the fluctuating power production from renewable energy sources requires cheap storage for hours or even days, and new iron-based batteries may be up to the task.

Oregon-based ESS, whose batteries can store energy for 4 to 12 hours, is launching its first grid-scale project in 2021. Massachusetts-based Form Energy, which raised $240 million in 2021, has batteries that can store electricity for up to 100 hours, and its first installation will be a one-megawatt pilot plant in Minnesota that is expected to be completed in 2023.

Both companies have chosen to use iron-based batteries, one of the most abundant materials on the planet. That means their products could end up being cheaper than other grid storage candidates, such as lithium-ion batteries and vanadium-based liquid-flow batteries.

Form Energy says its batteries could end up costing as little as $20 per kilowatt-hour, even less than the optimistic projections for lithium-ion batteries over the next few decades.

But there are still some challenges to be addressed. The typically low efficiency of iron-based batteries means that a significant portion of the energy put into them can't be recovered. In addition, side reactions can degrade the battery over time. However, if iron-based batteries can be widely deployed at a low enough cost, they could help power more people with renewable energy.

Synthetic Data for AI

Significance: The benefits of AI are mainly concentrated in areas where data resources are abundant, and synthetic data promises to fill these gaps.

Principal Investigators: Synthetic Data Vault, Syntegra, Datagen, Synthesis AI

Technology Realizability: Achieved

In 2021, researchers at Data Science Nigeria noticed that engineers aiming to train computer vision algorithms could select from a large dataset featuring Western clothing, but no dataset of African clothing. The team addressed this imbalance by using artificial intelligence to generate artificial images of African fashion, a completely new dataset.

Such synthetic datasets, computer-generated samples, have the same statistical characteristics as the real thing and are increasingly common in the data-hungry field of machine learning. In areas where real data is scarce or overly sensitive, such as medical records or personal financial data, these fake data can be used to train artificial intelligence.

The idea of synthetic data is not new; driverless cars, for example, have already undergone much training on virtual streets. In 2021, this technology is already becoming commonplace, with many startups and universities offering this service. Daten and Synthesis AI, for example, provide digital faces on demand, and other companies provide synthetic data for the financial and insurance industries. Synthesis Database is a project launched in 2021 by the MIT Data and Artificial Intelligence Lab to provide open-source tools for creating a wide range of data types.

This boom in synthetic data sets is being driven by generative adversarial networks (GANs). This is an artificial intelligence technique that is adept at generating realistic but false cases, whether they are images or medical records.

Proponents claim that synthetic data avoids the bias prevalent in many datasets. However, it is second only to the real data used to generate it in terms of how unbiased it is. For example, a GAN trained with fewer black faces than white faces may indeed create a synthetic dataset with a higher proportion of black faces, but given the limited raw data, these faces may end up being less realistic.

Malaria Vaccine

Significance: Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of children each year. In combination with other measures, the vaccine can reduce mortality by up to 70%.

Principal Investigator: GlaxoSmithKline, World Health Organization

Technical Availability: Achieved (with limitations)

The malaria parasite is a notoriously deadly enemy that has evolved countless ways to evade detection by the immune system and thrive in its human hosts. Malaria is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for approximately 95% of cases worldwide. More than 600,000 people die from malaria each year, most of them children under the age of 5.

In October 2021, after years of development, the World Health Organization finally approved the world's first vaccine against the deadly disease spread by mosquitoes.

GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine, known as RTS, S, or Mosquirix, is not a particularly effective vaccine. It requires three doses in children aged 5 months to 17 months and a fourth dose 12 to 15 months later. In more than 800,000 children in Kenya, Malawi, and Ghana, the vaccine is about 50 percent effective against severe malaria in the first year, and its efficacy declines sharply over time.

Even so, public health officials have hailed the vaccine, which has been tested since 1987, as a "game-changer" in Africa. When combined with other malaria control measures, including insecticide-treated nets and prophylactic drugs used during the rainy season, it is expected to reduce malaria deaths by as much as 70 percent compared to the death rate of children using existing drugs.

Mosquirix also has broader implications. It is the first vaccine approved for parasitic diseases. Parasites are complex, multicellular organisms with genomes 500 to 1,000 times larger than those found in most viruses and bacteria. This complexity allows them to mutate in countless ways when challenged by an immune response. GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine consists of a copy of a single protein that punctuates the surface of the parasite early in its life and pairs with a series of molecules designed to ring the immune system's alarm bells and catalyze the production of antibodies to protect potential hosts from infection.

Public health officials say approval of the drug may encourage innovation. A second-generation malaria vaccine, as well as vaccines for other parasitic diseases, are already in the pipeline.

Carbon Removal Factory

Significance: A large plant to capture carbon from the air could help create an industry the world needs to avoid the dangerous warming trends of this century.

Principal Investigators: Climeworks, Carbon Engineering, Carbon Collect

Technology Achievability: Achieved

In September 2021, Climeworks flipped the switch on Orca, the largest plant to date designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Located just outside Reykjavik, Iceland, the facility captures 4,000 tons of CO2 per year. Large fans suck air through a filter, where the material combines with carbon dioxide molecules. The company's partner, Carbfix, then mixes the CO2 with water and pumps it underground, where it reacts with basalt and eventually turns into stone. The facility runs entirely on carbon-free electricity, mainly from a nearby geothermal power plant.

To be sure, 4,000 tons isn't all that much. It's less than the annual emissions of 900 cars. And, according to various studies, it's only a fraction of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide the world may need to pull out of the atmosphere to prevent global warming from exceeding pre-industrial levels by 2°C.

Larger facilities are also under construction. Carbon Engineering, based in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, plans to begin construction this year on a plant in the southwestern United States that could eliminate 1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Together with its partners, the company has also begun engineering or design work on plants in Scotland and Norway that will capture 500,000 to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

One vision is to build more and larger plants to capture carbon from the air, which will help companies figure out ways to optimize their operations, drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. climeworks estimates that by the end of the 1930s, the cost per ton of carbon captured will be reduced from between $600 and $800 to about $100 to $150.

Today, a growing number of individuals and companies, including Microsoft, Stripe, and Square, are already paying high fees to suck carbon out of the air in an effort to offset the emissions they produce. These funds provide critical early revenue.

COVID Variant Tracking

Significance: The SARS-CoV-2 virus is the most sequenced organism on Earth, allowing scientists to rapidly identify new variants as they spread.

Principal Investigators: Global Initiative for Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID), Nextstrain, Illumina

Technical Achievability: Achieved

New coronaviruses are still spreading globally, and of all nasal swabs positive for COVID-19, approximately two hundred were sent to a gene sequencing machine for additional analysis. The purpose of this was to create a new map of the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and to see what had changed. This map consists of a total of about 30,000 letters.

Such genetic monitoring allows scientists to quickly identify and warn of new variants, such as Alpha (α), Delta (δ), and, more recently, Omicron. This is an unprecedented effort that has made SARS-CoV-2 the most sequenced organism in history, surpassing influenza, HIV, and even our own human genome. Open databases like GISAID and Nextstrain have revealed the genetic profiles of over 7 million pathogens.

Omicron is the most mutated variant to date. in November 2021, a lab in South Africa found a viral genome with more than 50 variants in its sequencer and sent out the first warning signal. Almost instantly, computers in Seattle, Boston, and London were using the data to make predictions: Omicron was trouble, and it was a variant that could evade antibodies.

One thing the sequencers can't yet tell us is exactly how SARS-CoV-2 will evolve next. That's why some say we should track this virus more closely. Most of the sequences were generated in places like the UK, US, and Denmark, but the virus can still evolve unknowingly in areas without sequencing capabilities. Fortunately, the rapid work in South Africa in discovering Omicron and tracking its spread provided an early warning to the world.

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