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Cast your mind back 30 years, if you are old enough, and you may just remember a rather humdrum, though retrospectively momentous, event. In 1979, the Japanese firm NET launched the first cellular phone network in Tokyo.
For decades the objects remained toys of the super-rich. Who would have thought that today there would be enough cellphones for half the world’s population to have one.
That’s not the only recent technological revolution. Would you have dreamed that an entire record collection could one day fit in your pocket? How about a system that helps you communicate and share information across the world instantly?
Crystal-ball gazing is a fraught endeavour, but we’ve decided to take the plunge. In this special feature, we assess the prospects of 10 of the coolest gadgets that in 30 years’ time may change our lives as much - or maybe more - than cellphones, iPods and the internet.
See a gallery showing the progress made towards the ten ideas
1 Super-vision
Who could ever pass up the chance to try on a pair of real X-ray specs? You may not always like what comes into view, but endowed with Superman-like vision, you would be able to see through solid walls, peer in at your neighbours or keep a watchful eye on your kids upstairs. Unfortunately, they still don’t exist, despite what those ads at the back of children’s comics suggest. Yet there are some technological tricks that can give you the next best thing.
Unlike visible light, radio waves can pass through solid materials. In 2006, engineers at Cambridge Consultants in the UK announced they had built a briefcase-sized system called the Prism 200 which can detect people through a brick wall by firing off pulses of ultrawide-band radar and listening for returning echoes.
According to the company, these pulses can pass through building materials over 40 centimetres thick, and spot activity over a range of up to 15 metres. The device could be used to track people in hostage situations, the company suggests, but it has a crucial weakness. To avoid being blinded by walls and other fixed structures, it is designed to only register objects that generate rapidly varying echoes. In other words, it can only detect people when they move.
Even human statues would be hard pressed to avoid detection by Erwin Biebl’s radar sensor, however. Biebl’s team at the Technical University of Munich in Germany has built a device that can pick up tiny motions like breathing, or even a beating heart, through a closed door.
His team found that radio waves at between 433 megahertz and 24 gigahertz can pass through skin and bone but are partly reflected by the fatty layer surrounding muscles such as the heart. The team has exploited this by using the Doppler effect to pick up sub-centimetre changes in movement caused by a beating heart or the motion of the lungs.
2 Disappearing act
Few dreams have flipped from science fiction to fact as quickly as “invisibility cloaks”. The first, which worked only for microwaves, was unveiled in 2006. Since then the field has been inundated with attempts to make cloaks to rival Harry Potter’s.
Cloaking makes an object disappear by steering electromagnetic waves around it - as if the waves had simply passed through. So far, the only way to do this is with “metamaterials”, which are made of electronic components designed to interact with light and direct it in a controllable fashion. The goal is to create a cloak that works for a broad spectrum of visible frequencies. Making these components isn’t easy. They have to be tiny - smaller than the wavelength of light they are designed to interact with.
Last year, a group at the University of California, Berkeley, constructed a material that was able to bend - rather than reflect - visible light backwards for the first time. Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK, has shown how metamaterials could work over a range of frequencies.
Even more mind-boggling, a team from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in China has worked out how to cloak objects at a distance. They suggest using “complementary materials” which have optical properties that cancel each other out. A wave polarised on a single plane passing through one material will become distorted, but this distortion is cancelled out as the wave passes through the complementary material, making it look as if neither material is there.
3 Hands-free healing
Modern cellphones may do more than a Star Trek “communicator” can, but Doctor “Bones” McCoy’s portable medical scanner, which revealed internal injuries in an instant, is taking longer to appear in the real world. When it does, it may go a step further: engineers are developing a portable scanner to not only spot internal injuries like torn arteries, but also heal them in a flash.
The secret of this device is high-frequency sound waves. Medics already use these ultrasound beams to examine babies in the womb. But turn up the intensity and focus the beam into a spot and it can generate enough heat to cook tissue.
Lawrence Crum at the University of Washington in Seattle has shown that high-intensity ultrasound can cauterise bleeding arteries. His company, Ultrasound Technology, has developed a hand-held device that allows surgeons to cut through blood-rich organs and cauterise the cut at the same time. Crum hopes to test it in humans this year.
Weak ultrasound beams can also be used to spot the fast flow of blood characteristic of a bleeding artery. The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a project to combine the two ideas, which will result in the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation system - a portable device that uses ultrasound to both spot and seal bleeding blood vessels.
The device will consist of an array of ultrasound transceivers built into a cuff that can be wrapped round an injured limb. Transceivers emitting low power ultrasound will scan for reflections from damaged arteries. If they spot a leaking blood vessel, the transceivers zap it. To avoid damage to healthy tissue, several beams are carefully focused to meet inside the body where their combined heat will seal the tear.
4 Spider vs gecko
Peter Parker makes it look easy, but replicating his rooftop antics is so difficult it has had researchers climbing the walls for years. The problem is clear: the gloves and shoes of any Spider-Man suit must be able to support the weight of an average person while dangling from the side of a skyscraper. And of course hands and feet must also peel off easily when required - superglue is not an option.
For inspiration, researchers have turned to geckos rather than spiders. In 2003, Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK, designed a material with microscopic hairs that mimic those found on geckos’ feet. Intermolecular van der Waals forces, which take effect on tiny scales, encourage each hair to stick to the wall and, because a gecko’s feet are coated with millions of these hairs, the result is a powerful force of attraction. Geim’s material has hairs made from a substance called kapton, and 1-centimetre-square of it, if pressed hard against a vertical surface, can support 1 kilogram.
But there may be problems scaling the materials up to a useful size. For example, the hairs need to be longer to provide a large enough surface area to support a person, and long hairs tend to tangle. Nicola Pugno at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy might have the answer. In 2007, he came up with a fir tree-like design, with long carbon nanotubes forming a trunk while shorter nanotubes branched off sideways. He has now made gloves that can support around 10 kilograms each.
Nature still has the upper hand, however. Dirt among the artificial hairs would compromise sticking ability. Geckos feet are self-cleaning, a trick way beyond current designs.
5 You power
Your cellphone is a marvel of the modern age. Yet no matter how sophisticated it is, it’s useless the moment it runs out of juice. But what if you could dispense with batteries and simply gather all the energy your gadget needs from the world around you?
For a start, you could plug it into your shirt. In 2008, Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wove a fabric made from zinc-oxide nanowires grown on strands of Kevlar. Each time the material is bent or squeezed, it generates a tiny current. Wang and his team found they could harvest it by coating each fibre with a film of metal.
Gadgets implanted inside your body, such as pacemakers, could be powered by you. David Tran’s team at Stanford University, California, have devised a heart-powered electricity generator. The gadget produces electricity by forcing a small magnet back and forth through a tiny wire coil. The magnet is housed in a liquid-filled silicone tube with a balloon attached to each end, and the whole device is placed within the heart. As the heart beats, the balloons are squeezed in turn, forcing the liquid - and the magnet - back and forwards through the tube.
Adam Heller at the University of Texas, Austin, has built a fuel cell that can be implanted in an artery and which uses glucose in the blood as fuel.
6 Jet packs
Personal jets occupy a curious position in the world of dream machines because engineers have been building and flying them for decades. Rocket belts, as they are more accurately called, famously featured in the James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965, at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California, and in the pages of New Scientist in 2005. It is 40 years since the first rocket belt flew, but all these machines work in the same way - and suffer from the same fatal limitation.
Rocket belts generate thrust by catalysing the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into rapidly expanding steam and oxygen. The trouble is that each machine can carry only enough propellent for about 30 seconds of flight. Who would want one of those?
In 1999, a company called Millennium Jet based in Santa Clara, California, built a personal flying machine with two vertically mounted rotors powered by a piston engine. Although promising, the machine crashed during a test flight and the company wound up operations in 2003.
And that might have been that, were it not for the Martin Aircraft Company of Christchurch, New Zealand, which last July launched an entirely different kind of jet pack. Its machine is powered by two turbojet engines, rather than a rocket engine. So it is a bona fide jet pack.
The turbojets turn two vertically mounted rotors that provide lift. The machine runs on standard auto fuel and it can fly for 30 minutes on the single tank, with a range of roughly 50 kilometres. It is fitted with a parachute in case of emergencies.
The downside is that they cost about $100,000, the same as a high-end car. The company is already taking orders and hopes to deliver the first production machines in the second half of 2009. “I’d imagined it would be a rich boy’s toy but we’ve had interest from the military, search-and-rescue, and all kinds of groups,” says company founder Glenn Martin.
The Martin Jetpack is a little on the large side - it is not so much strap on, as walk into - but if you have always wanted to commute to work with a jet pack, its time to start saving.
7 My other car is a spaceship
Fancy feeling the freedom of weightlessness or watching the sun set from orbit in your very own spaceplane? The prospect of zipping into space whenever you choose may not be as ludicrous as it seems.
The biggest hurdle is to find an affordable way to launch a craft into space. The usual approach - essentially stuffing a metal tube full of high-energy fuel and lighting one end - can cost as much as $100 million a shot. One way to reduce this is to add wings: the lift these generate helps a craft climb up through the atmosphere, reducing the amount of fuel needed, and thus the weight of the craft.
This is the strategy adopted by two private companies, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, which are developing craft to ferry paying passengers into space. When it begins operations in 2010, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo will be carried to an altitude of 15 kilometres by a launch plane. At that altitude the spacecraft will detach and its rocket will take over, blasting it into space. XCOR’s smaller Lynx spacecraft will fly the whole way itself, taking off and landing like a plane. The company recently announced it will be charging $95,000 per ticket - about half the price of seats on SpaceShipTwo. The Lynx, however, will only travel to an altitude of about 61 kilometres and so will not officially reach space - classed as 100 kilometres and beyond - as SpaceShipTwo is intended to do.
Alternatively, why not dispense with on-board fuel completely? According to Leik Myrabo, an engineer at Lightcraft Technologies, your personal spacecraft could fly into orbit on a beam of microwaves shone upwards from the ground. Myrabo has spent a decade developing small spacecraft that are pushed upwards by a ground-based laser. The beam generates an explosive plasma when it strikes the underside of the craft, creating thrust that pushes it skywards. He has now devised a system that uses microwave beams which he says could carry a crewed “lightcraft” into low Earth orbit by 2025. Myrabo reckons he could power 1000 launches for the cost of a single conventional launch. “I can imagine personal spacecraft taking off within the next 50 to 100 years,” says Patrick Wood from space technology company EADS Astrium, based in Stevenage, UK.
8 Breathe underwater
Even with scuba gear, you can only stay underwater for as long as the meagre air supply on your back allows. Yet the ocean contains oxygen, so why can’t we swim around like fish, extracting the gas from the water as we need it?
In 2002, a diver spent half an hour submerged in a swimming pool doing just this, breathing oxygen extracted from the water by an artificial gill. The device was built by Fuji Systems of Tokyo, Japan, using high-tech silicon membranes. These are permeable to gases but not liquids, so oxygen can diffuse into the breathing air from the water, while carbon dioxide diffuses out - just like the gills of a fish.
But you won’t see divers using artificial gills any time soon, because simple diffusion gills produce dangerously low levels of oxygen.
Israeli inventor Alan Bodner has tried to get around this problem with a gadget that exploits “the champagne effect”: gases dissolved in water bubble out when the pressure falls. Bodner has shown his method can produce a breathable gas. Problem solved?
Unfortunately not. We need a lot of oxygen and there just isn’t that much dissolved in a litre of seawater. So no matter how efficient the extraction method is, you would have to pump a huge volume of water through it to get enough. And while you do not need to carry air, you do need batteries and the means to make air, which means much more to go wrong.
Artificial gills may have a rosier future for other applications, however. Underwater robots powered by fuel cells could use gills to obtain oxygen. They are also likely to be used to get rid of excess carbon dioxide from submarines and underwater habitats, perhaps boosting the oxygen supply at the same time.
9 You speak, it translates
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined a small yellow fish, called a Babel fish. When popped into one’s ear, it would use brainwave energy, unconscious mental frequencies and something called a “telepathic matrix” to achieve real-time language interpretation, making conversations with aliens effortless. Well, it’s not yellow, and it doesn’t fit in your ear, but US soldiers in Iraq are using a device that could become a universal interpreter.
The soldiers use a system called IraqComm, developed by SRI International in Menlo Park, California, which consists of a laptop loaded with speech recognition and translation software. Speak into the microphone in Arabic and the software turns the phrases into written Arabic, before translating it into English. After the person has finished talking, a computer voice speaks the translation.
IraqComm’s software, and other programs like it, learned to translate much as a person would - by studying conversations. The software searches for statistical connections between a series of Arabic statements and English translations. For example, when the Arabic word “haar” appears, so does the word “hot” in the English version (the correct translation). If this occurs frequently enough, the program concludes that they mean the same thing. Given enough examples, the software can learn grammar too. A similar system running on a hand-held PDA, called the Speechalator, was developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Do not expect these programs to cope with free-flowing language just yet. The IraqComm works well because it focuses on around 50,000 words soldiers need. The broader the subject matter, the harder it becomes for the software to distinguish the alternate meanings required in different contexts. “We’ll get there,” says SRI’s Kristin Precoda.
10 Smell-o-vision
Whether it is the mouthwatering aroma of a roast dinner, the intoxicating perfume of a woman or the sulphurous smell of gunpowder in the heat of a battle, scent is a powerful force. So imagine the impact of TV and video games if scenes were accompanied by their aromas.
That is the idea behind smell-o-vision: giving TVs the ability to produce smells that fit the scenes they are displaying. We still don’t know why we perceive certain molecules to have particular scents and so cannot predict the scent of a novel molecule, nor manufacture a novel molecule to have a particular scent. However, recent advances mean some of these scientific hurdles can be side-stepped, and suggest “smell-o-vision” may become a reality even before we truly understand how olfaction works.
We group scents into about three-dozen categories, such as woody, grassy, faecal, floral and so on, says Avery Gilbert, an olfactory scientist who worked with DigiScents, a now-defunct company that developed smell-o-vision technology in the late 1990s. DigiScents built a prototype device that could generate most everyday odours. The smells were not perfect replicas but they were recognisable, says Gilbert.
The silver screen is no stranger to smell-o-vision. It began in crude form in cinemas in the 1950s and has recurred periodically ever since. Most recently, in various scenes in select screenings of the film The New World.
If it was not difficult enough already, emitting aromas for smell-o-vision has further down sides. How do you prevent the scents you release mixing into an unintended cocktail, or lingering longer than the scene requires? Researchers at Sony may have the answer: avoid the nose completely and go straight for the brain. The company’s plans were revealed in a patent application which described the idea of using ultrasound signals to directly stimulate selective parts of the brain to induce scents in a viewer’s or game player’s mind. Unfortunately, to date there has been no whiff of Sony producing the hardware required.
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