1.Femtosecond Projection Two-Photon Lithography
researchers have developed a method that uses lasers to project millions of points simultaneously onto 3D-printing material, instead of using one point at a time. And because they’re bad at branding, they called it Femtosecond projection TPL. To easily understand FP-TPL, simply imagine using a million heated needles to strategically melt a block of wax versus using a single needle. This means that incredibly tiny structures can be 3D-printed much faster(a thousand times faster, give or take), while still ensuring a good quality of the build.
2. LiFi
LiFi aims to use light to transmit information from point A to point B. The technology works by encoding digital data and turning LED bulbs on and off faster than humans can notice to transfer it. The light then travels to a photoreceptor, which can decode and translate the data to a more classic radio frequency (WiFi, 4G, 5G…)There are a lot of advantages to doing things this way. What with light being used, the speed at which the information is transmitted is very, very high — up to 100 Gbit/s, in theory; 5 times faster than 5G.
3. Energy-storing Bricks
Researchers have managed to store energy in the cheep red bricks we’ve been using for construction throughout the world for centuries. This process works for two reasons: bricks are porous and contain something called hematite (which gives it its color). For these bricks to store and then release energy, researchers heat them to 160 degrees and vaporize their surface with hydrochloric acid mixed with an organic compound called EDOT. When in contact with hematite, this mix causes a chemical reaction, creating a new plastic nanofiber coating called PEDOT. This polymer is trapped in the porous surface of the brick, forming a continuous and electrically conductive layer on each of its faces. The humble building block can then act as an ion sponge to store and conduct electricity.
4. Robotic bees
Details are scarce, but most researchers estimate that the bees would work by attaching horse hair coated with ionic liquid gel to a tiny drone. The hair picks up pollen from one flower, and moves it to the next. Researchers have long been working on RoboBees using such techniques. What Walmart offers on top is a wide array of sensors, cameras, artificial intelligence… to locate the relevant crops and pollinate them as needed.
5. Unnamed Dynamic Neural Networks Technology
Neural Network uses hidden layers to break down information (the input-images, audio, videos, handwritten text…) into tiny pieces of easily understandable components, allowing a computer to inform a prediction about the nature of said input. It does this thanks to a wide array of training data and mathematical models. In doing so, it works “similarly” to our brain, hence the technology’s name. This is far from new, but the world of data science has been on the lookout for faster and more efficient ways of using neural networks to serve the upcoming IoT revolution.
6. Seawater fuel
The fuel currently used to power the thousands of ships that cross the seas and oceans daily is very polluting. The conversion of CO2 into chemicals and value-added fuels could significantly reduce the greenhouse gases they emit over the long term.
There are however a handful of issues that need fixing before we get to greener maritime routes. Firstly, carbon dioxide concentration in seawater is about 100 milligrams per litre. That’s not much. To put it into perspective, you’d need to process close to 45 million cubic meters of water to power a cruise ship for about a week. And the more water you process, the more sea life you remove from the food chain, with potentially catastrophic long-term results. Secondly, you’re still releasing carbon into the air at the end of the day, even if it’s water-based carbon.
7.Zero-knowledge proof
Computer scientists are perfecting a cryptographic tool we could use to prove something without revealing the information underlying the proof. It’s easy to come up with VERY cool use cases. For example, if an app needs to know that you have enough money to put a transaction through your bank could communicate that yes, that is the case, without giving an amount. It could also help identify a person without a birth certificate, allow someone to enter a restricted website without needing to display their date of birth… or help with nuclear disarmament. additionally, it could provide proof of a crypto-currency transaction without revealing its amount . Yay for privacy, and here’s to a hopefully dying targeted advertising industry.
8.20-minute Water
The recipe was concocted especially for developing countries — remote areas where people don’t have access to chemical treatments such as chlorine.
Unlike other innovations in this article, this one hardly has any downsides. It’s very cheap: the amount of silver used for the nanowires is so small the cost is negligible, and the electricity needed can be easily supplied by a small solar panel or a couple of 12-volt car batteries. Since the filter doesn’t trap bacteria (killing them instead), it can have much larger pores, allowing water to speed through at a more rapid rate. More than 80,000 times faster than existing filters, to be exact. And it does so without clogging, an issue that plagues existing solutions.
9. YOLOv5
This innovation is important because it means we will soon be able to do real real-time analysis — detecting and labelling videos 140 times per second. For context, previous models struggled to get to 10 frames per second. At this speed, you can use AI on videos of fields as varied as the world of medicine or that of sport. It can also improve things like detecting obstacles in autonomous cars earlier to avoid even more collisions. It’s a really big deal, but one you surely won’t hear about in the newspapers.
10. 4D-printing
Put simply, a 4D-printed product is a 3D-printed object which can change properties when a specific stimulus is applied (submerged underwater, heated, shaken, not stirred…). The 4th D is therefore Time; time needed for the stimulus to be relevant.
The applications are still being discussed, but some very promising industries include healthcare(pills that activate only if the body reaches a certain temperature), fashion(clothes that become tighter in cold temperature), and home making(furniture that becomes rigid under a certain stimulus).
Another really cool use case is computational folding, wherein objects larger than printers can be printed as only one part.