MORE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE FUTURE

CREDIT University of Central Florida

In my last post I wrote about some of the ways a bright technological future is already under construction, one development at a time. There are far too many new inventions and discoveries to be covered in a handful of blog posts, but I thought I’d touch on just a few more. You can follow the links to read more details at the magazine NewAtlas.com.

Some of the most exciting new work is being done in the area of energy. Since our ravenous consumption of energy from fossil fuel sources is one of the key reasons our world’s environment is in such a sorry state, every alternative is a step toward heading off even worse damage. Some new developments are potential sources of energy production, like the wafer materials known as ferroelectret nanogenerators such as are being developed at Michigan State University. These FENGs (for short) involve layers of complex materials sandwiched together which produce an electric current when compressed. So, for instance, pressing on a touch screen device might produce the energy to power that screen. Bending and flexing can also produce current, perhaps turning our elbows or knees into potential energy generators. With a FENG folded into a more potent package in the heel of a shoe, creating energy could be a walk in the park!

Thermoelectric materials produce electric current because of temperature differences on either side of the material. Scientists at Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology say they’ve developed a thermoelectric coating that can simply be painted onto objects. So nearly anything that has a warmer inside and a colder outside (or vice versa) could produce energy. Maybe not useful for house paint in northern climates where we like our homes well insulated, but possibly for shelters in more gentle climes. And certainly potentially useful for loads of household gadgets from coffee mugs to crockpots.

With our desire for ever more powerful portable computing devices, designers have explored lots of ways to make our clothing and accessories “smart” with circuitry incorporated into them, but also elegant means to power such devices. University of Central Florida scientists have created a “fabric” that uses threads of very special filaments. A coating on one side of the filament gathers solar energy then passes it over to the other side, which is a superconductor (storing energy like a battery). A combination sweater/smartphone anyone? Although, not surprisingly, the first practical uses for this stuff will probably be in uniforms for the modern soldier, giving them the ability to power a range of portable high-tech hardware without the weight of batteries.

Other developments are fascinating if mainly for their “oh, wow” ingenuity, like the way Irish materials scientist Jonathan Coleman added flakes of graphene (one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms) to Silly Putty to produce an electrically conductive material he calls G-putty that’s ridiculously sensitive to pressure impacts of any kind. That could make it the perfect choice for medical sensors and other sensing equipment (and made of Silly Putty!)

Still other innovations could transform our world in ways that might take some time to become clear. A company in the Netherlands has created an alternative to stairs and elevators which they call Vertical Walking. In a near-sitting position, a person uses their arms and core muscles to pull themselves up vertical rails in a series of movements that provide healthful exercise but aren’t much more strenuous than walking, while not requiring the external energy, space, and infrastructure of elevators. I’m not sure it’ll catch on, though it’s an interesting idea.

But I have to say that not all new inventions will necessarily make the world a better place. Speaking as someone who’s still mystified by the appeal of “selfies” and their proliferation along social media, I wasn’t impressed by the appearance of the selfie stick. So I’m also not a fan of the AirSelfie drone—a miniature quadcopter the size and shape of a smartphone designed to offer even more ways to be relentlessly narcissistic. Stored in your smartphone case, powered by and linked to the phone, it flutters smoothly into the air at your command, just far enough to take yet another series of pictures of YOU.

If you think this is the most exciting of the breakthroughs I’ve just mentioned, please, I don’t want to know.

THE FUTURE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The future isn’t something that will suddenly spring upon us ready-made. Whether you grew up on The Jetsons, Star Trek, Futurama, or just got a kick out of the predictions in magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science (flying cars are always just a few years away) you probably wondered what it would be like to fall asleep for decades like Rip Van Winkle and suddenly arrive in that future world. Of course, that’s not the way it happens. The future comes with every passing moment. You’ve already witnessed incredible changes in technology in your lifetime, many of which no one predicted. Yes, a leap ahead ten years would bring a whole range of new gadgets and processes, but the point is, those “next big things” are in development now.

That struck me forcefully this week when I discovered the online magazine New Atlas. Article after article featured new discoveries, pending inventions, and cool gadgets—the future in process. It’s not only fun to read about the incredible ingenuity of human beings, but also to let your imagination run free about what these new creations could bring.

Some of them are potential game changers on a large scale. Like the research at Australia National University on the light-changing properties of certain nanocrystals (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and nanotechnology is one of the most promising areas of research around). The reason humans don’t see well at night isn’t that there isn’t any light around, it’s just light at frequencies the human eye can’t detect. Night vision goggles mostly collect infrared light and other frequencies and amplify it. But nanocrystals can be produced that shift the frequency of incoming light, say, from infrared into something in the visual spectrum. So imagine an ultrathin coating on regular eyeglasses or even contact lenses that can make these night-time forms of light visible for us. Suddenly there’s no more need for glaring, energy-sucking streetlamps that turn cities into gargantuan floodlights and banish the night sky. Usage of every kind of artificial light could be reduced. Not to mention the aesthetic and artistic possibilities of seeing our surroundings in whole new ways.

Sticking with crystals for a moment, some other Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales are working to refine a form of solar power crystals called perovskite. Perovskite was discovered about seven years ago, and along with its ability to convert sunlight into energy, it can be made with different chemical compositions to produce distinct properties. Among other things, it can be manufactured in various colours or completely transparent, and can be sprayed on in layers. So you could paint your car, or almost any other object, and the whole thing would become one big solar panel. Issues of durability and efficiency are being worked out, but someday perhaps every structure of an entire city could be put to use providing free and abundant energy. A bright future indeed.

One of the big problems humanity has to deal with is all of the waste products we produce, everything from nuclear waste to raw sewage. On the nuclear front, scientists at the University of Bristol, in England, have developed a way to make good use of the carbon from graphite blocks that have been used for decades to control nuclear reactions in UK generating plants. The graphite ends up mildly radioactive, but rather than find ways to dispose of it these scientists put it under pressure and heat and turn it into man-made diamonds. The diamonds aren’t for decoration—the radioactivity in them reacts with the diamond structure to produce an electric current, and suddenly you’ve got a diamond that’s a battery. A non-radioactive diamond coating makes the battery safe to handle, and it’s thought that these diamonds could still be producing half of their original energy output nearly six thousand years from now! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Energizer bunny!

But pressure and heat can help transform another waste product, too. It was high pressure and heat that, over eons of time, turned sludgy sea bottoms into crude oil. In a copycat process, a team from the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has learned how to turn raw sewage into biocrude: an oil-like sludge that can be processed the same way as other forms of petroleum from the ground, including into gasoline and other fuels. Considering that U.S cities are calculated to produce 128 billion litres of raw sewage every day, a process like this could be a tremendous boon to both the production of energy and the reduction of pollution.

Obviously, all of these discoveries are still in the refinement stage and will need to be scaled up considerably before they make a major mark on our world, but they are the future, right before our eyes. And, even more importantly, a hopeful future.

I’ll take a look at more of these new developments in a future post.