This year's big ideas in tech will make your food safer, make hybrid cars more energy efficient, and, finally, sentence overpriced texting plans to death. These are our picks for the technology trends to shape 2012.
1. Pascalization
Louis Pasteur's name is synonymous with food preservation, but it's another long-dead French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher whose research is changing the way we think about food: Blaise Pascal. Pascalization, commonly known as high-pressure processing (HPP), is a method by which food is subjected to extreme water pressure—sometimes up to 80,000 pounds a square inch—inside long, cylindrical metal chambers. This destroys living cells, including harmful bacteria such as E. coli and listeria, while leaving the texture and flavor of many foods surprisingly intact.
Sauces, fruit juices, guacamole, lunch meats, and fish hold up well to pascalization, and treated versions of these foods can be found in stores today. But falling equipment costs, demand for longer shelf lives, and a rash of bad PR for HPP's competition, food irradiation, will bring pascalization into the mainstream, says V. M. Balasubramaniam, a professor of food safety engineering at Ohio State University. "The food industry is conservative in terms of new tech," he says, "but in recent years the industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar business." Some extreme applications for pascalization include edible raw shellfish, and precooked eggs and omelets that can be stored at room temperature—for years.
2. Plastic Muscles
Functional electroactive polymers (EAPs), known colloquially as plastic muscles, have been in development for decades, but their applications have been limited. (In 2005, the International Society for Optical Engineering held its first EAP versus human arm-wrestling match. Don't worry—the human won.) Recent research, however, has unlocked new potential for EAPs beyond sensors, actuators, and fanciful experiments. By placing large, flat spokes of EAP material between a floating hub and a fixed outer wheel, researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Biomimetics Lab in New Zealand have been able to create a rotary motor, which could directly compete with the ubiquitous magnet-based electric motors in many low-power applications. The technology has drawn interest from NASA for its potentially high energy efficiency.
3. Subconscious Mode
Anyone who has woken up to a dead phone can attest that mobile devices suck energy whether you're using them or not. That's because, even when a device is inactive—say, in your pocket with the screen off—it remains alert for wireless data transmissions, in a state known as idle listening. University of Michigan researchers have developed a technology called Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening, or subconscious mode, which dramatically lowers the rate at which a device's Wi-Fi card retrieves data packets. By selectively listening only for small headers, or tags, the device is able to anticipate incoming data and open up its full wireless connection capabilities accordingly. In testing, subconscious mode reduced energy consumption by 44 percent in current mobile devices.
4. Mobile Instant Messaging
BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) paved the way for Internet-based mobile instant messaging. Apple, Google, and Microsoft now have MIM services of their own, sentencing overpriced texting plans to a well-deserved death.
5. Koomey's Law
If one piece of computer science trivia can be said to have entered the collective consciousness, it's Moore's law. First formulated in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, it states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every two years. In other words, processors become roughly twice as powerful every other year. Moore's law is still holding strong, but it has little to say about energy efficiency. Koomey's law is a proven computing law for the modern age, where wattage trumps all. Initially observed by Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, Koomey's law states that the amount of computing power per joule—effectively per watt—doubles every one and a half years. This trend tells us about the future of computing's most exciting areas in a way that Moore's law can't, with equal relevance to battery-dependent smartphones and unfathomably powerful—and power-hungry—supercomputers.
6. Supertruck
What does it mean for a long-haul truck to be "super"? According to new standards set by the Department of Energy, it means that it's 50 percent more fuel efficient than today's hardware—a goal the agency, with the help of Volvo, Daimler, Cummins, Peterbilt, and Navistar, hopes to hit by 2015. The new goals are specific to Class 8 trucks, which have loaded curb weights of 33,000 pounds or more; a full-to-capacity base-model Ford F-150 weighs about 6500 pounds.
More than $180 million has been allocated by the DOE to engine and trailer manufacturers for a variety of projects, some reaching or nearing deployment. Near-term goals include wide-base low-rolling-resistance tires, active tire-pressure monitoring, hybrid drivetrains, and new trailer shapes. Daimler Trucks is working on dramatically reducing the size and weight of its diesel engines, and Cummins is partnering with Peterbilt to produce a clean diesel engine with a waste-heat recovery mechanism. What will make these supertrucks recognizable on the road, though, is their exterior: Aerodynamic trailers, cabins, and wheel skirts provide an almost sci-fi appeal.
7. Convergent Encryption
Server space, while cheaper than ever, still costs money. People have justifiable reservations about storing private data on a company's servers. But of all the hurdles faced by cloud computing services, bandwidth is the highest: It takes hours to upload one gigabyte over a typical broadband Internet connection. Bitcasa, a new startup, is offering full cloud backup—everything on a computer—for $10 a month, using a technique called convergent encryption. Bitcasa's software assigns an anonymous hash, or identifier, to files before they're uploaded. If that hash already exists on Bitcasa's servers, it isn't re-uploaded; a popular song owned by millions would exist only once on Bitcasa's servers. This lets a Bitcasa user securely back up hundreds of gigabytes of data over an Internet connection that otherwise would have been prohibitively slow.
8. Flywheel Hybrids
To store kinetic energy in a battery, it must first be converted into electricity—a process that makes battery-powered hybrid cars inherently inefficient. Flywheel hybrids sidestep this problem in an elegantly simple way: Kinetic energy is stored as kinetic energy, in a spinning wheel.
In specialized applications, flywheel hybrids have been in use for decades. Switzerland deployed flywheel-assisted buses in the early '50s; an industry consortium called Flybus is currently testing a modern update on the concept. Porsche has even demonstrated the technology in a race-ready concept car, the 767-hp 918 RSR. In a much larger form, flywheel batteries serve as a grid-storage technology, holding excess energy during off-peak-usage hours.
Until this year, flywheel storage in mainstream cars has been elusive. A team of car companies, including Ford, Jaguar, and Land Rover, has joined with motorsports companies Flybrid Systems and Prodrive to develop a carbon-composite flywheel battery, driven by a brake-powered continuously variable transmission and housed in a partial vacuum. In real-world testing, the consortium saw fuel-efficiency improvements of 22.4 percent over unassisted engines. At peak power, the flywheel returned 80 hp to the car's drivetrain.
Flywheel hybrids also promise to be easier on the environment after death. Chemical batteries require special disposal measures; flywheels don't.
9. Games With a Purpose (GWAPs)
GWAPs apply human intuition to computational problems. By "playing" a 3D protein simulation on their PCs, lay users decoded the structure of a retrovirus protein that had stumped scientists for years in just a few days.
10. Mobile Lidar
You probably haven't seen one of Google's self-driving cars cruising down the road—yet. Nonetheless, the search company's (mostly) driverless fleet has been quietly racking up hundreds of thousands of miles on public asphalt in California and Nevada. (There has been one crash, though Google insists that, at the time of impact, the car was under human control.) These autonomous vehicles depend on military-grade optical sensing technology called light detection and ranging, or lidar. The camera mounted atop Google's cars renders a 360-degree, three-dimensional view of the car's surroundings, which Google's navigational software interprets and reacts to in real time.
Source: Popularmechanics 1 and Popularmechanics 2
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