Is your company ready for the nanotech boom? For an article entitled "Small Wonders" that appears in the May issue of Entrepreneur magazine, reporter Andrea Cooper talked to Social Technologies' Peter von Stackelberg about a brief he wrote on the future of nanomaterials.

In her article, Cooper writes:

Social Technologies, a global research and consulting firm, asked experts worldwide to predict the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value through the year 2025. Nanomaterials was named one of the top 12 areas. The 2007 report, which defined nanotechnology as the creation of particles, fibers, films, coatings and other materials between 1 and 100 nanometers in size, said major accomplishments in nanotech will dramatically change "the materials and processes used to produce many of our consumer and industrial products."

Additional fields spotlighted in the Social Technologies report include construction (imagine a self-cleaning floor with an anti-microbial nanocoating); leisure goods (your tennis racket may already be reinforced with carbon nanotubes to make it stiffer and lighter); and consumer products (nanoparticles in sunscreen is one controversial application).

Read the entire article.

Image: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino (flickr)

On February 15th, the National Academy of Engineering unveiled its Grand Challenges for Engineering. Over a year in the making, the list was crafted by an international committee with members like Ray Kurzweil, William Perry, and Craig Venter. The group came up with the following list of challenges:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
  
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

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An RFID chip before insertion. Image: Ishmell (Flickr)What is the probability of personal chip implants entering the mainstream consumer market? That was the question Social Technologies' Matthew Sollenberger worked to answer in a recent brief.

"Technology has advanced to the point where it is feasible to implant advanced microchips in humans," explains Sollenberger. “GPS, medical implant technology, and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips could be used for a variety of functions, from surveillance to identification. Chipping people would be simple, and could assist with child and elder safety, debit and credit payment, and personal medical records. However, consumer opinion is sharply divided on the merits of human microchip implants.”

Drivers for inserting chips into people are diverse:

• Cheap implantable devices and quick, low-cost implantation have made chipping easy and affordable. It takes about 20 minutes, and doesn’t require stitches.
• Chip tracking and scanning is becoming more robust, thanks to wireless, GPS, and RFID scanning networks.
• Parents are increasingly looking to technology to provide child safety solutions. In fact, 75% of parents in the UK say they would buy a child-tracking device.

But there are obstacles, he says. "The idea of implanting a chip with tracking functions in the body tends to evoke strong feelings—especially considering that RFID implants are considered highly vulnerable to hacking, and the long-term health effects are unknown."

In addition, privacy advocates warn that human chipping would let “Big Brother” run rampant. And, Sollenberger says, activist and legislative moves to restrict the use of human RFID implants are in motion, and several states already have laws prohibiting implantation of chips.

What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?

To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.

After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:

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Two recent studies have suggested that researchers are zeroing in on how the brain thinks about the future. Imaging technologies have been unveiling what parts of the brain “light up” when certain physical or cognitive activities are undertaken. But we’re not quite there yet. A study at the University of Washington reported by the BBC suggests that the areas we use to remember an event are different than those used to think about a future event. A second, by University College of London researchers and reported in the January 16 Wall Street Journal, suggested that the “role of the hippocampus in processing memory was far broader than merely reliving past experiences…it also seems to support the ability to imagine any kind of experience including possible future events."

It is safe to anticipate that researchers will eventually pinpoint and understand how the brain processes all of our physical and cognitive activities, including how we think about the future. The “map” will be filled in and linked. The interesting question is when and how having the map will facilitate the development of therapies, and perhaps more interestingly, enhancements. The issue of brain or cognitive enhancement could make today’s controversy over the use of steroids for performance-enhancement in professional sports seem like a walk in the park. Imagine the potential for performance-enhancing drugs for the brain, beyond today's primitive versions--some different points of view will surely emerge about the ethics of that. It is also not too hard to envision a day when such potential is considered routine and safe, and the history books wonder what all the fuss was about.

In the meantime, however…. As a practicing futurist, I am particularly intrigued about the enhancement possibilities for the “futurizing” area of the brain. Might I be the Barry Bonds of the futures profession, with my amazingly good futures work tainted by my “juicing up?” I can see my frontal lobe lighting up right now! 

Image: Photos.com