10 breakthrough technological advancements of 2018 (p. 3)

Carbon dioxide container

Practical and affordable methods of trapping carbon dioxide from the air can absorb excess greenhouse gas emissions.

Even if we slow down carbon dioxide emissions, the warming effect of a greenhouse gas can persist for thousands of years. According to the UN climate group, in order to prevent a dangerous increase in temperature, the world in this century will need to remove from the atmosphere as much as 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide.

A surprising discovery last summer by Harvard climatologist David Keith calculated that theoretically machines can handle this for less than $ 100 per ton using an approach known as direct air trapping. This is an order of magnitude cheaper than in earlier estimates, which led many scientists to reject the technology as too expensive, although it would take years for the costs to fall to that level.

But as soon as you catch carbon, you still have to figure out what to do with it.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup founded by Keith in 2009, plans to expand its pilot plant to increase production of synthetic fuels, using captured carbon dioxide as the key ingredient. (Bill Gates is an investor in Carbon Engineering.)

Wrist-embedded electrocardiogram

Regulatory approval and technological advances make it easy for people to continuously monitor their hearts with wearable devices.

Fitness trackers are not serious medical devices. Intense training or a weakened band can ruin sensors that read your pulse. But an electrocardiogram, which doctors use to diagnose disorders before they cause a stroke or a heart attack, requires a visit to the clinic, and people often do not have time to take the test on time.

Smart watches with ECG support, made possible by new rules and innovations in hardware and software, offer the convenience of a wearable device with an accuracy close to the accuracy of medical.

Compatible with Apple Watch, the AliveCor startup group from Silicon Valley, capable of detecting atrial fibrillation, a common cause of blood clots and strokes, received FDA approval in 2017 Last year, Apple released its own ECG function, cleared by the FDA, embedded in See for yourself.

Sewerless sanitation

Energy efficient toilets can operate without a sewer system and process waste on site.

About 2.3 billion people do not have good sanitation. The lack of proper toilets encourages people to dump fecal matter into nearby ponds and streams, spreading bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can cause diarrhea and cholera. Diarrhea is the cause of death of one of nine children worldwide.

Now researchers are working to create a new type of toilet, which will be cheap enough for the developing world and will be able not only to recycle waste, but also to recycle it.

In 2011, Bill Gates created what was essentially the X Prize in this area - “Invent Toilet Challenge”. Since the launch of the competition, several teams have put prototypes on the ground. All waste is treated on site, so there is no need for a large amount of water to deliver it to a remote treatment plant.

Most of the prototypes are autonomous and do not need sewage, but they look like traditional toilets placed in small buildings or storage containers. The NEWgenerator toilet, developed at the University of South Florida, filters out pollutants through an anaerobic membrane, which has smaller pores than bacteria and viruses. Another project developed by the Connecticut-based company Biomass Controls is a refinery the size of a shipping container; it heats the waste, forming a carbon-rich material that, among other things, can fertilize the soil.

AI voice assistants

New methods that capture the semantic relationships between words, make machines better in understanding natural language.

We’re used to AI assistants — Alex plays music in the living room, Siri sets alarms on your phone — but they’re not really up to their intended minds. They should have simplified our lives, but they barely made a dent. They recognize only a narrow range of directives and are easy to deflect.

But some recent advances are going to expand your digital assistant's repertoire. In June 2018, researchers from OpenAI developed a technique that teaches AI on unmarked text to avoid the cost and time to classify and label all data manually. A few months later, the Google team introduced the BERT system, which learned how to predict missing words while studying millions of sentences. In the multiple choice test, he handled as well as people did when filling in the gaps.

These improvements, combined with improved speech synthesis, allow us to move from simple instructions to AI assistants to talking with them. They will be able to cope with daily trifles, such as meeting notes, searching for information or shopping online.

Some are already here. Google Duplex, terribly human-like update of Google Assistant, can receive your calls on the screen for spammers and telemarketers. He can also call you to schedule reservations for restaurants or lounges.

In China, consumers are accustomed to AliMe Alibaba, who coordinates the delivery of parcels by phone and trades on the price of goods in the chat.

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