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Ten Inventions That May Change Your World
from the who-said-innovation-was-dead? dept
Newsweek is running one of those always-popular stories talking about "ten inventions that will change your world". To avoid the unnecessary overhype, I probably would (and did in my title) change the headline to "may change your world". Still, though, I always find these types of articles interesting, if just to get me thinking about new possibilities. Yes, clearly, some of these technologies are overhyped or vaporware, and some may go nowhere. However, it's a good reminder of the spirit of innovation - something that (despite repeated predictions of an "end to innovation) will never go away. Some of the more interesting technologies mentioned are advances in ways to "trick" the tongue into tasting flavors that aren't there (useful for making dietary products taste like their fat-and-calorie filled relatives) and quantum cryptography (where the act of spying on a message changes the message itself, so you know it's been tampered with).
Reader Comments
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90% of "taste" is smell
Smells are harder to trick than taste buds. Sometimes, if I go swimming and get too much water up my nose, my nose will go dead for a day and all food tastes incredibly bland.
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How about "top 10 phenomenons"?
It might be more interesting to talk about what will happen as a RESULT of the various tools people are inventing. If people live longer and healthier lives, in the future we might expect to see more 60- and 70-year-olds going to graduate schools to get their MBAs, MDs, etc. Despite the prejudice in some sciences that only young people can invent new ideas, maybe we will see a future when AARP members dominate the sciences, and young people becoming too discouraged to pursue tech fields. How about an inversion of roles, where young people are too ignorant and unskilled to be productive, therefore they spend the first 40 years of their life in "pretirement", as permanent students and breeding machines?
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I'm not fat!
I was genetically engineered this way!
Reminds me of an old sci-fi story I read some place about a scientest who devoted his life to curing cancer so people can still enjoy smoking, etc.
After many years of zero success, he goes nuts and instead invents a laboratory mouse that is totally immune to cancer and unveils it to a room full of tobacco company managers, DDT manufacturers, etc.
After a few minutes of them all going "huh?", one of them finally makes the connection and stands up and shouts "Hey, tobacco does NOT cause cancer in laboratory animals!" and then the DDT people say "Yeah, DDT does NOT cause cancer in laboratory animals!" and the world goes back to using all the carcinogenic products that had been done away with... but everybody still died of cancer.
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One thing is missing that would change the world
Someone needs to invent something that would revolutionise transport. Something that we would actually build cities around. Something that would make Jeff Bezos honk. How about basing it on a Sterling engine?
Phillip.
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Re: One thing is missing that would change the wor
Revolutinary transport?
http://www.skywebexpress.com
The ultimate vision of PRT is 80-100mph vehicles that take you point-to-point nonstop without you having to drive. Much safer than cars and quicker too. Theoretically they wouldn't even slow down in dense city centers and they would be elevated so pedestrians wouldn't be in danger. Of course, getting investors or government to spend the money on something that is potentially unworkable is never easy. It seems a lot more revolutinary than the Segway though if it works.
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