From protein engineering and 3D printing to detection of deepfake media, here are seven areas of technology that Nature will be watching in the year ahead.
Deep learning for protein design
Two decades ago, David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues achieved a landmark feat: they used computational tools to design an entirely new protein from scratch. ‘Top7’ folded as predicted, but it was inert: it performed no meaningful biological functions. Today, de novo protein design has matured into a practical tool for generating made-to-order enzymes and other proteins. “It’s hugely empowering,” says Neil King, a biochemist at the University of Washington who collaborates with Baker’s team to design protein-based vaccines and vehicles for drug delivery. “Things that were impossible a year and a half ago — now you just do it.” READ MORE...
3D printing is quickly becoming a mature manufacturing technology. It’s useful for prototypes and offers significant benefits for small and medium-sized production runs. But just how much will 3D printing change manufacturing and supply chain — and how will the technology get there? Here are six predictions about the near future of additive manufacturing.
1. 3D printing will be bigger, faster and cheaper. 3D printing technologies are developing quickly. Rising demand for specialized materials to fulfil the required properties of end parts will continue to drive developments in the range and types of options available. The key for the new generation of printers, especially industrial-grade solutions, will be the ability to handle a greater range of advanced materials. This opens the door for businesses to benefit from additive manufacturing in areas where they previously could not.
Although machine costs remain high, increased print speed is pushing the price of parts down. As more and more businesses adopt 3D printing, these advancements will accelerate. With the addition of processes such as dual extrusion, the versatility of 3D printing is growing. As a result, 3D printing is being adopted in a wider range of industries. Another trend likely to significantly drive development is printing without the use of support structures, which again broadens the range of applications additive manufacturing can offer. In our eyes the potential for cost and time savings is high.
2. Additive manufacturing will become part of an integrated supply chain approach. To maximize benefits, manufacturers need a large range of printers and materials and, importantly, connections with other industry professionals. Furthermore, interoperability among different systems is becoming important to maximize the potential of 3D printing. Automation in production and post-processing as well as in integrated usability will be important trends this year and beyond.
Additive manufacturing can provide a whole new supply chain approach as part of a holistic and secure platform in which the individual steps are combined into one process, from concept to materials, digital inventory, production and delivery. As manufacturers strive toward Industry 5.0, services offering a fully automated, yet secure, platform will be essential. READ MORE...
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning refer to the ability of machines to learn and act intelligently, meaning they can make decisions, carry out tasks, and even predict future outcomes based on what they learn from data.AI and machine learning already play a bigger role in everyday life than you might imagine. Alexa, Siri, Amazon's product recommendations, Netflix’s and Spotify’s personalized recommendations, every Google search you make, security checks for fraudulent credit card purchases, dating apps, fitness trackers... All are driven by AI.AI is going to revolutionize almost every facet of modern life. Stephen Hawking said, “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.” And Hawking immediately followed that up with, “Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks."There are potentially huge risks for society and human life as we know it, particularly when you consider some countries are racing to develop AI-enabled autonomous weapons. AI and machine learning are the foundation on which many other technologies are built. For instance, without AI, we wouldn't have achieved the amazing advances in the Internet of Things, virtual reality, chatbots, facial recognition, robotics, automation, or self-driving cars, just to name a few. TO READ ABOUT THE OTHER FOUR, CLICK HERE...
A strange shape described by mathematician Lord Kelvin in 1871 and predicted to behave unusually in a fluid has finally been fully studied in the real world thanks to 3D printing – and it seems Kelvin may have been wrong. The behaviour of the shape, called an isotropic helicoid, has been described in fluid dynamics textbooks, but it hadn’t been directly measured until now.
An isotropic helicoid must experience the same amount of drag from a fluid regardless of its orientation, like a sphere, but also rotate as it moves through the fluid. So if you dropped an isotropic helicoid into a tank of a viscous liquid, it should spin as it sinks, similar to the way a propeller turns.
Greg Voth at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his colleagues 3D printed five different shapes that should be isotropic helicoids, each a little more than a centimetre across, and dropped them into a tank of silicone oil. They were unable to detect rotation in any of them, meaning the predictions for an isotropic helicoid may be wrong.
“You’ve got to guess that somebody else has tried this in 150 years – in Kelvin’s original paper, it even sounds like he tried it,” says Voth. “I suspect that people have tried to fabricate these particles, but they were limited by defects in the fabrication so they simply didn’t publish, so the hypothesis of this behaviour has stayed with us.”
Upon delving into the hydrodynamic effects in play, the researchers calculated that there was almost certainly a link, or coupling, between the movement and rotation of their particles, meaning they fulfilled Kelvin’s criteria. But this was far too small to have any detectable effect.
“The coupling is tiny, but it still exists,” says Voth. He and his team are now working on building an isotropic helicoid where that coupling could be measurable, which would finally vindicate Lord Kelvin’s idea. READ MORE
