• Question: what technology can we expect in the near future

    Asked by bazza110 to David, Rebecca, Simon, Verity, Wei on 20 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by stakernathan.
    • Photo: David Armstrong

      David Armstrong answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      This is a very general question! Apart from the new Wii they announced this week, I’m afraid I only know about nuclear technologies.

      In the near future we will be hopefully seeing some new types of nuclear fission reactor (currently called GEN IV reactors). These will be more efficient, so cheaper to run, safer and produce less waste. However these will not be available until about 2030.

      Around the same time I hope they will be building a nuclear fusion reactor called DEMO which will show that fusion reactors can operate for sustained periods of time, but it is likely a commercial fusion reactor won’t be built until the middle of this century.

    • Photo: Wei Xun

      Wei Xun answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I think one that will impact on a lot of people might be personalised drugs together with genetic screening, to see which drugs will be the best for an individual patient, and how much they should be given for the best effect.

    • Photo: Simon Trent

      Simon Trent answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Genetics is massively advancing and ‘designer babies’ are already becoming a realitity. I think there will be further advances down this route, where we can design babies to not have any disorders but also to select cosmetic features like hair colour and eye colour. Gene therapy, in which you insert ‘good’ versions of genes may be round the corner for people with genetic disorders and stem cell research is a quickly growing field of research of massive potential for treating diseases and disorders.

    • Photo: Verity Nye

      Verity Nye answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      We can expect ‘scanners’ that will be able to quickly and accurately read an organism’s entire genome (genetic barcode). These will enable us to immediately establish what an organism is, and what it’s most closely related to, without spending hours in molecular biology labs. We’ll end up with a huge amount of data, so will have to consider how best to store and analyse the data.

    • Photo: Rebecca Handley

      Rebecca Handley answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      I think among these suggestions virtual reality will be an ever increasing technology, as is seen with new developments in games consoles, where controllers arent need anymore or they use motion technology. But this technology is also very beneficial in science, especially in medicine and doing remote experiments in space.

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