Progress and disruption go hand in hand. The history of human civilization is characterized by periodic dances between old technologies resisting newer ones, with the latter ultimately ending up victorious — before inevitably becoming old and ripe for disruption once more. The horse and buggy made way for the gasoline-powered automobile, which is bound to be replaced by electric vehicles; the radio quickly lost ground to the television, which — along with print press and virtually every other form of traditional media — became disrupted by the internet.

What about the next wave of disruptions? Richard Watson, a leading futurist and lecturer at the London Business School, recently compiled some of the most promising technologies that seem set on shaking different industries from the ground up.

Watson teamed up with colleagues from Tech Foresight at Imperial College London, as well as an ex-BBC researcher to help list companies that are leading the way for each disrupting tech. Be it retail, finance, food, transport, computing, energy, or health, no industry seems to be spared by the waves of innovation.

“The idea for the table initially came from me stumbling upon a list of emerging technologies on Wikipedia. This felt fairly accurate, but also rather lifeless. It wasn’t especially contextual either. Other lists from MIT Tech Review and McKinsey were better, but somehow these weren’t showing the bigger picture either,” Watson wrote.

“Using all this as a good starting point I did some further research to identify candidate technologies and then spoke with Anna and academics at Imperial College to validate the thinking. This was the easy bit.”

“The tricky part was then deciding which technologies to leave out and how to rank both the disruptive potential of each technology and time (both near impossible, but we had a good go using small post-it notes that could be moved around easily). What results is far from perfect, but it’s better than anything else I’ve seen and it’s hopefully a foundation for people being wrong in really useful and interesting ways.”

Watson has been kind enough to offer a high-res version of his table of disruption, which can download for free here.

Some disruptions are happening right now, while others are still incubating, waiting for the right moment to hatch. Watson highlighted the fact by dividing the nearly 100 technologies he listed into four groups. Colored in green are horizon 1 disruption — those that are happening right now, and which companies should waste no time jumping on board with. Yellow, or horizon two, are probable near-future technologies (10-20 years from now), which companies are advised to experiment with. Red, or horizon three, are technologies thought to emerge in the more distant future (20 years plus); companies should keep a close eye on their developments. Finally, the outer edge, colored in grey, are the so-called Ghost Technologies, fringe territory where you’ll find technologies that are highly improbable or downright impossible to mature with our current level of understanding.

Some items are super obvious and predictable, such as autonomous vehicles and smart energy grids, while other disruptions are extraordinarily outlandish or downright ludicrous — human head-transplants, telepathy, and artificial consciousness.

On the X-axis are technologies ranked by their potential for disruption in time, while the Y-axis ranks the probability of disruption from low to high. In this case, time relates to common usage, not initial invention.

So the next time you get your groceries delivered by an Amazon drone, don’t act too surprised. Revisit this table and prepare for the next big thing.

The full list of technologies that the team looked at:

The list 100 disruptive technologies

Smart nappies

Deep ocean wind farms

Vertical agriculture

Wireless energy transfer

Cryptocurrencies

Concentrated solar power

Predictive policing

Micro-scale ambient energy harvesting

Robotic care companions

Smart control of appliances

Cultured meat

Delivery robots and passenger drones

Distributed ledgers

Precision agriculture

Autonomous vehicles

Intention decoding algorithms

Balloon-powered internet

Powered exoskeletons

Computerised shoes and clothing

Airborne wind turbines (high altitude)

Avatar companions

Metallic hydrogen energy storage

Autonomous ships and submarines

Resource gamification

Water harvesting from air

Drone freight delivery

Autonomous passenger aircraft

3D-printing of food and pharmaceuticals

Medical tricorders

Smart flooring and carpets

Diagnostic toilets

Smart energy grids

Algal biofuels

Human organ printing

Artificial human blood substitute

Mega-scale desalination

Self-writing software

Public mood monitoring machines

Programmable bacteria

Peer-to-peer energy trading and transmission

Lifelong personal avatar assistants

Smart dust

Predictive gene-based healthcare

Automated knowledge discovery

Autonomous robotic surgery

Emotionally aware machines

Humanoid sex-robots

Human biohacking

Internet of DNA

Vacuum-tube transport

Scramjets

Smart glasses and contact lenses

Pollution-eating buildings

Broadcasting of electricity

Bio-plastics

Swarm robotics

4-dimensional materials (and printing)

New (Nano) materials

Fusion power

Low-cost space travel

Colonisation of another planet

Thought control machine interfaces

Dream reading and recording

Planetary-scale spectroscopy

Implantable phones

e-tagging of new-borns

Male pregnancy and artificial wombs

DNA data storage

Genomic vaccines

Quantum safe cryptography

Cognitive prosthetics

Data uploading to the brain

Conversational machine interfaces

Life-expectancy algorithms

Stratospheric aerosols

Battlefield robots

AI advisors and decision-making machines

AI board members and politicians

Invisibility shields

Factory photosynthesis

Transhuman technologies

Digital footprint eraser

Personal digital shields

Human head transplants

Human cloning and de-extinction

Distributed autonomous corporations

Space solar power

Space elevators

Fully immersive VR

Artificial consciousness

Telepathy

Reactionless drive

Whole Earth virtualisation

Shapeshifting matter

Self-reconfiguring robots

Zero-point energy

Beam-powered propulsion

Force fields

Asteroid mining

(Source: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/table-disruptive-technology-042343/)

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Resources for the DIY alternative engineer

A new alternative battery

An unexpected discovery has led to a rechargeable battery that’s as inexpensive as conventional car batteries, but has a much higher energy density. The new battery could become a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative for storing renewable energy and supporting the power grid.

A team based at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory identified this energy storage gem after realizing the new battery works in a different way than they had assumed. The journal Nature Energy published a paper today that describes the battery (“Highly reversible aqueous zinc/manganese oxide energy storage from conversion reactions”).

“The idea of a rechargeable zinc-manganese battery isn’t new; researchers have been studying them as an inexpensive, safe alternative to lithium-ion batteries since the late 1990s,” said PNNL Laboratory Fellow Jun Liu, the paper’s corresponding author. “But these batteries usually stop working after just a few charges. Our research suggests these failures could have occurred because we failed to control chemical equilibrium in rechargeable zinc-manganese energy storage systems.”

Chemically inclined

After years of focusing on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, researchers are used to thinking about the back-and-forth shuttle of lithium ions. Lithium-ion batteries store and release energy through a process called intercalation, which involves lithium ions entering and exiting microscopic spaces in between the atoms of a battery’s two electrodes.

This concept is so engrained in energy storage research that when PNNL scientists, collaborating with the University of Washington, started considering a low-cost, safe alternative to lithium-ion batteries – a rechargeable zinc-manganese oxide battery – they assumed zinc would similarly move in and out of that battery’s electrodes.

After a battery of tests, the team was surprised to realize their device was undergoing an entirely different process. Instead of simply moving the zinc ions around, their zinc-manganese oxide battery was undergoing a reversible chemical reaction that converted its active materials into entirely new ones.

Attractive alternative

Liu and his colleagues started investigating rechargeable zinc-manganese batteries because they are attractive on paper. They can be as inexpensive as the lead-acid batteries because they use abundant, inexpensive materials (zinc and manganese). And the battery’s energy density can exceed lead-acid batteries. The PNNL scientists hoped they could produce a better-performing battery by digging deeper into the inner workings of the zinc-manganese oxide battery.

So they built their own battery with a negative zinc electrode, a positive manganese dioxide electrode and a water-based electrolyte in between the two. They put small, button-sized test batteries through the wringer, repeatedly charging and discharging them. As others had found before them, their test battery quickly lost its ability to store energy after just a few charging cycles. But why?

Detailed investigation

To find out, they first performed a detailed chemical and structural analysis of the electrolyte and electrode materials. They were surprised to not find evidence of zinc interacting with manganese oxide during the battery’s charge and discharge processes, as they had initially expected would happen. The unexpected finding led them to wonder if the battery didn’t undergo a simple intercalation process as they had previously thought. Perhaps the zinc-manganese battery is less like a lithium-ion battery and more like the traditional lead-acid battery, which also relies on chemical conversion reactions.

To dig deeper, they examined the electrodes with several advanced instruments with a variety of scientific techniques, including Transmission Electron Microscopy, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and X-Ray Diffraction. The instruments used were located at both PNNL and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE Office of Science user facility located at PNNL. Combining these techniques revealed manganese oxide was reversibly reacting with protons from the water-based electrolyte, which created a new material, zinc hydroxyl sulfate.

Typically, zinc-manganese oxide batteries significantly lose storage capacity after just a few cycles. This happens because manganese from the battery’s positive electrode begins to sluff off, making the battery’s active material inaccessible for energy storage. But after some manganese dissolves into the electrolyte, the battery gradually stabilizes and the storage capacity levels out, though at a much lower level.

A simple fix

The team used the new knowledge to prevent this manganese sluff-off. Knowing the battery underwent chemical conversions, they determined the rate of manganese dissolution could be slowed down by increasing the electrolyte’s initial manganese concentration.

So they added manganese ions to the electrolyte in a new test battery and put the revised battery through another round of tests. This time around, the test battery was able to reach a storage capacity of 285 milliAmpere-hours per gram of manganese oxide over 5,000 cycles, while retaining 92 percent of its initial storage capacity.

“This research shows equilibrium needs to be controlled during a chemical conversion reaction to improve zinc-manganese oxide battery performance,” Liu said. “As a result, zinc-manganese oxide batteries could be a more viable solution for large-scale energy storage than the lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries used to support the grid today.”

The team will continue their studies of the zinc-manganese oxide battery’s fundamental operations. Now that they’ve learned the products of the battery’s chemical conversion reactions, they will move on to identify the various in-between steps to create those products. They will also tinker with the battery’s electrolyte to see how additional changes affect its operation.

By Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

(Source:  nanowerk.com; April 18, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/hxnf4s6)

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