10 Technologies To Watch

In a world brimming with innovation and limited time, it can be hard to tell what technology has the potential to really shift life. Yet, every year, MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/about/ undertakes this very task and puts out an annual list to magazine readers of 10 Breakthrough Technologies https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/03/1109178/10-breakthrough-technologies-2025/. Today, host Regina G. Barber https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber hops through highlights from the list with Amy Nordrum https://www.technologyreview.com/author/amy-nordrum/, an executive editor at the publication. Check out the full list here https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/03/1109178/10-breakthrough-technologies-2025/. Another tech topic on your mind that you want us to discuss on an upcoming episode? Let us know by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:20Regina Barber?

  Sometimes I marvel at the speed our technology is advancing, from AI and medicine to the most recent scientific breakthroughs and the newest tech. But it's also hard to know which ones are just hype and which ones may be game changers. Little did I know there's a whole magazine dedicated to this topic called MIT Technology Review.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  We're a magazine that is focused on charting out the future of emerging technologies and seeing what's coming up on the horizon in areas like artificial intelligence, biotech, and climate change.

• 0:52Regina Barber?

  That's Amy Nordrum, an executive editor of the publication. And she said a couple of decades ago, the editors were trying to make predictions about which emerging technologies would be the most impactful that year, for better or for worse. They decided to make a list of their top 10.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  And we've done that annual exercise every year since. It's called 10 Breakthrough Technologies, and it's our look at the future of tech and our attempt to say which of these emerging technologies our newsroom thinks matters most right now.

• 1:22Regina Barber?

  And they've made some spot-on predictions in their 24-year history.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  In 2009, we put intelligent software assistants on the list.

• 1:30Regina Barber?

  Specifically Siri, which was released in February 2010. On their first list, they included natural language processing.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Which is the AI technology that's underpinning ChatGPT and generative AI.

• 1:43Regina Barber?

  Satellite mega constellations were on their 2020 list. One year, they predicted virtual reality headsets. Another year, they included data mining, when you extract different bits of info from large data sets.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  It's a practice that is still happening today and has underpinned the growth of online advertising and driven lots of personalization across the web for decades.

• 2:04Regina Barber?

  But then there were also some misses.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  So in 2010, we really thought social TV would be popular. So these were platforms that allow you to like, watch a show with your friends from different locations and all chat about it right there on the screen together. And that still kind of exists, like there's watch party apps out there, but it never got as big as we predicted it would.

• 2:27Regina Barber?

  But in a sea of innovation, it can be hard to tell what tech is the real deal and what could shift our society. So today on the show, we break out the crystal ball. We're exploring some of the top technologies MIT Tech Review predicts will be breakout stars this year. From increasing our view of the cosmos to decreasing methane-filled cow burbs. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:17Regina Barber?

  Okay, Amy, let's just dive into the top 10 technologies of 2025 per your publication, MIT Tech Review. We don't have time to go through all of them, so for the rest of this episode, we're going to like spotlight a few, starting with my favorite as an astrophysicist, the Vero Rubin Telescope in Chile. So let's just start off, how is this telescope different from the others?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is so, such a cool one. It's one of my favorites as well on the list. So this is a huge telescope now being completed in Chile, and it's going to contain the world's largest digital camera.

• 4:48Regina Barber?

  I hear that camera is as large as a car.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, it's massive. And it took quite a while to build. This has been in the works for more than a decade, but it's almost done now. It's being completed down there on a remote mountaintop and should be up and running toward the middle of this year. And we should be getting our first images back from it around that same time.

• 5:07Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and I'm very excited about it. But from the scientists that you've talked to and you've, you know, done this research, what are they excited about that like this telescope is now going to allow them to do that they couldn't do before?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Well, the biggest mission of this telescope is to complete this 10-year survey of the southern sky. So every night it'll be taking photos of the sky over and over and over. It's called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It goes till 2035. And this will just be a comprehensive survey of the sky in a way that we've never really done before. And that will allow astronomers to do all kinds of stuff, like discover many, many new asteroids and galaxies and make a time lapse video of the sky and how all the different objects move around, maybe also leading to more discoveries that way. And it'll also help them create the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way that we've ever had.

• 5:59Regina Barber?

  That's so cool.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  And they're building some platforms and interfaces that will allow anybody anywhere to have access to this information. Specifically, they're going through this platform called Zooniverse, which is a, a big place where a lot of community science projects happen. And there's a couple already set up there that are going to start using Rubin's data whenever it does become available.

• 6:19Regina Barber?

  Oh, cool.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's one to classify galaxies by their shape, and there's one to try and spot a certain kind of asteroid that has a comet-like tail. And there's another project that's got volunteers trying to spot cases of gravitational lensing, which is where light is actually bending around a massive galaxy and allowing you to kind of see what's behind it.

• 6:38Regina Barber?

  I'm so excited. Okay, let's do the next one. And this is also very, like, close to my heart. And it is because it's about a technology to reduce cow burps. Can you tell me more about this?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Right, well, cows burp a lot as they digest their food. And it's a problem because in every burp, they give off methane. It's a byproduct of their digestion, and that's a very powerful greenhouse gas, which contributes to climate change. So it's a problem we need to solve if we're going to reduce emissions and keep climate change, you know, somewhat under control. But it's a tough one because we do eat a lot of meat in this world, and people are getting wealthier, and usually that means they're going to want to eat more meat. So rather than trying to reduce demand and have people eat less meat, although that is still a very good thing, some companies are trying to come at this from a different angle and produce supplements that you can mix into a cow's food or water, or make into,

• 7:38Speaker 02

  like, a capsule-like form that actually prevent the cows from giving off methane in the first place.

• 7:42Regina Barber?

  Like Gas-X for cows?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of, right.

• 7:46Regina Barber?

  So how much does it reduce their burps?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Well, there's one on the market now called Bovier. It's available in already more than 50 countries, and it reduces methane by about 30% in dairy cattle and can do higher in beef cattle. And then there are a couple startups working on new formulations that they say could reduce methane emissions by more than 50%, perhaps up to 80, 90%.

• 8:09Regina Barber?

  Jeez.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  So I, yeah, so 30% seems to be on the low end, which is still pretty great, but we could get even higher.

• 8:15Regina Barber?

  So when you say, like, 30% reduction in the ones that are already here and, like, above 50%, like, how much of a dent can we, can we put in, you know, our emissions?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  That's a great question, and it's kind of a tough one because the estimations for agricultural emissions are notoriously difficult to really, to really nail down. But livestock emissions, which includes cows but also sheep and goats, are somewhere between 11 and 20% of our global greenhouse gas emissions, and these methane emissions from cows are a good chunk of that. So it would certainly help a lot. It would not solve the whole problem. There's other emissions that come from other areas of agriculture like fertilizer production and land clearing. But this would this would definitely put a big dent in one of the worst sources. Okay, next one. How about generative AI search? Search engine companies like Google and Microsoft, which makes Bing, are incorporating

• 9:09Speaker 02

  large language models, these new AI models into their search engines, which means you can go and type in a query and in Google's case, it's going to give you what's called an AI overview at the top. And this is that AI model's summary of the topic or an answer to your question that was just generated for you in that moment. Yeah, I've seen that a lot. And I'm like, how much can I trust this? Right. And I mean, the concept is that it's maybe more conversational, hopefully more useful and easier to find the info that you want, rather than having to go look through all those, you know, individual links. But exactly as you say, like, the model doesn't actually know if the overview it's giving you is right or wrong. It's just assembling that answer based on all the things that it's been trained on, all the material it's

• 9:50Speaker 02

  ingested from the internet before. And so you cannot completely rely on it. You know, it's pretty good a lot of the time, I will say. But, you know, this is really a fundamental change to the way that we search. People already, according to Google and OpenAI, people are asking longer questions. They're asking more follow-ups when using these tools. You can ask a bunch of stuff and put a bunch of instructions into one query instead of, you know, going back to it again and again. Oh. I think, yeah, I think that just, I think it does fundamentally change the way we interact with and engage with these searches. And I don't really know what that means yet. Right. Kind of the jury's still out, I guess. Yeah, we don't know what this will actually, what the consequences will be. Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's such, I mean, I search the internet how many times

• 10:33Speaker 02

  a day. I'm sure, you know, you probably do as well. It's like many, many times. And it's just such a fundamental part of most of our lives. And seeing this shift happen in the way that information is, you know, served up and organized, I think we just think is like a very interesting, you know, important moment that we really honestly don't know what the implications of that might be yet. Right.

• 10:54Regina Barber?

  Okay, so Amy, because we are in a super long podcast and we can't go over everything on this list, to end, we're going to go into rapid fire with three honorable mentions. So first up, long-acting HIV prevention meds.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yes, so for a long time, we've had very effective preventative treatments for HIV called PrEP, but that's a pill that you have to take. And now there's a new drug that can be injected just once every six months from Gilead, and it's had some really promising clinical trial results.

• 11:22Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  This could be a big deal because more than a million people are infected with HIV every year around the world. And so in order to really end the AIDS crisis, which is the condition that develops from HIV, we do need much broader access and treatments that can be made more accessible and maybe not taken as often.

• 11:42Regina Barber?

  Okay, green steel.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  The way we make steel today requires a lot of coal. And now there are a few companies building plants that are going to come online in the next year or so that are going to replace coal with hydrogen made from renewable sources. And that could really cut back on greenhouse gas emissions from this very dirty process.

• 12:01Regina Barber?

  Okay, robo-taxis, like one of my last favorites.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  These have been around for a while, but now they are moving into new cities without safety drivers. And there are cities where the service will be launched the first time in the coming year. Waymo is moving into Austin and Atlanta. A company called Zooks will be in San Francisco, Miami, and Austin. So we expect many, many more people will get the firsthand experience, maybe their first rides in a robo-taxi in the coming year or so.

• 12:30Regina Barber?

  So amazing. Amy, thank you so much for bringing us the new technologies that are going to happen in 2025. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 12:43Regina Barber?

  The full MIT Technology Review of 10 Breakthrough Technologies is out now. We'll link to it in our episode notes.

• 12:52Regina Barber?

  Shortwavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to. And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. This is something that my producer wrote for me, so get ready. I'm Gassy. Can I take these supplements? These are only for cows.

• 13:36Regina Barber?

  So we should just go back to Gassix. I think you've got to stick to that, yeah.

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