Amy Nordrum

As 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. But then there were also some misses. 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 I'll 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.

Yeah, this is 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. I hear the camera is as large as a car. 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 soon. toward the middle of this year, and we should be getting our first images back from it around that same time.

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 until 2035. And this will just be a comprehensive survey survey of the sky in a way that we've never really done before.

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.

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. That's so cool.

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 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. Oh, cool.

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. I'm so excited.

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 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. Mm-hmm.

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 like a capsule-like form that actually prevent the cows from giving off methane in the first place. Like Gas-X for cows. Yeah, kind of.

Right. So how much does it reduce their burps? Well, there's one on the market now called Bovier that'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%. Jeez. So I...

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

That's a great question, and it's kind of a tough one because the estimations for agricultural emissions are notoriously difficult 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 definitely put a big dent in one of the worst sources.

search engine companies like Google and Microsoft, which makes Bing, are incorporating 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 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 individual links.

But exactly as you say, 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 that's ingested from the internet before. And so you cannot completely rely on it. It's pretty good a lot of the time, I will say.

But 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 going back to it again and again. Oh, okay.

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. 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 a, I mean, I search the internet how many times a day?

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

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 and the way that information is served up and organized, we just think is a very interesting, important moment that we really honestly don't know what the implications of that might be yet. Right.

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. Okay, green steel. 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. They're 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.

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 Zoox 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.

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