Amy Nordrum

This is the 25th year, actually, that our newsroom has put out a list of 10 breakthrough technologies.

For better, like... Potentially help us solve major problems like climate change or improve...

our well-being and our health as humans.

And for worse.

We also include advances that we think are equally as significant but might have very negative consequences.

We had military drones on the list a few years ago.

you know, what's going on in biotech or the latest climate progress, especially at a moment where it can feel like there's not as much being made generally, especially here in the U.S.

This is so not fair, but I mean, I guess I always have a personal favorite, honestly, or one that I'm just kind of most interested in.

This time it's in the space category.

Well, lithium has really been the go-to battery chemistry for decades at this point, and sodium ion batteries could shake that up really for the first time in a meaningful way if they're able to scale up.

And these batteries would be much easier to produce.

Lithium supply is very concentrated in just a handful of countries, but you can find sodium everywhere.

It's the same sodium that you find in sea salt.

So this could make it much easier to produce batteries, and we're going to need more batteries soon.

over the coming decades to store renewable energy, to operate electric vehicles, to do all kinds of things in our lives.

It would give manufacturers another option for EVs and one that is made from a material that's much more abundant and less vulnerable to supply.

chain risks, for example.

And over time, these might actually make EV batteries cheaper.

Right now, their sodium ion batteries are not cheaper than lithium ion, but as you scale up and produce more of them, some analysts think that they could someday be about a third of the

as expensive as lithium-ion batteries to produce.