Chapter 1: What are the 10 breakthrough technologies expected in 2026?
Short Wavers, I know every podcast everywhere asks you to follow them, and it's for a good reason. For us, as a show on a public media budget, one of the best ways you can help us grow and thrive is to follow us from wherever you're listening. Thank you. We appreciate you. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here with a list.
made from our friends over at MIT Technology Review.
This is the 25th year, actually, that our newsroom has put out a list of 10 breakthrough technologies.
This is Amy Nordrum, executive editor of that newsroom, and she says that this list describes which technologies they think matter most each year. We're really looking for high-impact advances that we think will change the way we live and work in the future.
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.
This year, Amy says a large chunk of the list is on AI technology because that area has taken off. But they've also included other important advances that may not have risen above the noise for people not paying close attention.
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.
So today on the show, we go through some of the top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2026 by MIT Technology Review, including Amy's favorite on the list.
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.
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Chapter 2: How are sodium-ion batteries changing the electric vehicle landscape?
Number two, you mentioned it, data centers, but specifically AI data centers.
So everybody's been using a lot of AI in their daily life, whether they honestly know it or not. It's built into all kinds of things that we use every day. And now there's a huge investment going into building more data centers by lots of different companies. And these are really a new breed of infrastructure.
They're massive facilities that use hundreds of thousands of specialized chips called GPUs and also require their own kind of very specialized hardware. cooling systems. So this new class of infrastructure is something that we wanted to recognize on this year's list because it's unique to our time.
And to round it all out, a slightly fun one, in my opinion, a gene resurrection.
Well, you've heard a lot about extinct animals, maybe that might be coming back according to the claims of some companies.
Right.
But they might not be coming back. But yes, they might not be coming back. And so we were quite careful with our What we think is quite exciting, though, is the efforts around bringing back genes from ancient creatures into modern day animals or plants, often for conservation purposes or to help those plants adapt to climate change.
There's been a lot of work in this ancient DNA space and now new efforts to, you know, help endangered species get more genetic diversity by reintroducing genes from past organisms.
So maybe we're not resurrecting the woolly mammoth, but we might be helping endangered species survive. I think that's the more accurate way to think about it, yes. Amy, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I love hearing about this list every year. Please come back next year. It's been a pleasure. I'd love to talk about it with you again in 2027.
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