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 undertakes this very task and puts out an annual list to magazine readers of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Today, host Regina G. Barber hops through highlights from the list with Amy Nordrum, an executive editor at the publication.Check out the full list here.Another tech topic on your mind that you want us to discuss on an upcoming episode? Let us know by emailing [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.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of MIT Technology Review?
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.
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.
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.
In 2009, we put Intelligent Software Assistance on the list. Specifically, Siri, which was released in February 2010. On their first list, they included natural language processing.
Which is the AI technology that's underpinning chat GPT and generative AI.
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Chapter 2: What are the top technologies of 2025?
Satellite megaconstellations 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 datasets.
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.
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 burps.
I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. 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 Vera Rubin Telescope in Chile.
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Chapter 3: How is the Vera Rubin Telescope different from others?
So let's just start off. How is this telescope different from the others?
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.
Chapter 4: What discoveries will the Vera Rubin Telescope enable?
Yeah, and I'm very excited about it. But from the scientists that you've talked to and you've done this research, what are they excited about that this telescope is now going to allow them to do that they couldn't do before?
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.
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.
Okay, let's do the next one. And this is also very close to my heart. And it is because it's about a technology to reduce cow burps. Can you tell me more about this? 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 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.
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Chapter 5: How can we reduce methane emissions from cows?
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.
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?
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.
Okay, so Amy, because we are on 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.
Wow.
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.
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