Buzz
The last ten years have been filled with remarkable scientific achievements, with revolutionary advances in fields like bionics, space exploration, and even cracking some of Einstein’s theories. Yet, 2020 still feels far from the 'future' many of us envisioned. While we’ve certainly developed technologies we couldn’t have imagined a century ago, progress on some of the more visually exciting, fictional concepts—like flying cars—seems to have been sluggish.
One reason we feel this way is that the technologies we’re waiting for—like flying cars—are often impractical and inefficient. Truly groundbreaking innovations are in development right now, but they often don’t get the spotlight because they aren’t as flashy. To remind everyone just how far science has come, here are 8 recent breakthroughs that prove we’re already living in the future.
8. AI Doctors
Medicine is a field we assume will never be fully automated because we believe that only a human brain can handle the complexity of diagnosing the many things that can go wrong with the body. This argument makes sense—unless we consider that robots may not just replace human doctors, but also learn from experience. Thanks to AI and machine learning, robotic doctors are already matching, and sometimes exceeding, our medical knowledge.
Take the British National Health Service (NHS), for example, where chatbots recently deployed to remotely diagnose issues were found to outperform human doctors in many cases, particularly in diagnosing abdominal conditions. According to the company's own testing, their accuracy was far superior to ours.
That’s not all—AI-powered systems have consistently outshone human doctors, especially in medical diagnostics, across several recent studies. However, due to our innate skepticism toward machines and robots, their integration into hospitals and government-run healthcare facilities has been slower than anticipated.
7. Resurrecting The Dead
Bringing the dead back to life has been a theme in fiction for centuries, embodying humanity's deep-rooted desire to escape death, often manifested through creatures like Frankenstein’s monster and zombies. While we’ve always known that reversing death might someday be possible, no one expected that moment to come anytime soon.
But a recent study suggests that we're not just getting closer to reversing death—we might have already figured out how to do it. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine successfully reanimated the brains of 32 pigs after they were declared dead. They connected the brains to a structure called BrainEx and infused them with a solution that mimicked blood flow. To their astonishment—and perhaps dread—the brains began to function normally. Some even responded to drugs like a living brain would.
6. Nuclear Fusion
Many of us believe that nuclear fission is a more powerful reaction than nuclear fusion, and it makes sense—splitting things apart seems like it would release more energy than putting things together. However, nuclear fusion is not only far more powerful, but it's also the energy source that powers our Sun (and all other stars). Fusion is also a cleaner energy source, though it's much harder to achieve. Despite our ongoing attempts to replicate this on Earth, harnessing nuclear fusion like the stars remains a distant dream for scientists.
While it may still take some time before we can replace the Sun with an energy source of our own creation, a recent study in China has demonstrated that we can recreate the conditions required for nuclear fusion on the Sun right here on Earth.
At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei, China, a team of researchers successfully simulated an artificial Sun using nuclear fusion. They reached temperatures of over 100 million Celsius, enough to turn the matter into plasma. In other words, Chinese scientists have figured out how to recreate the SUN on Earth, plasma and all.
5. Detecting Parkinson’s Through Voice
Parkinson’s disease belongs to a group of serious disorders that remain poorly understood, much like Alzheimer’s disease. It isn’t caused by any external factors but is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, though that’s about all we know. The exact cause remains a mystery, and we don’t even know if it’s a typical disease or something entirely different, like prions. Moreover, detecting Parkinson’s has always been just as difficult as understanding it, as its symptoms develop slowly and over time. There’s also much debate about what exactly those symptoms are, as patients don’t exhibit clear biological markers.
While we’re still far from fully understanding or curing Parkinson’s, recent advancements have allowed us to detect it much earlier. In a groundbreaking clinical achievement, researchers from three universities developed a method to detect Parkinson’s using just voice samples. Although it’s not yet available for medical use, the system demonstrated an accuracy rate of 87%. Since it’s based on machine learning, it’s expected to only improve over time.
4. Robots That Can Follow Orders
When you think about it, robots haven’t exactly transformed our daily lives. Sure, when combined with other technologies like VR and AI, they have the potential to play a huge role in the future, but on their own, they don’t do much. Despite having existed for decades, robots are far from being a part of everyday life as 20th-century fiction predicted. What’s the hold-up?
A major reason is their inability to understand human commands. Robots haven’t become ubiquitous because they lack the cognitive ability to process instructions in real-time. While we’ve created robots that can perform backflips or run as fast as a human, programming them to understand and follow instructions in a meaningful way remains incredibly difficult.
Though it may still be a while before robots can understand and converse like humans, we’ve made remarkable strides in their cognitive abilities in recent years. The U.S. Army has developed software capable of programming field robots to understand verbal commands, execute them, and report back without supervision. These robots would also be equipped with machine learning, allowing them to improve by learning from their mistakes as they work.
3. Converting Brain Signals Into Audio And Images
If you told someone from the 19th century that in two hundred years we’d have the ability to read other people’s thoughts, they’d likely laugh in disbelief. It’s still a concept that feels far-fetched, so much so that even science fiction hasn’t explored it too often. From a scientific standpoint, there’s no logical way to directly access someone’s thoughts, since thoughts are merely electrical waves interpreted by the brain. Plus, there’s the issue of privacy.
However, recent studies suggest that we already have the ability to read people’s thoughts to a surprising degree. A team of neuroengineers at Columbia University recently created a system that can convert brain signals into spoken words, and it’s surprisingly accurate. Other studies have also shown that brain signals can be translated into images, something we didn’t even realize was possible until now.
2. Eye Tribe
The idea of using just your eyes to control a computer may sound like something straight out of the future (and pretty cool too), yet there hasn’t been much progress toward making it a reality. If developed, this technology could have numerous applications across different fields, especially for individuals with disabilities. It could completely transform the way we interact with our devices, something many of us might not even think is possible.
While no technology like this exists today, it did for a brief period. Eye Tribe, a short-lived startup, managed to create a prototype that, according to their videos, allowed users to control any screen with just their eyes. Naturally, the device was more of a prototype for developers rather than a finished product, which limited what could actually be done with it. Nevertheless, the potential was enormous, and it really felt like something out of a science fiction novel.
1. Quantum Entanglement
Quantum Entanglement is one of the most fascinating and perplexing phenomena in Quantum Physics. The theory suggests that two quantum particles will always influence each other, regardless of the distance separating them or any active forces involved. This has been proposed as the key to breakthroughs like faster-than-light travel and quantum networking. Though it has been theorized and observed on small scales, we haven’t yet confirmed if it’s possible to observe this effect over long distances.
That changed when a team of Chinese scientists made history by successfully beaming entangled photon pairs over a distance greater than 1,200 km (about 750 miles). In simple terms, they demonstrated that the state of one particle could be altered by another particle thousands of miles away, regardless of any external factors. As you can imagine, this discovery opens up numerous possibilities. China is on its way to creating a quantum network that is virtually immune to censorship, and this system could be exponentially faster and more secure than anything we currently have. It could also pave the way for previously unthinkable breakthroughs, like faster-than-light communication.
