MRNA vaccines for cancer, HIV and others. Moderna clinical trials have been real good.
Imagine getting a cancer diagnosis, then 30 days later getting a tailored treatment that eliminated the cancer.
Also vote. Because one party system has decided to side with anti vaxxers. The other has not. Cancer numbers have been steadily rising, second only to heart disease as a cause of death. There is a solid chance you’re going to get cancer.
Do you know about preferential voting? It makes the 2 party system not so bad.
Voting is mandatory here. So no need to tell me to vote.
And I’m not sure which party is anti Vax.
Solid state batteries are just starting to hit the market but are still fairly comparable to lithium. In theory the mature tech is more energy dense, more thermally stable, charges faster and may be less environmentally damaging.
Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.
A big difficulty is that between the scientific discover, and the application years or even decades can occur. Look at how supra conductor have been known for 100 years and still have very few real life usage.
My thoughts tough
- Life on Mars. I don’t talk about Martian, but if we find remain of bacteria it would be a major breakthrough in biology
-physics beyond the standard model at LHC, no impacts for commoner, but would really help physics to understand our universe
More on technology/applied science
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Next generation cures against cancer with high efficiency/specificity. I think about targeted alpha therapy and immunotherapy. If these get real, a cancer isn’t 6-12 month of painful treatment for followed by a year of recovery, but something a single injection can cure.
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Male birth control, would give men a better control of their own fertility and give one more option to couple where the woman can’t use birth control
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high temperature supra conductors, by high temperature I mean anything above 100K in normal pressure, high current, high magnetic field. Would allow to use way more super conducting magnet than today. Imagine a world where quenching a MRI doesn’t turn off the machine for 3 months.
I agree, but MAGA might have other plans? Lost lots of sleep about this overnight. Science is doomed.
attempting to cure microvasculature damage caused by repeat COVID leads to a bigger-dick pill
Not huge in itself (hey hey) but immediately a source of trillions in funding.
this is the only outcome of the research
I second the lemmy saying there is a considerable gap between discovery and implementation.
But to answer your question, I believe we are due some major breakthrough regarding psilocybin and other psychedelic substances which have been banned since the 60s. Research is well underway and with our current technology + knowledge in neuroscience we’re due to catch up quickly, unless everything gets tangled in too much red tape.
Improvement in mental health has a pretty immediately impact in our lives after all.
A wealth tax. With that we could fully fund all the research people mention and have the means to roll out the advancement in a way that doesn’t cause massive externalities.
Nobody’s talking about this one, but if NASA is able to confirm even the slightest degree of lab-scale spatial warping we’d be in for a huge sea change in potential futures.
Yeah… I’m not going to tell intelligent sea mammals where pollution comes from.
Or how delicious they are.
If you don’t tell your sea life who’s doing the polluting, then transgender communists will.
Please. Talk to your local sea life about pollution.
(Brought to you by the Committee for Orca Attacks)
High temperature superconductors.
Specifically anything above commercial / household freezer (-18C); but if we could get to ~105C (above water boiling) it would change literally everything.
Electric motors become more efficient over a much greater RPM range.
Superconducting magnets become much easier to construct and run, this gives us a much better chance at fusion.
Transmission lines themselves are pretty efficient as it is, but all of the associated switchgear at the conversion points all gets really warm, this could be virtually eliminated.
The conductors on circuit boards, and potentially inside microchips. This reduces heat loading and thus makes all computing devices more efficient.
The conductors in batteries; enabling these to be smaller and thus increasing battery energy density.
Finally making super-capacitors actually viable as longer term energy storage.There are so many aspects of life that would be impacted by this one breakthrough, that it is probably the most important thing that will happen this century (scientifically speaking). It would be almost as revolutionary as when electricity itself became widespread.
Everybody is going to groan, but solid state batteries. That would be a huge sea change, not just for cars, but also air travel.
I don’t know about air travel. For comparison, Li batteries are about 200-300 Wh/kg, with solid state reading 3-4x that.
Jetfuel is 11000 Wh/kg. Hydrogen is 39000 Wh/kg.
By volume they might have an advantage but planes tend to care more about weight
I have good news for you, then. We’re now past the “discovery” phase and we’re at the implementation phase with solid state batteries, as you can actually buy production models: https://yoshinopower.com/
Yeah but they’re not there yet in terms of mass deployment and that’s still going to take some more technical breakthroughs. They’ll get there eventually but there might be some new discovery any day that would greatly speed up the process.
Yes, it’s brand new, but the mass manufacturing difficulties have been resolved. We might not have whatever future iteration of the technology you’re looking for, but it is unquestionably here and future developments are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary.
AGI
In the next 5 years?
I’m skeptical. In the next 20, sure.
Specifically, I think the abilty to make hydrogren from renewable resources at large-scale will change everything. Hydrogen fuel cells are more space efficient, and require less toxic manufacturing, when compared to current renewable energy generation and storage methods. If hydrogen is seen as cheaper or more green than other power sources, it will change the market completely.
Hydrogen generation is also an active research area, and just this year they’ve have some promising results for renewable hydrogen.
For everyone? Nuclear Fusion is on the cusp of reaching net zero emissions. Meaning we can create massive amounts of clean energy. Right now, we use nuclear energy off of Nuclear Fission creating hazardous waste and resulting in excess heat/waste
Nuclear Fusion would allows us to create clean energy with the goal of being net zero
Nuclear Fusion and “net zero emissions” doesn’t really make sense.
What I think you are trying to say is that fusion is nearing the point where net energy is possible (that is getting more energy out then the amount of energy put in to create the reactions in the first place). Fusion is not practically close yet, but there are tantalizing hints that we are close.
See this from 2022; the national ignition facility produced more energy that was impacted on the target (2MJ in 3MJ out), but this doesn’t take into account the huge inefficiencies in the laser generators to produce that 2MJ laser pulse.
There are a bunch of fusion experiments that are hitting massive temperatures (120 - 150MK) which is starting to get into the range where practical fusion could occur, the center of the sun is approx 15MK but also has massive gravity to encourage fusion.
So fusion is still a decade away at least, but we understand the science much more completely now. We know the problems (well a bunch of them) and it is mostly now a very difficult engineering problem rather a problem of understanding the science.
Yes. You are correct. Thank you.
Room temperature superconductors would represent the greatest leap forward since electricity itself. Ultra-cheap, ultra-high resolution MRIs, lossless power transmission across vast distances, massive gains in computing power, much lower cost supercolliders for advanced physics, low-cost magnetic confinement for fusion power experiments, and so on.
Just a note: Superconductivity is not only destroyed by temperature, but also by magnetic fields or a too high current. We might find a room temperature superconductor that is basically useless for energy transportation or high magnetic field applications.
Another problem: almost all known high-temperature superconductors are ceramics and thus very brittle and hard to work with.
What we want is a cheap, metallic, high temperature superconductor with a high maximum critical magnetic field and high critical max current density…
But of course any improvement could give big improvements in some applications. Having a nitrogen cooled MRI wound be awesome.
An6 form if room temp super conductor would be awesome. Like electronics will stop emitting heat and in case of ICs and microprocessors, difficulty to work with won’t he an issue as you fab them.
Also school level science experiments will get more exciting
More efficient or even lossless, sustainable energy storage.
Lossless is impossible, as
heat is produced and loses energyengineers will always put blinking LEDs on the batteriesThis is true. You only have to deal once with a device that doesn’t have a light or something to realize just how essential indicators are. I have sworn to the electronics gods to never to make a device without at least a power led.
