Soonish summary

There’s an important difference between nuclear fission and fusion. Fission refers to the energy produced when atoms split apart, while fusion captures the energy produced by atoms fusing together.

So far, our attempts at harnessing fusion power have been inefficient and largely unsuccessful, though scientists are still hard at work trying to find a solution. There’s still much hope that fusion power will be a reliable and clean source of energy in the future.

Imagine living in a house that could change its structure depending on the weather. It might sound like pure fantasy, but such programmable matter that can change its physical properties based on its programming is actually already being worked on.

As you can likely imagine, programmable matter has the potential to be a huge asset for humankind, and not just in building materials.

Robots have been producing things for us for some time now, but there’s one area that they’ve yet to infiltrate: houses. This is because houses are big, complicated structures with lots of different elements and possible locations to consider, and robots are better suited for precisely-controlled factory conditions.

However, these obstacles may soon be a thing of the past.

Imagine walking through an actual forest with a virtual guide a few steps ahead of you, giving you the details of each type of tree you walk past. This is the kind of future that augmented reality or AR, will provide. Unlike virtual reality, which places you in a virtual world, AR adds layers of virtual elements onto the real world around you.

One of the benefits AR technology could provide is efficiency.

In 2015 alone, malaria killed over half a million people, and efforts to eradicate the disease have remained unsuccessful. But there is hope that the growing field of synthetic biology, or advanced DNA manipulation, could finally give us the tools we need.

Scientists can manipulate the DNA of mosquitoes with a gene that is resistant to malaria. Introduced into the larger population, it is believed this gene could quickly spread and wipe out the disease in any particular region. While this might sound like a miracle that should happen as soon as possible, scientists want to conduct more tests before releasing a synthetically engineered organism into the wild.

Despite the great progress made in modern medicine, thousands of patients still get misdiagnosed every day. In the future, however, we might be able to employ something known as precision medicine.

In a world of precision medicine, you could walk into a clinic and get an instant diagnosis and prescription of the best possible treatment. The key to this system would be biomarkers or biological indicators that would immediately detect any unwanted molecules entering your bloodstream, cancerous growths or even symptoms relating to depression.

While the previously-discussed 3D printing of houses is undoubtedly impressive, you might be wondering how far this technology can really go. Well, one of its potential applications may offer some good news for the 8,000 people who wait in vain for an organ transplant every year: bioprinting.

Bioprinting aims to let us print the organs that these people need. But, as you may expect, it’s an extremely complex procedure.

In sci-fi movies, we’ve seen characters plug things into their brain in order to quickly download life-saving information. However, the more we learn about the brain, the less likely it seems that we’ll ever be able to hook ourselves up to a thumb drive for a cranial download of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

So instead, what scientists are focusing on these days is how to use brain-computer interfaces to fix problems, such as blindness and paralysis, rather than enhance abilities.