Bernard Marr
Paxlovid – A Pill For Covid
Vaccines have been hugely successful at cutting the risk of
dying from Covid-19, but they are of limited use against new variants, and they
can’t be administered once someone has tested positive. The pill developed by
Pfizer as a “cure” at the start of the year has proven to be effective at
reducing the chance of a person suffering from severe symptoms, even if given
after infection. Initial findings suggest that they reduce the risk of
hospitalization by 89%. The drug works by disrupting the virus’s ability to
replicate itself within the body – essentially by forming a protective coating
around the cells. The drug was actually approved for use in December 2021, but
it didn't make its way into general healthcare use until early 2022, so I’m
bending the rules slightly to include it in this list! More recent findings
suggest that it may even be effective for treating and relieving symptoms of
long covid – which until now have often seemed to be untreatable.
Nuclear Fusion – A Step Closer To Reality?
Physicists have long believed that we will one day be able
to harness the energy created via nuclear fusion – the same process that powers
the sun. In 2022, we took a step closer, as researchers at the National
Ignition Facility published a paper outlining their successful attempts at
creating "self-heating burning plasma." It's hoped that this
breakthrough will eventually lead to commercially viable fusion reactors that
will provide us with a nearly limitless, cheap, and clean source of energy.
Building on this research, startup Commonwealth Fusion
Systems is now working with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center on plans to
build a factory that can mass-produce components for the first commercial
fusion reactors. The first step will be to create prototype machines that will
be the first machines to achieve net energy production using fusion. Following
that, it’s hoped that full-scale production will begin on fusion generators
that will create energy that will be fed into national grids early in the next
decade.
Axiom One
Before 2022, breakthroughs in space flight in recent years
had mostly centered on "space tourism," with Virgin Galactic and Blue
Origin, founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, successfully carrying paying passengers
into space in 2021. This year saw a potentially more significant milestone
reached, as Axiom-1 became the first privately funded crewed mission to dock
with the International Space Station (ISS). Using a craft designed by SpaceX,
three astronauts successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center in April and
spent 16 days docked with the ISS’s Harmony hub. The Axiom-1 mission is
considered to be hugely important to the future of space travel as it is
planned to be a first step on the road to establishing a privately funded and
operated space station, which commercial businesses will use to carry out their
own research and development projects in space.
The World’s Biggest Carbon Removal Plant Opens
The Orca, close to Reykjavik, Iceland, is the largest and
most powerful facility of its kind, with the capacity to capture 4,000 metric
tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. The carbon dioxide is
sucked through filters that bind it with water and pump it into the ground,
where natural processes eventually transform it into carbon minerals –
essentially rocks. The facility itself is powered by carbon-neutral energy
generated at a nearby geothermal plant.
Although 4,000 metric tons might sound like a lot, in
reality, it's only equivalent to the emissions created by 900 cars. The genius
of Orca’s design, however, is that it is built using a modular design that can
be replicated relatively simply and cheaply anywhere in the world. Orca, and
other similar facilities, could prove to be a vital tool in our struggle to
keep rising global temperatures under control.
The World’s Second Biggest Cryptocurrency Successfully
Switches to Proof-Of-Stake
The “merge” of 2022 saw the popular Ethereum blockchain –
which acts as a distributed computing platform as well as a cryptocurrency –
successfully switch from a proof-of-work (PoW) model (similar to Bitcoin) to
proof-of-stake (PoS).
According to the Ethereum Foundation, by doing so, it
reduced the overall energy usage of the network by 99.9%. This is significant
because the large amount of energy used by blockchain networks has often been
seen as a hurdle that has to be cleared before the technology will live up to
its potential. Essentially, PoS and PoW are two different methods of validating
transactions on a blockchain – a distributed, decentralized database that
relies on cryptography to keep multiple copies of the database synchronized,
effectively making them tamper-proof.
As well as less energy intensive and therefore less damaging to the planet, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies that operate using PoS algorithms are faster, meaning transactions will be processed more quickly. Blockchain is proposed as a solution for a host of problems ranging from creating new systems of money to acting as the foundation of new digital societies and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Successfully managing the transition of a blockchain used by millions of people is a step towards proving that the underlying technology is sound.
To stay on top of the latest on new and emerging business and tech trends, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and check out my books ‘Future Skills’ and ‘Business Trends in Practice, which just won the 2022 Business Book of the Year award.
Bernard Marr
Internationally Best-selling #Author, #KeynoteSpeaker, #Futurist,
#Business, #Tech & #Data Advisor