Top Tech Innovations to Watch in 2004

Jan. 23 -- In this week's Cybershake, we pick the minds of the big-thinkers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology for the hot technology of 2004. Plus, we note the music industry continues its war on suspected online copyright violators.

The Top Tech to Watch in 2004

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say 2004 will be a banner year for new technological innovations. And in the latest edition of the university's Technology Review magazine, editors and researchers highlight the "Top Ten Technologies" that will change our world.

Editor in Chief Robert Buderi, says the innovations run the gamut, covering "everything from information technology to fundamental biology to materials."

One field that is predicted to take off with innovations is so-called synthetic biology. That, says Buderi, is "creating life from scratch with the new genomic tools that we have, or altering existing simple forms of life like bacteria and in essence programming them to do certain tasks."

"We know some bacteria are good at eating oil, for cleaning up environmental waste," says Buderi. "What if you can tailor their genomes to do that even more efficiently? Release them at oil spills and [you] have a clean site very rapidly."

The rapid pace of development in information technology will also yield a novel tool that has been long in the works: a universal language translator.

Buderi notes that by the end of this year, rudimentary translating machines will be able to seamlessly understand and convert between only two languages — say, between English and Arabic. But even such limited systems would be a boon to soldiers and health care providers working overseas who need to instantly converse in foreign languages in order to save lives in danger.

And then there's T-Ray, or "terahertz radiation," technology. Like X-rays or infrared waves, T-rays are just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum but with unique properties.

"If you shine them or beam them on to some target, as they pass through different gaps or thickness of material, they'll take longer time or shorter time to pass through to a detector and from that [difference in] times you can get a spectral fingerprint of the material they're passed through," says Buderi.