Fracking
Thanks to hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, as it’s often called—America’s shale fields are now capable of yielding massive quantities of previously inaccessible natural gas. Last year alone, estimates of unproved shale gas reserves jumped by 30 percent. Here’s how it works: Sand, water and lubricating chemicals are mixed in a slurry blender, then injected into a well at pressures high enough to make cracks form in the surrounding rock, releasing the gas or oil trapped within its pores. Although the method has been used for decades, its use in horizontal shale wells is new—and attracting new controversy. Opponents cite the technique’s environmental impact (drinking-water contamination is a particular concern), and studies suggest it may cause minor earthquakes. Energy companies and environmental groups are gearing up for a fight in the coming year.
Homomorphic Encryption
Researchers at IBM recently cracked a decades-old problem: how to encrypt data so that other people can sort and search it without actually revealing the contents. As cloud computing becomes more pervasive over the next year, this “homomorphic” encryption will allow companies to store sensitive data on remote servers, where it can be kept secret from the server's host, but still be easily accessed and searched. Users will also be able to enter search-engine queries and receive results without the search engine ever knowing or having a record of their query. The key breakthrough was a “double-blind” scheme that can check for encryption errors and fix them without revealing the data. Best of all, the researchers demonstrated that the technique can be implemented in just a few minutes on a standard PC, not just high-priced super-computers.
Flywheel Energy Storage
If we are going to retool our electric grid to incorporate more renewable energy sources, we need to find better ways of storing energy. One solution that has been talked about for decades is the use of flywheels: large, heavy wheels that store energy by spinning rapidly and release it through a generator that converts it back into electricity. The upshot: A utility can swiftly ramp up supply or taper it off to meet demand. After years of false starts, the first large-scale flywheel plant is set to open in 2011. Beacon Power’s 20-Mw plant in Stephentown, New York, features 200 flywheels, each with a magnetically levitated rotor that spins at up to 16,000 rpm.
Complex-Event Processing
Corporations and governments routinely comb through enormous databases of information and images (such as those pulled from surveillance cameras) in search of patterns. But in today’s data-rich world, an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio can make it time-consuming and expensive to find anything relevant. A new generation of software is shifting the focus from “data” (a record of what’s happened) to “events” (what’s happening right now). Companies like StreamBase Systems and Tibco offer complex-event processing systems that analyze enormous flows of data in real time using new database and pattern-recognition approaches. This allows them to make instant decisions about whether to make a stock trade, initiate surveillance on a potential terrorist or halt a suspicious credit-card transaction. As the technology matures, we can expect these capabilities to trickle down to consumer devices. This would allow, for example, a GPS-enabled cellphone to sift through a constant stream of location-aware offers and alert users only to ones they would actually be interested in—such as deals on coffee along their morning commute route during the hours when they make the trek.
Mechanophores
America's infrastructure needs renewal, but we can't just rebuild everything at once: We need effective ways to figure out which structures are closest to failure. One approach is to integrate tiny wireless sensors into new construction. Another is to incorporate “mechanophores,” a class of materials recently developed at the University of Illinois that change color when they are stressed. Mechanophores could give an engineer a quick visual indication of whether a bridge is at risk and where the trouble lies. The researchers are currently working to tune the reaction so that it can occur at any desired level of stress. They also hope to develop new mechanophores that undergo a self-healing response when they are damaged.
