Life-changing Science
Today, many technologies are being developed that will enable humanity to live very differently in the future. They stay in the shadows of trendy gadgets and events, which is why they often go unnoticed by many people.
Digital money
Financial privacy could be improved in the coming years with the help of digital money. In today’s world, people increasingly abandon paper money, making it more difficult to buy and sell without the involvement of a financial mediator. With digital money, direct money transactions from one account to another become possible.
Facebook plans to launch digital money. The social network has announced that it is working on a Libra currency. China could also become one of the first big economies to launch its own digital currency. The People’s Bank of China is exploring the possibility of launching its own digital currency and considering it as a replacement for paper money.
The Internet that can’t be hacked
Scientists from the Netherlands are soon to complete work on a section of the Quantum Internet that connects Delft and Hague. After successful testing, the network will operate in four cities.
Such Internet would provide significantly greater security for communications. It is assumed that at the current level of technology, it cannot be hacked. Today, hacking into Internet communications is one of the biggest problems.
Work on the Quantum Internet has continued for many years. For example, China has created a quantum communication channel between Beijing and Shanghai, which are separated by 2,000 kilometres. However, such projects rely on classical electronic components, causing the quantum connection to break periodically. This increases the risk of hacking.
The network created by Dutch scientists will be the first in which information is transmitted entirely using quantum technologies. This uses a physical phenomenon called quantum entanglement. If unauthorized access to transmitted information is attempted, entanglement will be broken and the data will be distorted.
Hyper-personalized medicine
There are some fatal diseases that are so rare that they are not being studied. However, such patients may have hope of healing in the future, thanks to the development of genetic medicine. They will be able to get a personalized medicine to fix their DNA.
One of the first to experience hyper-personal medicine was an eight-year-old girl, Mila Makovic, who suffers from an incurable and fatal disease of the nervous system. Her condition is very rare — 2–4 cases per 100,000 births.
In October 2019, doctors identified the spot in the genes that causes the disease and created a cure. It was called Milasen. It did not treat the girl completely, but it stabilized her condition, allowing her to stand and walk with support.
Search for medicines by artificial intelligence
There are a huge number of substances that could turn out to be medicines. It is impossible to manually analyse all variants of chemical compounds, so artificial intelligence will help. A team of scientists from the University of Toronto has already managed to find six potential medicinal substances among 30,000 new molecules in this way.
