

Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years - axiom

When the transistor was first introduced in the late 40s there was quite a bit of hype surrounding it, but I wonder if anyone fully appreciated the significance of the development at the time.<p>Same goes for the world's fair in 1893, when Tesla's AC generators were first introduced to the wider public. I can't imagine that anyone realized how significant this was. Well, maybe Tesla.<p>So what are some major research results from the last 10-15 years that you feel will have a large impact?
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viergroupie
Without PCR (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCR>) almost none of the biotech
research of the past 20 years would have been possible. In the past few years
PCR has got absurdly fast and convenient. I think RT-PCR is kind of mind-
blowing. You can get an off-the-shelf solution that will (in about half an
hour) screen your blood for a set of known virii. Or snoop or your food for
toxins. Or whatever else you want to do with DNA...

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npk
1) Measuring the age of the universe to a few percent ~14 billion years. 2)
Determining the dark energy (70%) / dark matter (25%) / regular matter (5%)
breakdown of the universe to a few percent. 3) The Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
Hubble Space Telescope and Wilkinson Probe

I'm purposely being biased :)

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richcollins
> Determining the dark energy (70%) / dark matter (25%) / regular matter (5%)
> breakdown of the universe to a few percent.

Translation: We've figured out in even more detail how we have no idea wtf is
going on in the universe

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derek
The Human Genome Project, or perhaps just its completion since it originated
outside your window.

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nickb
Does Internet qualify? :) Probably the greatest thing that has happened in our
lifetime.

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axiom
The internet is definitely a great example. But I guess what I had in mind was
more along the lines of things that haven't borne their fruit quite yet.
Things that in retrospect people will see as seminal, but that are currently
still hidden in research journals.

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plusbryan
> things that haven't borne their fruit quite yet.

Well, what about web 3.0?

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greendestiny
Machine translation of language. In 10-15 years time, given improvement and
dissemination of the technology, we might massively open up the world's
communication. This could be significant as we massively increase the
marketplace of ideas and communication.

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nickb
Are you a MT practitioner? Email me (email in profile).

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greendestiny
Nope. Purely an interested bystander on this one. While I hate saying leave it
to Google they are working quite hard on this one and they have quite a lot of
data.

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nickb
Are you in a startup? I'm working on something in this area... that's why I
ask. You were the first one who mentioned this (that I saw) on n.yc.

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robg
I'm biased: functional MRI

We're just now scratching the surface as to how humans derive their intellect
from 3.5 pounds of squishy grey stuff. Some questions we'll never have licked,
but the future looks good.

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viergroupie
I totally agree, even more so considering recent advances in real-time fMRI
(<http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html>),

I also nominate EROS (<http://www.answers.com/topic/event-related-optical-
signal>) as a revolution in the making. I think it will deliver some huge
discoveries in the activity of the human cortex.

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robg
Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather
than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond
resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting
better and better.

As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect
activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively
inexpensive technique that is not invasive to the test subject."

That's a big problem it will need to overcome to compete.

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viergroupie
While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data
collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of
fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious.
For the first time fMRI is giving us access to _when_ brain activity happens,
which is nearly as importnat as knowing _where_. If you look at the
biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'll see it's extremely exciting.

Also, I don't view the depth restriction of EROS as a very big problem. There
are enough mysteries lurking in the top 3 centimeters of your brain to keep
academia busy for a hundred years.

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robg
I don't know about the BOLD delay being "atrocious". We get good temporal
resolution and it's getting better and better (hundreds of milliseconds for
some paradigms). I agree though - the biofeedback stuff is very exciting.

As for below the first few centimeters, that's where the control network is in
mid-brain structures. That's kind of important, and if EROS can't penetrate
deeper and with precision it's not likely to be widely adopted.

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viergroupie
I think part of the reason neuro-imaging is so preoccupied with midbrain
structures at the moment is because their activity is simpler and easier to
correlate to the brain's inputs or outputs. With the huge boost in both
spatial and temporal resolution EROS provides we can put more focus where the
cognitive action is (the cortex).

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aristus
0\. Sophisticated manipulation of nanotubes.

1\. Metamaterials (discovered in the 40s, but only confirmed in the late 90s).

2\. Weird properties of DNA. Your DNA, for example, contains encodings of many
of the viruses you are immune to; in certain cases they might even
"spontaneously generate".

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plinkplonk
Probabilistic Robotics (think the Darpa Car Races)

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jfoutz
This is the one.

No more big rigs, ups drivers, fed ex drivers, taxi drivers, pizza drivers.

The tech seems extensible to store shelf stocking, so a pretty big chunk of
_all_ transportation of goods should be automated.

It's easy to envision a retailer that has automated delivery from the factory
floor to the store shelf.

This will be huge.

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rkabir
Better wireless data. I know this isn't really new, but I know it's a recent
deployment in countries like Bangladesh. It gives you the opportunity to lay a
communication foundation throughout an entire third-world country at a
significantly reduced cost than laying down cable. I also remember reading
that in some countries, copper wire would be dug up by surrounding people to
sell. It's nearly free infrastructure.

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Kaizyn
Stem cell research and cloning. Growing replacement organs and/or cell sets to
"repair in place" damaged parts of the human body is going to have the
greatest impact in the long haul.

The mechanical heart is another wonder from medical science as well.

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iamwil
In 5-10 years, I'd say personal fabrication.

In 10-15 years, I'd say perhaps Human Genome

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Leon
I think he meant last 5 - 10 years?

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icey
He is talking about the last 5-10 years... Personal fabrication has been
available in a limited form for a few years ago, and Human Genome Project
started in... 1990 iirc.

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myoung8
Wireless electricity.

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staunch
That's one Telsa himself was working on 100+ years ago.

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kingnothing
Yes, but he didn't get far enough with it to be feasible for everyday life.

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clay
How about some gene therapy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy>

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rms
I think this will be the one, but we've got a couple years, at least.

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mytix
Almost everything will have a great impact. Alone those small achievements
don't have great effect, but together all of this is driving us to singularity
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity>). Ray Kurzweil had a
talk about this on TED (and his books are interesting too).

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altay
synthetic biology.

here's a fascinating TED talk from craig venter. (if you haven't heard of him,
he was instrumental in the human genome project.)
<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/6>

the part that was new to me was the idea of synthetic bio solving our energy
problems.

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henning
Support vector machines and other practical realizations of statistical
learning theory research that began in the 1970s.

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viergroupie
Why single out support vector machines? Sure, the kernel trick is neat but
there's really nothing about them that stands out above other classification
methods. It would make more sense just to say "the field of machine learning".

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henning
It's a practical (especially for small to medium sized data sets), effective
way of doing machine learning that has a highly sound theory behind it and
doesn't require arcane tricks that are rarely or never written down, unlike
old-style artificial neural networks.

The interest in kernel methods is proof that there's nothing more practical
than a good theory. :)

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viergroupie
At the same time, I think it's astounding how often k-nearest neighbors (a
method considerably simpler than SVMs) is either the best or second-best
classifier for a dataset. I'm not trying to pit SVMs vs. neural
networks...rather I'm saying most methods of machine learning (neural nets,
SVMs, gaussian mixture, kNN, what have you) can be effective and none stand
out above the rest.

~~~
viergroupie
Woops...forgot the squeeze an "often" before the "either"...

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byrneseyeview
"When the transistor was first introduced in the late 40s there was quite a
bit of hype surrounding it, but I wonder if anyone fully appreciated the
significance of the development at the time."

Uh. From what I've read, it was on page twenty-something of the NYT, with a
blurb about how it might be used in hearing aids.

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brlewis
Why are you so sure the transistor and the AC generator were not expected to
change the world? Inventors often envision sweeping changes as a result of
their inventions.

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palish
I'm surprised no one's mentioned it: Dexter.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/anybots.html>

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nreece
1\. Internet

2\. Human Genome

3\. Nano-technology

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axiom
Nano-technology is one of these buzz words that's been applied to everything
from MEMS to car polish creams. It's so amorphous and vague that the only
definition I can think of is "anything that's pretty damn small." I'm really
not sure if it's a useful term at all anymore, or if it just obscures whatever
it's used to describe.

One of my good friends is doing his PhD on MEMS micro-manipulators. But his
work falls under non-linear control systems. Can it be described as nano-
technology? sure, but what does that tell you? it hardly clarifies what his
research is about, it just makes it sound like he's seeking funding from
gullible VC's :)

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randallsquared
Yeah, nanotechnology was coined to mean molecular manufacturing -- mechanical
chemistry. Unfortunately, it's been applied too widely, and so we now have to
use these clumsier terms to describe Drexler's idea.

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JulianMorrison
The concept of SENS and the "engineering" approach to ageing.
<http://www.sens.org>

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jgamman
photovoltaics, slow but steady. not much else counts if we don't have the
juice to run it. continuing with the energy theme, the fusion reactor is
approaching unity with the next iteration predicted to >= unity, if that bad
boy can generate more out than in, we'll be in a very different world 50 years
from now.

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myoung8
Quantum teleportation.

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jsmcgd
Genetic algorithms.

~~~
richcollins
Older than 15 years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm#History>

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deltapoint
Cloning and aerogel

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vuknje
Semantic web. I'm suprised no one mentioned it.

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pg
I think this is more of a _planned_ research breakthrough. I.e. the type that
doesn't happen.

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vuknje
I think every research breakthrough is planned. Impact on civilization is what
counts. I just have an impression people are not aware of the huge impact
Semantic web will have. Why there are no more startups dealing with SW
problems?

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axiom
I think pg's point is deeper than that. Research breakthroughs are made by one
or two (usually one) very smart guys. Breakthroughs don't happen because
consortiums and commitees declare "let the web be sematic!", which seems to be
the case with the sematic web idea.

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DanielBMarkham
Christmas Tree Machines. We've seen the beginnings of home fabrication
(including fabricating entire homes!) but as this technology progresses, it
will impact the entire supply chain and wholesale/retail sector. May be a
hundred years, though. But we've seen the beginnings already.

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lst
less is more (all-time record)

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AlexanderHood
The internet is just a more sophisticated version of the cave drawing. The
Genome is a discovery, not a breakthrough. The last true breakthrough was
splitting the atom. Perhaps creating life from Methane gas and electricity
would qualify.

