World Economic Forum: Top 10 emerging technologies for 2012

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on emerging technologies released its top 10 emerging technology trends for the year.

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1: ‘Informatics for adding value to information’

“Big data” has been a buzzword in technology circles for some time. Harnessing the volume of data produced during our everyday lives is at the heart of some of the most sought-after discoveries. “Innovations in how information is organized, mined and processed hold the key to filtering out the noise and using the growing wealth of global information to address emerging challenges,” reads the report posted on the World Economic Forum’s Forum: Blog. In this photo, Carlo Ratti, professor and director of Senseable City Laboratory, MIT, watches a presentation during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 11, 2012.

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg News

2: ‘Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering’

“The natural world is a testament to the vast potential inherent in the genetic code at the core of all living organisms,” according to the council. Breakthroughs are allowing scientists to create organisms and biological processes designed for specific purposes. In this photo, an Affymetrix Inc. employee places a gene wafer into one of the photo lithography machines at the company’s production facilities in West Sacramento, Calif., on April 3, 2002. Gene chips are dime-size pieces of glass, infused with DNA fragments, that allow researchers to study how and why genes react to various stimuli.

Rich Pedroncelli / AP

3. ‘Green Revolution 2.0 -- technologies for increased food and biomass’

“By integrating advances across the biological and physical sciences, the new green revolution holds the promise of further increasing crop production yields, minimizing environmental impact, reducing energy and water dependence, and decreasing the carbon footprint,” the council members write. In this Oct. 26, 2010, photograph, arrays of bacteria gather sunlight and carbon dioxide and convert them to fuel at Joule Unlimited’s ethanol and diesel production testing facility in Leander, Tex.

Felicia Spagnoli / AP

4. ‘Nanoscale design of materials’

In this photo, Ted Skurmurski operates equipment in the 35,000-foot Albany NanoTech facility. “Nanostructured materials with tailored properties, designed and engineered at the molecular scale,” according to the council, “are already showing novel and unique features that will usher in the next clean energy revolution, reduce our dependence on depleting natural resources, and increase atom-efficiency manufacturing and processing.”

Michael Forster Rothbart / For The Washington Post

5. ‘Systems biology and computational modelling/simulation of chemical and biological systems’

“For improved healthcare and bio-based manufacturing, it is essential to understand how biology and chemistry work together,” according to the council. In this March 10, 2011, photo, a researcher of Future University Hakodate examines amoeboid with a microscope at a laboratory of the university in Hakodate, Japan's southern island of Hokkaido. A brainless, primeval organism that can find its own way through a maze might help Japanese scientists come up with the ideal design for a transport network.

Shingo Ito / AFP/Getty Images

6. ‘Utilization of carbon dioxide as a resource’

A Chinese motorist wears a mask as she makes her way along a smog-filled road in Hefei, east China's Anhui province, on Nov. 29, 2011. The amount of global warming gases sent into the atmosphere made an unprecedented jump in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's latest world data on carbon dioxide emissions. China alone was the biggest polluter with a spike of 212 million metric tons in 2010 over 2009.

/ AFP/Getty Images

7. ‘Wireless power’

There could come a day when pictures of power lines will be in the same stack as phonographs and gramophones. A pedestrian walks past power lines in east Sydney on Oct. 12, 2011. According to the council, “a number of emerging technologies are coming together to lay the foundation for advanced electrical energy storage and use.”

Daniel Munoz / Reuters

8. ‘High energy density power systems’

“Better batteries are essential if the next generation of clean energy technologies are to be realized,” according to the council’s top 10 list of emerging technologies for 2012. Advances in this type of technology could make the battery obsolete and could "supercharge the next generation of clean energy technologies."

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9. Personalized medicine, nutrition and disease prevention

The day of personalized medicine is coming, powered in large part by individual genetic coding. DNA kits are assembled at Qiagen company headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Aug. 12, 2011. “Advances in areas such as genomics, proteomics and metabolomics are now opening up the possibility of tailoring medicine nutrition and disease prevention to the individual,” according to the council.

Jeffrey MacMillan / For The Washington Post

College professors are reconsidering the lecture -- an age-old teaching method that, in far too many cases, is failing to produce desired results, <a data-xslt='_http' href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/colleges-looking-beyond-the-lecture/2012/02/03/gIQA7iUaGR_story.html'>as The Post’s Daniel de Vise writes</a>. This, among other developments, begs the question: Will 2012 be the year of individualized education? “Rapid developments in social media, open courseware and ubiquitous access to the Internet are facilitating outside classroom and continuous education,” according to the council. In this Jan. 26, 2012, photo second-graders Nica Martinez, left, and Beau Cash record some poetry in class at West Elementary in Sycamore, Ill. Each student in the early paperless classroom has a hybrid tablet laptop computer.

10. Enhanced education technology

College professors are reconsidering the lecture -- an age-old teaching method that, in far too many cases, is failing to produce desired results, as The Post’s Daniel de Vise writes. This, among other developments, begs the question: Will 2012 be the year of individualized education? “Rapid developments in social media, open courseware and ubiquitous access to the Internet are facilitating outside classroom and continuous education,” according to the council. In this Jan. 26, 2012, photo second-graders Nica Martinez, left, and Beau Cash record some poetry in class at West Elementary in Sycamore, Ill. Each student in the early paperless classroom has a hybrid tablet laptop computer.

Kyle Bursaw / AP

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National

World Economic Forum: Top 10 emerging technologies for 2012

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on emerging technologies released its top 10 emerging technology trends for the year.

Featured Photo Galleries