Technologists have laid out a 14 item list of the 21st century’s greatest engineering challenges to overcome. These were announced in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Committee chairman, former Defense Secretary William Perry: “We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and commitment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century. Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible.”
Google co-founder Larry Page: “Tremendous advances in quality of life have come from improved technology in areas such as farming and manufacturing. If we focus our effort on the important grand challenges of our age, we can hugely improve the future.”
The List of 14
- Making solar energy affordable: How do you convert and store the power of sunshine at a cost competitive with fossil fuels?
- Providing energy from fusion: How do you sustain a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power generation?
- Developing carbon sequestration methods: How do you capture the carbon dioxide produced from fossil-fuel burning, and confine that excess carbon underground?
- Managing the nitrogen cycle: How do you develop countermeasures for fertilizer use, internal combustion and other activities that contribute to pollution?
- Providing access to clean water: How do you address the short supply of water for personal use and irrigation in many areas of the world?
- Restoring and improving urban infrastructure: How do you renew aging infrastructure while bringing cities into better ecological balance?
- Advancing health informatics: How do you identify the specific factors behind wellness and illness, and follow through on the promise of personalized medicine?
- Engineering better medicines: How do you find new treatments for age-old scourges such as malaria as well as newly emerging diseases?
- Reverse-engineering the brain: How do you unlock the secrets of brain function, to heal human diseases and advance the field of artificial intelligence?
- Preventing nuclear terror: How do you head off threats from agents who are bent upon bringing ruin to industrial society?
- Securing cyberspace: How do you protect the global information infrastructure from identity theft, viruses and other threats without bogging down the flow of data?
- Enhancing virtual reality: How do you use computer technology to create imaginative environments for education and entertainment?
- Advancing personalized learning: How do you move from a “one-size-fits-all” style of education to more engaging teaching techniques?
- Engineering the tools for scientific discovery: How do you improve our methods for exploring the frontiers of life, the atom and the cosmos?
links:
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23175788/
