Modeling Surprise

Much of modern life depends on forecasts: where the next hurricane will make landfall, how the stock market will react to falling home prices, who will win the next primary. While existing computer models predict many things fairly accurately, surprises still crop up, and we probably can't eliminate them.

Probabilistic Chips

Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

NanoRadio

Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

Wireless Power

Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

Atomic Magnetometers

John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before.

Offline Web Applications

Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.

Graphene Transistors

A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors.

Connectomics

Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

Reality Mining

Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

Cellulolytic Enzymes

Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.