Futurology articles

Though it's a year shy of the big decade marker, 2019 looks to be one of the most exciting and most important years for the tech industry in some time. Thanks to the upcoming launch of 5G and foldable displays, as well as critical enhancements in AI, robotics, and other exciting areas, there's a palpable sense of expectation for the new year that we haven't felt for a while.

Best known as the immutable database that runs underneath cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is poised to play a critical role in every industry imaginable as businesses seek ways to cash in on the distributed ledger technology's promise of enabling a "trustless" consensus to validate transactions.

As technology migrates from our desktops and laptops to our pockets and bodies, databasing and deep learning will allow for society to be optimized from the micro to the macro. Here are 5 technologies that may not be on your radar today, but they sure are approaching closer and are expected to become very relevant very soon.

Our brains communicate with electrical and chemical signaling, but scientists have discovered that light stimulation could hold potential keys to manipulating neuronal communication pathways that influence motor control, sensory perception, memory, neurochemical production and mood – or cellular virtual reality, as a report from the Journal of Cell Biology describes it.

Predicting the future is more art than science, yet it's always an interesting exercise to engage in as a new year comes upon us. So with the close of what was a difficult, though interesting year in the technology business, here's a look at my predictions for the top 10 tech developments of 2017.

Internet is the most important invention of the 20th Century. It has changed the way people communicate, cooperate, learn and trade globally. The last two decades has seen users rising from forty million to around 3 billion, with one billion added in the last four-five years itself. And yet over 4 billion people remain unconnected to the Internet.

Leap Motion touts its controller as a new paradigm in human input devices, allowing users to wave, swipe and poke their way through a digital world otherwise meant for keyboards, mice and touchscreens.

The miniscule gadget barely measures larger than a USB flash drive, however inside the Leap you'll find two cameras and three infrared LEDs capable of tracking hand and finger movements in all three spatial dimensions. Making use of motion-sensing technology to interact with your computer is at least refreshing, if not magical.