10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007

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Bendable concrete is 40 percent lighter than regular concrete and 500 times more resistant to cracking under pressure. (Photograph by ACE-MRL)

The nickname for Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is self-explanatory: bendable concrete. Specially coated microscopic polymer fibers slide past each other instead of snapping under stress, so ECC bends without breaking. The material has been used to create stretchable expansion joints for a Michigan bridge, and to allow the coupling beams in a 41-story tower in Yokohama to flex during Japan's frequent earthquakes.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: LOWIt could take years for ECC to be commonly used in construction, unless a major earthquake puts it in the spotlight.

Flash memory, with no moving parts to break or wear down, is the data storage technology of choice for devices such as iPods and digital cameras. But phase-change RAM is set to overtake flash entirely—it uses a chemical found in rewritable discs, which is alternately heated and cooled to store data. The result is memory that's 30 times faster than flash, with more than 10 times the life span.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: HIGHSamsung demonstrated a PRAM prototype in September and expects PRAM-enabled devices to be available in 2008.

Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually—more than triple the current solar output of the entire country.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: LOWSolar power still isn’t in wide use, so even a tech breakthrough will take time to have an effect. But the long-term outlook is brighter.

Starting this year, all new U.S. passports will include a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that stores a digital photo of the owner, as well as biographic data (name, date of birth and so on). The goal is to prevent passport counterfeiting, but hackers already have flexed their muscles: A German security researcher publicly cloned an e-passport at a Las Vegas conference last summer. The State Department promises additional encryption, which hackers will no doubt put to the test.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: LOWMost people won't need a new passport for years. And even if counterfeiters are able to swipe data to make forged documents, these RFID chips won't hold financial information or Social Security numbers.

Your car may have GPS navigation and radar blind-spot monitoring, but it still doesn’t stand a chance against traffic. The Department of Transportation’s Vehicle Infrastructure Integration program, which faces its final testing in 2007, might even the odds. The program involves installing a 5.9-GHz short-range wireless link in your car that can talk with other cars, as well as with control units at intersections and along the side of the road. Pool all the information being beamed from cars—speed, location, whether the wipers are on—and you have a map of traffic and weather conditions, so that drivers can be directed away from trouble spots.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: LOWThis is only the latest — albeit the smartest — in a long history of federal initiatives to win the war on traffic. Next year, lawmakers will decide whether to wire up hundreds of thousands of intersections and roads, but getting automakers to install standardized transmitters might prove even trickier.

Picture this: The cellphone in your pocket sends a tiny electrical current—a fraction of an amp—along your skin, so your car door springs open at your touch and your PC logs in when you grab the mouse. That’s what German startup ImCoSys says its new smartphone will be capable of, thanks to body area network (BAN) technology. Of course, proving those claims would require partner companies to build BAN-compatible devices, and no such deals have been announced since the phone was released last summer.
SHORT-TERM IMPACT: LOWUsing your body as a secure network is smarter than sticking finger- print scanners everywhere, but there’s no guarantee that BAN products will ever materialize.

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