Nostradamus strikes back

Forget stem cells, pharmacogenomics and the next big cure - Michael Kenward gazes into his prophecy book to see what the physical sciences have in store for us this year. Or maybe not.

New Years have a habit of rushing by in a blur of parties and resolutions, especially after you have seen a lot of them. But that does not stop us from using the winter equinox as an excuse to cast aside the journalists' usual pursuit of verifiable facts and to offer some hostages to fortune for the coming year.

First, a word of warning, our track record is such that no one in their right mind would put money on the suggestion that nuclear fusion really will happen one day and that taming the Sun would solve the world’s energy problems. Needless to say, the official time horizon for commercialisation of fusion has stretched from 25 years when the fusion community held its first conference on reactors to an optimistic 40 years today.

So anyone who wants to make money out of R&D can safely ignore the fact that 2005 was the year in which the world picked somewhere to build the next big machine. Unless, that is, you make some of the kit that will go into ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

Silicon gulch

We can be a bit more confident about of quicker returns from some of the scientific announcements of 2005. Take silicon. Not to be confused with enhancing silicone, this magic element continues to confound the jeremiahs who write it off as electronics moves to ever smaller devices that have to do more than just move around electrons.

Silicon will never, they used to say, match the photonic materials that can carry photons as well as electrons. Wrong. "The Impossible Is Possible" proclaimed the announcement from Brown University "Laser Light from Silicon". It was a simple matter of changing the atomic structure of silicon itself "by drilling billions of holes in a small bit of silicon using a nanoscale template".

The year gave us not only silicon that pumped out light, but "stretchable" silicon. The usual effusive press release that went with the scientific paper, in Science no less, tells us that "Functional, stretchable and bendable electronics could be used in applications such as sensors and drive electronics for integration into artificial muscles or biological tissues, structural monitors wrapped around aircraft wings, and conformable skins for integrated robotic sensors." The release also quotes the man behind the paper, John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as saying that "Stretchable silicon offers different capabilities than can be achieved with standard silicon chips."

There was also talk of "orbitronics", which seems to have something to do with spintronics (see Spintronics – the quick guide). This time, the story was from Stanford University where physicists described orbitronics as "an alternative to conventional electronics that could someday allow engineers to skirt a daunting limit while still using cheap, familiar silicon". It was something to do with heat dissipation.

Piling on the evidence, the journal Nature Physics tells us that "the orbital Hall effect could produce orbital currents to keep silicon ahead of the pack".

Power plays

For other signs of life in silicon, look no further than another of the hot tips for 2006, renewable energy. There was even a solar-powered IPO over in California, where SunPower placed 7,700,000 shares of its Common Stock at $18 per share

We confidently predict that 2006 will see even more investment in renewable energy systems. The Russians have done their bit to promote this by pulling the plug on gas sales to Ukraine. With that sort of activity, you suddenly long for the return of the oil sheikhs. But when you look at this list of the UK's top 10 renewable energy projects for 2005, you have to ask yourself how the country can possibly abandon hydrocarbons. These are major bits of kit, but they add up to a row of candles.

And where is the answer to the fastest growing use of oil? Air travel is rapidly overtaking other uses of energy, and the growth predicted in the UK's transport policy would wipe out all savings by 2030. So, if we want to keep flying all over the planet, we will have to abandon all other uses of hydrocarbons.

We aren't the only ones who think that the furore surrounding climate change and oil prices is good news for technology. Look for plenty of people trying to make money out of solar energy this year.

SiliconValley.com alerted us to a Dow Jones/AP story reporting that in the first three quarters of 2005 venture capitalist firms invested in solar energy "more than twice what they allocated during all of 2004, and 30 times what they invested in solar a decade ago".

Then again, we have been here before. Older readers may recall that we had an oil shock in the 1970s. Governments shovelled money into energy R&D, think tanks thought, but then they tanked. Oil prices collapse and it was back to business as usual. This time, though, we do have the climate thing.

Big oil companies are certainly putting money into renewable energy, so there will also be serious competition. And this time around, the majors are throwing real money into the sector, not the PR amounts, designed to get headlines without denting the cash flow, of earlier ventures.

One thing you might not have worried about, as someone watching technology, is the price of sugar. But here we have a web site we watch for information on fuel cells warning of the possible continuation of fluctuating sugar prices in 2006.

For really interesting price wobbles that should be a spur to technological activity, how about natural gas? Which brings us back to the beginning, no predictions on the likely state of gas prices for 2006, but a strong suspicion that thanks to recent events the increasingly relaxed purveyors of kit for nuclear power stations will begin to see money flowing this year.

Toy stories

Toys are always on the mind at this time of the year, and in the UK at least, this year's toy that dads bought themselves for Christmas was an in-car navigation system. Put that together with the launch of the first of the array of Galileo satellites and you wonder if there is much room left for innovation from smaller businesses. Isn't this big boys' territory?

An item from Technology Review shows just one of the possibilities, a services that adds intelligence to the basic technology, number crunching traffic data and providing travellers with useful advice.

One prediction for 2006 is that we will see many more ideas like this coming along. Indeed, we have barely started to think about all the ways of adding intelligence to transport. How about a mobile phone service that navigated you on a complicated railway journey? On second thoughts, that would require joined up thinking on the part of the railway industry, a notion that will have anyone in the UK rolling about with laughter. It could happen just about anywhere else in Europe though.