10 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.(Technology Information)

THE TECHNOLOGY REVIEW TEN

What if you had a crystal ball that foretold the future of technology? Imagine, for example, if you had known in 1990 just how big the Internet was going to be 10 years hence. Sorry, that crystal ball doesn't exist. But in this special issue of Technology Review, we offer you the next best thing: the educated predictions of our editors (made in consultation with some of technology's top experts). We have chosen 10 emerging areas of technology that will soon have a profound impact on the economy and on how we live and work. These advances span information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology--the core of TR coverage in every issue. All of these areas merit special attention in the decade to come. In each area we've chosen to highlight one innovator who exemplifies the potential and promise of the field. Keep this issue around and see how well our predictions hold up--even without the aid of that crystal ball.

The Editors

MIGUEL NICOLELIS

Brain-Machine Interfaces

Belle, a nocturnal owl monkey small enough to fit comfortably in a coat pocket, blinks her outsized eyes as a technician plugs four connectors into sockets installed in the top of her skull. In the next room, measurements of the electrical signals from some 90 neurons in Belle's brain pulse across a computer screen. Recorded from four separate areas of Belle's cerebral cortex, the signals provide a window into what her brain is doing as she reaches to touch one of four assigned buttons to earn her reward--a few drops of apple juice. Miguel Nicolelis, a Duke University neurobiologist who is pioneering the use of neural implants to study the brain, points proudly to the captured data on the computer monitor and says: "This readout is one of a kind in the world."

The same might be said of Nicolelis, who is a leader in a competitive and highly significant field. Only about a half-dozen teams around the world are pursuing the same goals: gaining a better understanding of how the mind works and then using that knowledge to build implant systems that would make brain control of computers and other machines possible. Nicolelis terms such systems "hybrid brain-machine interfaces" or HBMIs. Recently, working with the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at MIT, he scored an important first on the HBMI front, sending signals from individual neurons in Belle's brain to a robot, which used the data to mimic the monkey's arm movements in real time.