Google X Inspired: 8 Moonshots To Watch
Think big or go home. Google's pursuit of moonshots -- radical solutions to huge problems using breakthrough tech -- has encouraged others to launch their own projects. Here are eight worth watching.
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Google's affinity for moonshots -- big problems addressed with radical solutions -- first showed up in 2010 when the company began talking about self-driving cars.
As reports about the company's skunkworks, Google X (now simply X in the wake of the Alphabet reorganization last fall), surfaced a year later, the moonshots multiplied.
Under Alphabet's corporate umbrella, X is shepherding only a handful of hopefully revolutionary projects. Beyond self-driving cars, there's Project Loon, an effort to provide Internet connectivity through network hardware suspended on weather balloons; Makani, a startup providing power derived from large, tethered kites that function as wind turbines; and Project Wing, which aims to deliver goods to customers using drones.
There may also be undisclosed moonshots, such as a reported effort to build better battery technology. And of course there's the $30 millionĀ Google Lunar XPRIZE, which aims to fund an actual moon shot.
[See 10 Cool Microsoft Garage Projects You Didn't Know About.]
Google also has a separate research group, theĀ Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), which is pursuing initiatives like Project Ara, a modular smartphone platform, among others. ATAP's work is a bit more focused than X's research, but it's ambitious in its own way.
Some of X's projects have graduated from the lab. They may not yet have reached the moon, to so speak, but commercialization is underway.
Google X Life Sciences, responsible for Google's Smart Contact Lens and other health-oriented initiatives, has become a distinct Alphabet subsidiary, Verily. Google Glass crashed and was reborn as Project Aura, which has yet to reveal its revised wearable hardware. A computational photography project called Gcam has been moved under Google Research. Google Watch got folded into Android Wear. The indoor mapping effort known as Project Insight has been absorbed by Google Maps. The eerily named Google Brain, an effort to help machines understand images, audio, and text, has been integrated with Google Research. A sustainable architecture project called Flux has been spun out as a new company. And Project Tango has become part of ATAP.
That's a lot of innovation for one company, even if it's now spread across multiple Alphabet subsidiaries. But it goes beyond one company. Google's willingness to take aim at the moon has become a model for other innovators.
In 2012, Google created We Solve for X as a moonshot community. It's a think tank of sorts, an organization that aspires to address significant problems with unconventional thinking. Google of course didn't invent revolutionary aspirations, but its can-do technical ethos offers a convenient template for like-minded organizations and individuals. Participants include the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IEEE, TED, and other organizations.
Here's a look at the future as it might be, if any of these moonshots strike their marks. Scroll through and let us know what you think of these projects, in the comments section below.
What do you get when you add Kinect-style motion tracking, motion-controlled mirrors, machine learning, and computer vision? MIT researchers believe they can provide robotic localized heating. The device will direct heat at people as they move about. A robot that heats people sounds a bit worrisome -- ever seen the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? -- but when the alternative is the costly and inefficient heating of air, perhaps it's worth a shot.
Oil spills are a huge problem, in terms of both geographical and social impact. Researchers from the University of Taiwan have a potential solution -- graphene-based sponges that are both superhydrophobic and superoleophilic, which means they resist water but love oil. These qualities will allow the sponges to soak up oil in the ocean without taking the ocean with them. It might just work.
Worries about being eaten by robots, specifically robots designed to derive power from organic matter, are exaggerated. But we may soon have the option of entertaining robots in our intestines. Researchers at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery and the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London are developing an endoscopic drone in the hope that it can identify pre-cancerous lesions better than existing techniques, which mainly involve endoscopies and colonoscopies. It's a moonshot, in a manner of speaking.
Divergent Technologies sees a way to make cars using 3D printing. It claims its manufacturing process can reduce the environmental damage arising from traditional car manufacturing while also reducing the cost of the car itself.
What if you could eat plastic water bottles instead of throwing them away to clog landfills or litter the sea? That's the idea behind Ooho!, edible packaging made from seaweed. It doesn't have the familiar cylindrical structure of a bottle. Rather, it looks like a bag. It's a membrane, really. But it's far better for the environment than petrochemical-based plastic. The name's a bit if a problem, with its Yahoo-like exclamation point. Still, here's to hoping it shows up on store shelves soon.
Flaminia Catteruccia, a molecular entomologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, believes we can control malaria, and potentially other mosquito-borne diseases, through the release of sterile male mosquitos. This sort of thing is already being done in Brazil. Given concerns about the Zika virus, dengue, and other illnesses spread by mosquitos, this can't happen soon enough.
Ynsect, based in France, doesn't quite fit into its home country's culinary tradition. The company has come up with an automated system for turning insects into food and other commercially useful compounds. In the near term, bugs could serve as a protein replacement for increasingly expensive fish meal, used in fish food and to feed poultry, pigs, and pets. A bit further into the future, maybe it can put bugs on the menu in Europe and North America. McCricket Sandwich, anyone?
Maryam Shanechi, assistant professor of electrical engineering at USC, has been working on brain-machine interfaces. There are many challenges left to solve, but in time we can look forward to therapeutic machines that get into our heads. Imagine being able to dial away tremors or activate paralyzed limbs. With luck and medical ethics, connections to the brain will only be used for good.
Maryam Shanechi, assistant professor of electrical engineering at USC, has been working on brain-machine interfaces. There are many challenges left to solve, but in time we can look forward to therapeutic machines that get into our heads. Imagine being able to dial away tremors or activate paralyzed limbs. With luck and medical ethics, connections to the brain will only be used for good.
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