MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Every year, the editors of the MIT Technology Review compile a list of 10 breakthrough technologies that they think will shape the future. On this year's list - robotaxis, remedies for cow burps and the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. Those are just a few of the big ideas on this year's list, and one of the editors, Amy Nordrum, is here to talk about it. Amy Nordrum, welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
AMY NORDRUM: Thanks - glad to be back.
KELLY: OK, I want to start with robotaxis because I have been hearing all about these from friends and colleagues on the West Coast. These things are already roving all over LA and San Francisco. And I gather y'all are predicting they will roam even more widely this year.
NORDRUM: Yes, you're absolutely right. For years, there have been robotaxi companies gathering data in communities and testing out these services. But now it is becoming increasingly possible to hail one of these rides in dozens of cities around the world that are fully autonomous with no safety driver. And we think that this will be more increasingly common in the years ahead.
KELLY: Have you ridden in one yet?
NORDRUM: I did ride in one. I rode in a Waymo about a year ago, and I was pretty blown away by the experience. It felt very smooth, and it was interesting to observe the car, you know, doing its thing as it encountered different situations and handled curves and, you know, pedestrians or bicycles going in front of it. And just last summer Waymo opened up its services, so there's no longer a wait list. Anybody who goes to San Francisco can try it out for themselves.
KELLY: OK - next up, cow burps (laughter). What is the remedy for cow burps? This has to do with climate change.
NORDRUM: Absolutely. Yeah. The problem here that is trying to be solved by a number of companies is that when cows burp - and they do this a lot - they are burping up methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas. And that is actually one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. So because of this, there's been lots of effort for years now going into getting people to eat less meat, and that's still a good idea, but it's kind of hard to get people to switch. And as the world gets wealthier, that probably means beef consumption is only going to go up. So there's companies developing supplements now that can be mixed into a cow's food or water and will prevent them from giving off so much methane in the first place.
KELLY: Although these supplements are expensive, an extra expense for farmers. Are there indications that farmers will actually fork out the extra money - any incentive for them?
NORDRUM: Unless there's a policy maybe requiring them to reduce emissions or some kind of commercial advantage to using these, it's going to be tough, possibly, to convince farmers to do that. Denmark is trying this out. Their parliament there approved a plan to tax farmers for the emissions that their farms produce starting in 2030. And built into that as a kind of rebate for the farmers if they use these methane-reducing supplements. There are other companies. There's a company called Rumin8 that is saying its supplements can actually help the cows that use it produce more milk and meat, so there might be a commercial advantage there that could help. But that adoption question is a big one for this technology for sure.
KELLY: Fascinating. OK. Last one - you wrote about this giant telescope. It is being built on a mountain in Chile. This is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Why are astronomers so excited about this one?
NORDRUM: This is a massive project. It's been underway for more than a decade now, and it's going to be taking its first images sometime around the middle of this year. And the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy have been taking on this big project because astronomers are really looking to do a comprehensive survey of the Southern Sky using this instrument. It'll last for 10 years, and every night, the observatory will be taking photos of the sky, capturing the same sections over and over and completing the whole sky every couple of nights.
And they hope to use that to make the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, and also create a kind of time lapse video of the sky so that they can see how objects dim and brighten or move over time, which could lead to all kinds of new discoveries, billions of new stars and galaxies that we might find and lots more information, perhaps about things like dark matter and dark energy that we really don't know much about.
KELLY: Amy Nordrum, I think this is the third year in a row that I have talked to you about this list, which makes me curious for an update on how the track record is going. Did the breakthrough tech that you flagged these last few years - did it end up breaking through?
NORDRUM: It's a fair question. You know, we had - for example, on last year's list, we had the Apple Vision Pro, a consumer device, a headset that Apple was just about to release around this time, and there have been mixed reviews. Apple has not sold as many of those as they had hoped. So we've definitely had some that are more mixed. Others - you know, we had another item on the the list that was called AI for everything that talked about the infusion of artificial intelligence into so many services and programs that we use online every day. And that one, I would say - that was more on the mark.
KELLY: Oh, boy, you got that one right.
NORDRUM: Yeah, exactly.
KELLY: That's Amy Nordrum, executive editor at the MIT Technology Review. Thanks so much. Happy 2025.
NORDRUM: Thank you. Happy New Year. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
