Michael Dennis is Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President Legal at CAS.
We live in interesting and dynamic times. On the one hand, humanity’s growing technical proficiency creates a lot of exciting opportunities. On the other hand, people need to overcome more complex challenges now than ever before.
This reality shapes innovation, technology and collaboration among businesses, industries and governments. With timely adoption and implementation, numerous technological developments on the horizon will create new opportunities, provide economic advantages and accelerate innovation.
Here are four technological trends that likely will be at the forefront in 2025:
1. Powering Technologies Of The Future
To meet global goals for the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), we need better batteries. Solid-state batteries are well-positioned to provide the next generation of power for EVs while also offering the potential of greater reliability and engineering benefits. Their solid phase nature makes them more durable, less prone to fires and more resistant to cold weather performance degradation. They’re also faster to recharge.
Based on their longevity and ability to overcome engineering limitations, these batteries will likely lead to decreased upkeep costs, potentially making EV vehicles a more economically advantageous choice. Major players in the car industry are already betting on this technology, with the likes of Toyota and Volkswagen investing in solid-state battery research. Mercedes-Benz is even aiming to produce solid-state batteries at scale by 2030.
2. Getting Ahead Of The Waste Cycle
One way to combat humanity’s continuing need for plastic is to develop and adopt technologies that make recycling profitable. This includes exploring innovative waste-to-energy solutions like plastic-eating bacteria or biomass conversion, which can improve the efficiency of waste management and offer financial incentives for companies to participate.
Breakthroughs in materials science have seen researchers develop a “self-digesting plastic”—a type of polyurethane (a commonly used plastic) containing spores of plastic-eating bacteria—to help reduce pollution. When these spores germinate, the bacteria eat away at the plastic, causing it to self-destruct.
Beyond waste reduction, biomass conversion technologies can turn organic waste and agricultural leftovers into materials like hydrochar or biochar, which can be used for electricity generation and improve soil quality. Furthermore, new battery recycling methods like bioleaching, electro-hydrometallurgy and direct recycling help recover valuable metals such as lithium, cobalt, aluminum and manganese, reducing the industry’s dependency on rare minerals.
3. Boosting Data Quality To Accelerate AI Success
The world of AI offers endless possibilities. However, utilizing high-quality, curated data sets and skilled algorithm experts is essential to the success of current AI models. So far, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have fallen short when it comes to specialized scientific and technical applications, but progress is being made.
Some of the innovative solutions we’re seeing include the production of synthetic data sets to meet AI training needs or “mixture of experts” approaches that utilize several specialized sub-models instead of a single large model to carry out specialized tasks. Compound AI approaches show considerable potential and have also demonstrated increased accuracy in medical examinations when compared to the accuracy of traditional LLMs.
In the domain of training self-driving cars, developing customized datasets is essential for safety, so collaboration between industry and experts is a key component required for success.
4. Leveraging Omics To Gain Unprecedented Biological Insights
Multi-omics is already making it possible for cancer researchers to study epigenetic effects and mutations simultaneously at the single-cell level and to better understand the causal relationships between the layers that make up a tumor, which will aid the development of patient-specific therapies.
AI approaches can make integrating the different data sets easier and offer opportunities to increase the throughput of these technologies, accelerating their availability. While combining data sets could be challenging, it could also lead to promising new drug targets and increase scientists’ understanding of how living organisms work.
Taking multi-omics a step further, omni-omics, an approach to provide a complete molecular inventory of a cell, can identify new targets, streamline drug discovery pipelines and accelerate innovation toward precision medicine for cancer patients.
Final Thoughts
2025 is set to be an exciting year with many promising technologies driving significant scientific breakthroughs. As these technologies mature, they will create new market opportunities while addressing pressing global challenges.
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