1) Gene Therapy 2.0

Gene-therapy researchers have surmounted many of those early problems by using viruses that are more efficient at transporting new genetic material into cells.

But several challenges remain. While gene therapies have been developed for several relatively rare diseases, creating such treatments for more common diseases that have complex genetic causes will be far more difficult. In diseases like SCID and hemophilia, scientists know the precise genetic mutation that is to blame. But diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart failure involve multiple genes—and the same ones aren’t all involved in all people with those conditions.

Nonetheless, for many parents, the success of gene therapy is already real. A treatment they had never heard of rid can get their child of a horrific disease.

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603498/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-gene-therapy-20/

2) Hot Solar Cells

Solar panels cover a growing number of rooftops, but even decades after they were first developed, the slabs of silicon remain bulky, expensive, and inefficient. Fundamental limitations prevent these conventional photovoltaics from absorbing more than a fraction of the energy in sunlight.

But a team of MIT scientists has built a different sort of solar energy device that uses inventive engineering and advances in materials science to capture far more of the sun’s energy. 

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603497/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-hot-solar-cells/

3) The Cell Atlas

In 1665, Robert Hooke peered down his microscope at a piece of cork and discovered little boxes that reminded him of rooms in a monastery. Being the first scientist to describe cells, Hooke would be amazed by biology’s next mega-project: a scheme to individually capture and scrutinize millions of cells using the most powerful tools in modern genomics and cell biology.   

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603499/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-the-cell-atlas/

4) Reinforcement Learning

The reinforcement learning is largely how AlphaGo, a computer developed by a subsidiary of Alphabet called DeepMind, mastered the impossibly complex board game Go and beat one of the best human players in the world in a high-profile match last year. Now reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games. In addition to improving self-driving cars, the technology can get a robot to grasp objects it has never seen before, and it can figure out the optimal configuration for the equipment in a data center.

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603501/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-reinforcement-learning/

5) Botnets of Things

Botnets are used to commit click fraud. Click fraud is a scheme to fool advertisers into thinking that people are clicking on, or viewing, their ads. There are lots of ways to commit click fraud, but the easiest is probably for the attacker to embed a Google ad in a Web page he owns. Google ads pay a site owner according to the number of people who click on them.

The attacker instructs all the computers on his botnet to repeatedly visit the Web page and click on the ad. Dot, dot, dot, PROFIT! If the botnet makers figure out more effective ways to siphon revenue from big companies online, we could see the whole advertising model of the Internet crumble.

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603500/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-botnets-of-things/

List Curated from MIT and Techreview List