New Technologies Report (Intec) 2024
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INTEC Report 2024: Taking action in an hour of the brave
The introduction to the Report on 10 Emerging Technologies to Power Spain (INTEC 2024) puts the emphasis on mechanisms to turn ideas into real transformative action.
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1. An AI that thinks in Spanish
Large language models (also called large language models, or LLMs), have experienced unprecedented growth, especially since the popularisation of ChatGPT in late 2022. These models, which are actually artificial intelligence systems and programmes trained on huge amounts of text, have been...
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2. Farming for water
The strategic value of water in Spain is enormous, due to its relative scarcity in many regions of the country, especially during the summer season and in periods of drought. Despite being a country with a great diversity of water sources, including rivers, aquifers and reservoirs, the irregular distribution of rainfall and the...
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3. The resurgence of phages in healthcare
Bacteriophage viruses - or, simply, "phages" - are a technology that seems like science fiction. Discovered around the same time as penicillin as a tool to fight bacterial infections, phages fell into obscurity, overshadowed by the success of antibiotics popularised during World War II. But, decades later, these microscopic creatures...
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4. CRISPR leaves the lab
CRISPR gene technology is world famous. The scientists behind its development, French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna, have received prestigious awards, including the Princess of Asturias Award for Research in 2015 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. CRISPR makes it possible to "cut and paste" code fragments...
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5. Towards sustainable aviation
2023 has been one of the hottest years since temperature records have been kept. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the planet is absorbing CO₂ at a slower rate, which could accelerate the consequences of the climate crisis. And the aviation industry is one of the most important factors...
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6. The biofuel era
Nature offers alternatives to oil One of the first alternatives to oil were biofuels, derived from the fermentation of naturally occurring sugars in plants such as corn, sugar beet and sugar cane. Plants have the ability to capture carbon dioxide and water directly from their own bodies....
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7. The catapult to the gravity-free economy
Since the dawn of the space race in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of systems to escape Earth's atmosphere and gravity has been one of the greatest engineering challenges. Over the years, we have seen shuttles evolve from the first space shuttles to the...
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8. Under the dome of the megaconstellations
Since the origins of the solar system billions of years ago, until just a few decades ago, our planet, the Earth, has had only one satellite orbiting around it: the Moon. However, since October 1957, when the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space in the midst of the Cold War, the Earth's orbit has not been...
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9. The awakening of green methanol
Methanol is the simplest alcohol. A chemical compound in the same family as ethanol, the ethyl alcohol in beer, wine and spirits, it is also colourless and has a distinctive odour, but is much more toxic. Methanol can cause blindness and, in higher doses, can be lethal to humans.....
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10. Educating with artificial intelligence
The advent and popularisation of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) has transformed different sectors of our society. In fact, both in previous editions of INTEC and in previous chapters of this report, we have analysed the potential of AI to improve very different technologies....