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An expert international committee in 2008 came up with 14 “grand challenges of engineering”. The group – comprising scientists, entrepreneurs and thinkers – included Google co-founder Larry Page, biologist Craig Venter and chemical engineer Jackie Ying, head of Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. This is the list they came up with to secure the future.
Make solar energy economical:
The sun’s power is an attractive option as a long-term, sustainable energy source. It is clean and free. Overcoming the barriers to widespread solar power generation will require engineering innovations in several arenas — for capturing the sun’s energy, converting it to useful forms and storing it for use when the sun itself is obscured. Many of the technologies to address these issues are already available, but they are not cheap or efficient enough yet.
Energy from fusion:
This is the artificial re-creation of the Sun’s source of power on Earth. Human-engineered fusion has already been demonstrated on a small scale. The challenge is to find ways to scale up the process to commercial proportions, in an efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly way.
Develop carbon sequestration methods:
Carbon dioxide has been fingered as a major culprit in global warming. Carbon sequestration is capturing the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels and storing it safely away from the atmosphere.
Manage the nitrogen cycle:
Human production of nitrogen nutrients, burning fossil fuels and planting of legumes has disrupted the Earth’s natural nitrogen cycle and doubled the amount of fixed nitrogen over pre-industrial levels. Among the consequences are worsening of the greenhouse effect, reducing the protective ozone layer, adding to smog, contributing to acid rain as well as contaminating drinking water.
Provide access to clean water:
Through processes such as desalination, filtration and water recycling.
Restore and improve urban infrastructure:
Good design and advanced materials can improve transportation and energy, water and waste systems as well as create more sustainable urban environments.
 Advance health informatics:
Health and biomedical informatics encompass issues from the personal to global, ranging from thorough medical records for individual patients to sharing data about disease outbreaks among governments and international health organisations. Maintaining a healthy population in the 21st century will require systems engineering approaches to redesign care practices and integrate local, regional national and global health informatics networks.
Engineer better medicines:
Using personalised medicine – combining combining genetic information with clinical data to optimally tailor drugs and doses to meet the unique needs of an individual patient.
Reverse engineer the brain:
Getting a handle on how the brain works could lead to anything from circumventing neurological disorders by wiring materials into the body to take over from lost or damaged nerve cells, to designing new drugs or ophisticated computer simulations.
 Prevent nuclear terror:
Nuclear security poses acute technical issues, and engineering shares the challenge of finding the dangerous nuclear material in the world, keeping track of it, securing it and detecting its diversion or transport for terrorist use.
Secure cyberspace:
Ranging from protecting the confidentiality and integrity of information and deterring identity theft to preventing hackers from doing damage.
Enhance virtual reality:
This illusory environment can be used in fields such as psychiatry and education, for training and treating patients, for example. It is also a powerful tool for entertainment and learning.
Advance personal learning:
Personal learning involves instruction tailored to a student’s individual needs. Developing teaching methods that optimise learning is a major challenge for software engineers.
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery:
By, for example, partnering with biologists to develop better tools for imaging the body, developing better systems to explore space, and answering fundamental questions of physics.
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