Medicine, chemistry, transport, physics… 13 promising scientific advances to improve our daily lives
About fifty years ago, around 1975, a scientific revolution was going to change our lives: for the first time, personal computers, using new microprocessor technology, transformed our daily lives. Twenty-five years later, we entered the era of digital Internet networks which have since become omnipresent. From now on, it is the tools of artificial intelligence that herald a profound transformation of our habits and the world of work. But other scientific revolutions are taking place before our eyes, sometimes without us realizing it.
There, the design of new drugs is accelerating. Here, knowledge of the infinitely small and the infinitely large continues to transcend borders. The United Nations itself is not mistaken, having declared 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, another revolution underway in the field of modern physics. Enough to make you dizzy at times. The Pilgrim offers you a selection of innovations that will revolutionize the future. It remains for the citizens and consumers that we are, amazed by so much real or promised progress, to keep a cool head so as not to lose the heart of our humanity in the process.
1. Medicine: brain mapping and the development of brain implants
2. Robotics: transforming our daily lives with humanoid robots
3. Climate: capture CO2 with COF-999, an innovative powder
This is the number of kilograms of atmospheric CO2 that can be captured by 200 grams of a particularly porous orange-yellow powder, nicknamed COF-999, manufactured and studied by a Californian team from Berkeley (United States). This is the equivalent of what an adult tree absorbs in a year.
Promising research as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere reach increasingly alarming levels on a global scale, accelerating the most dangerous climate disruptions.
4. Pollution: eliminating plastic from the oceans using innovative solutions
5. Chemistry: a promising technology to effectively degrade eternal pollutants
15 is the multiplication factor obtained by French chemists from the CNRS and the laboratories of the Saclay plateau (Essonne), in collaboration with a Chinese team from the University of Hefei. They have developed a technology multiplying by 15 the current capacity for degradation of “eternal pollutants”, per- and polyfluoro-alkylated molecules (PFAS) which are particularly persistent in water and soil. Although this work is still at the basic research stage, it opens the way to effective treatments to eliminate these toxic and now omnipresent pollutants.
6. Prevention: anticipate and better manage future pandemics with the WHO
7. Computer Science: Solving Complex Problems Using a Revolutionary Quantum Processor
8. Transport: going green with a long-range electric truck
9. Pharmaceuticals: promising drugs to transform the treatment of obesity, addictions and neurological diseases
10. Physics: capturing the movement of electrons to open new perspectives in chemistry and electromagnetism
625. This is the exposure time, in attoseconds (billionth of a billionth of a second), that a team from the University of Arizona (United States) managed to obtain to capture the movement of electrons. Thanks to ultra-fast light pulsations generated by lasers, American researchers were able to perceive the very activity of these particles which gravitate around the nuclei of atoms. Enough to open new doors to the understanding of chemical and electromagnetic reactions.
