New senses to come

The theory of the basic 5 senses - touch, taste, hearing, smell, and vision - will be expanded in 2019. Thanks to new technologies, we will be able to transmit the data stream directly to the brain, thus forming a new type of sense, says Professor David Eagleman in his book “The Brain: Your Personal History”. This idea is going to be implemented in real life very soon.

Miniaturized satellite to replace large ones

Artificial satellites have been widely used in the Earth orbit and have gained a good reputation. However, these satellites are only affordable for countries having a huge budget on space exploration.

In the nearest future, CubeSat will probably grow in popularity. This is a standardized satellite cube of 10 x 10 x 11.35 cm in size which is supposed to reduce significantly the cost of launching artificial satellites. Some positive steps have already been taken thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk and other space enthusiasts.

CubeSat can be used for photography, atmospheric observations, and navigation. Tim Harford, one of the most respected economists in the world, predicts an unprecedented number of launches of such miniature space satellites in 2019.

Vacuum high-speed transport

It’s not long before the most ambitious transport projects of our time - the Hyperloop vacuum train - will be turned into reality, billionaire and founder of Virgin Group Richard Branson believes. Although the first commercial route is still far from being launched, the project is highly likely to be completed this year.

Blockchain and the art

With the help of blockchain technologies, the global art market will become more transparent and secure, and the problem of fakes will be resolved, former UK Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey said. By the beginning of 2019, 5% of all the blockchain technologies have been already involved in the field of art, and this share will only grow in the near future.

Fake videos to become part of political propaganda

Last year, Deepfake, a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence, came into life. The first fake videos made by a neural network turned out to be very realistic. Yasmin Green, research director at Alphabet, thinks that in 2019 such videos will be almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones. One of the dangers posed by such fakes is their possible use in order to discredit political rivals.