WANT TO BECOME A BILLIONAIRE?

JUST SOLVE ONE OF THESE 10 PROBLEMS

If you fancy yourself as someone who could be turned into a billionaire, you were arguably
cheating. The real challenge, and the greater value and more lucrative pursuit, would be to
come up with the solutions to problems that have befuddled engineers for decades. So, think
of just 10 such problems and they are:

1. WIRELESS POWER
Digital devices have become so small that it can be cumbersome to plug them into a power
source. Longer-lasting batteries! The key is to find ways of squeezing more efficiency out of
the devices' other parts and stealing power from what's around you. University of
Washington engineers, among others, are at work on harvesting existing TV and cellular
transmissions and turning them into a power source.

2. RURAL, REMOTE INTERNET
Everyone agrees this is a priority. But there appears to be a hard way and an easier way to
achieve it. The former involves lots of expensive regulatory clearance and installations. The
latter, currently spearheaded by Google, is called Project Loon. The company plans to send
renewable-powered balloons to the edge of space to create an Internet network in remote
parts of the world. "We believe it's possible to create a ring of balloons that fly around the
globe on the stratospheric winds and provide Internet access to the earth below," they say

3. CHEAP, SCALABLE SOLAR
There are two ways to reduce the cost of raw solar power. One is to have a super-cheap
photovoltaic cell, with the tradeoff off that it's inefficient. Of course, more efficient cells cost
more to make. So everyone is racing to find a material or process that eliminates the tradeoffs.
Australian researchers say they've achieved commercial-scale efficiency with a set of dirt-
cheap materials first experimented with a century ago but never considered for this use:
perovskites. The scientists say they could help cut solar costs by 75% .

4. CLEAN COAL
The technology was recently the subject of a cover story, which said carbon capture and
storage "may be more important though much less publicized than any renewable-
energy technology for decades to come," since it would allow the world to keep burning its
most abundant fuel source. But it goes on to note that "developing reliable, large-scale CCS
facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly."

5. SUPER-LOW-COST INTERNATIONAL PAYMENTS
While this isn't a problem that touches the average consumer directly, the fees paid by
financial institutions to wire funds overseas can eventually filter down. Remittances, too,
while not over burdensome, would be much cheaper if they were sent over a decentralized or
distributed network free from network, acquiring or interchange fees This, of course, is the
problem Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like technologies, like Ripple, are looking to address.






6. A PILL THAT REALLY MAKES YOU LOSE WEIGHT
The holy grail of modern society and another that may prove impossible. But there may yet be
a way. In 2012, scientists at UCLA say they had genetically engineered mice brains to a key
compound that craves fats. The results, according to The Week, "These mice lived in a 'hyper
metabolic state,' burning fat calories far more efficiently than normal mice. They were
'resistant to obesity,' staying thin despite a high-fat diet without exercise. They even had
normal blood pressure, and showed no increased risk of heart disease or diabetes."

7. CHEAP DESALINATION
Water shortages continue to make the list of the world's most pressing issues. But
desalination plants have proved too expensive and inefficient to build. But Business Insider's
Dina Spector profiled the company behind a kind of solar-powered desalination process that
uses half the total energy most of it coming from solar of the best competing thermal
(fossil) methods, and one-fifth the electricity of reverse osmosis technology. A parabolic
trough collects energy from the sun. The heat is used to evaporate clean water from the salty
agricultural drainage water of irrigated crops.

8. DETECTING OR PREDICTING MAJOR WEATHER OR NATURAL EVENTS

The world community of seismologists remains divided over the issue of whether it will ever
be possible to predict earthquakes. It is a complex problem. And, to date, no one has yet
predicted an earthquake. Meanwhile the number of billion-dollar meteorological events climbs
inexorably higher.



9. UNHACKABLE PASSWORDS
2012 was the year passwords broke. Hackers have, through brute force, so far been able to
break through practically every firewall ever invented. There must be a better way. And
engineers are working on them. Google, for instance, continues to search for ways to turn
your Smartphone or some other device into a computer "car key," Another involves what was
once thought the holy grail of cryptography, called obfuscation, which masks the inner
workings of a computer program.

10. DEATH
It's happening. Google yes, it has appeared several times on this list, but that's because it's
interested, and it can just hired biophysicist Cynthia Kenyon from UCSF to join its Project
Calico anti aging team. Her experiments have produced roundworm as old as the equivalent of
80 human years but look and act the equivalent of 40. Google admits it's a moon shot, but it's
proved pretty decent at those.




[-A Compilation]