WSJ’s The Future of Everything

By The Wall Street Journal

Technology

What's WSJ’s The Future of Everything about?

What will the future look like? The Future of Everything offers a kaleidoscope view of the nascent trends that will shape our world. In every episode, join our award-winning team on a new journey of discovery. We’ll take you beyond what’s already out there, and make you smarter about the scientific and technological breakthroughs on the horizon that could transform our lives for the better.

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A Nuclear Power Plant in Yo...

11.22.2023

The next generation of nuclear power plants could be tiny, and that could mean big things for carbon-free electricity. Several companies including NuScale Power and Bill Gates’ TerraPower are developing small modular reactors that promise to be more adaptable than ...

WSJ’s The Future of Everything episodes:

11.22.2023 A Nuclear Power Plant in Your Backyard? Future Reactors Are Going Small The next generation of nuclear power plants could be tiny, and that could mean big things for carbon-free electricity. Several companies including NuScale Power and Bill Gates’ TerraPower are developing small modular reactors that promise to be more adaptable than ...
11.10.2023 Hearing Aid Tech Isn’t Just for Listening Anymore There may come a day when everyone will be wearing hearing aids. That’s because today’s hearing aids can do much more than clarify and amplify sound. Companies like Starkey are adding features like cognitive activity tracking and exercise monitoring. They’re ...
10.27.2023 Beaming Solar Energy From Space Takes a Big Step Forward What if there were a way to generate clean solar electricity from space and send it directly to Earth? It sounds like science-fiction, but Caltech engineers are working on ways to collect solar energy on orbiting satellites and wirelessly beam ...
10.13.2023 Going Electric? Why Future Power Could Come From Hot Rocks Want to go electric? We might need to dig a little deeper… into the Earth’s crust. Researchers and startups are testing new technology and drilling techniques to harness geothermal energy – heat from the Earth that can be used to ...
09.29.2023 What Planets Outside Our Solar System Can Tell Us About Life on Earth Is there life on planets other than Earth? For generations, scientists have puzzled over the question, searching for planets that might have the right conditions both inside and outside the Milky Way. There are thousands of exoplanets – those beyond ...
09.15.2023 Real or AI? The Tech Giants Racing to Stop the Spread of Fake Images AI-generated or manipulated images are quickly becoming a lot more realistic. Soon, it may be impossible to tell the difference. That could create an opportunity for people to spread misinformation, and make it difficult to know what’s real. Tech companies ...
09.01.2023 No More Charging Stops? We Take a Road Trip in an Ultralong-Range EV The great American road trip has long been powered by gasoline. Gas stations are everywhere, making it easy to fill-up when your gas tank nears empty. But what if you’re trying to travel long-distance in an electric car and can’t ...
08.18.2023 Meet the Soft Robots Doing the Hard Jobs of the Future When you think of a robot, what comes to mind? A big metal arm in a car factory? A shiny android like C3PO from “Star Wars”? What about a robot that’s soft, floppy and looks a little more like the ...
08.11.2023 The Sensors Helping Farmers Adapt to Extreme Weather Farmers across the U.S. are facing challenges from extreme weather. From intense heat and drought roasting crops to rain-delayed harvests, many who grow the food we rely on are having to find new ways to adapt. For some, that means ...
08.04.2023 How Vaccines Could Help Ease the Threat of Deadly Fungal Infections The risks from fungal pathogens are increasing. Severe infections used to be rare, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates more than 75,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized for fungal diseases each year, and the World Health ...
07.21.2023 The Wrinkles in Getting ‘Forever Chemicals’ Out of Our Clothes So-called “forever chemicals” are seemingly everywhere. A recent government study found close to half of U.S. tap water contains at least one PFAS chemical. They’re also on a lot of our clothes, where the chemicals are used to promote water ...
07.14.2023 How Drugs Like Ozempic Are Changing What We Think About Weight Loss You may have heard about Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. It’s tough to miss the online chatter, the ads on TV and all the news coverage. They are part of a class of drugs originally designed to treat diabetes, and all ...
07.07.2023 Astronaut Fashion Is Changing. This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Spacesuit For the first time in decades, NASA is planning to send astronauts back to the moon. Their spacesuits will be very different from what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore when they walked the lunar surface in 1969. Spacesuits today ...
06.23.2023 How Do You Make Hurricane Forecasts Better? Send In the Drones Forecasting hurricanes is an inexact science. That's why they're called forecasts. But government researchers and meteorologists are working to make their predictions better, to help people know when they should evacuate and when it's safe to stay put. And that ...
06.09.2023 Greener Planes Are Taking Flight. That Could Change How We Travel Some of the world’s biggest aviation companies, including Boeing and Airbus, are working on the next generation of planes. One big goal? Making air travel greener by cutting its carbon footprint. So, they're ditching traditional jet fuel in favor of ...
05.26.2023 Can Flying Taxis Get Off the Ground? Imagine getting from your home to the airport and skipping all the traffic on the road in a flying taxi. They once were the domain of science fiction and Saturday morning cartoons, but a growing number of companies are working ...
05.12.2023 NASA Plans to Bring Bits of Mars to Earth. It May Change How We See Space NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting samples on the surface of Mars, and some of them will be coming to Earth—that is, if all goes well. NASA has a complex plan to bring bits of the Red Planet here, arriving ...
04.28.2023 Forecasting Future Diseases With Every Flush At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, epidemiologists looked to our sewers to help figure out the scale of the virus’ spread. It worked, giving some public health officials a heads-up before Covid surges. Now, researchers are taking the lessons ...
04.14.2023 How Recycling Wastewater Could Help Quench the West’s Thirst Severe droughts in the American South and West are raising new questions about how to ensure millions of people have access to clean, safe water. That’s why several local water systems, including one that provides water to 19 million people ...
03.31.2023 How Smell is Helping Treat the Toughest Cases of Trauma Our sense of smell is deeply linked to our emotions, due to the connections between the tissue structures that identify odors and the parts of the brain that govern our memories and feelings. But what if those smells are linked ...
03.17.2023 The ‘Mini Brains’ solving medical mysteries and raising concerns It may seem like science fiction, but over the past decade scientists have been using stem cells to grow so-called “mini brains.” Researchers prefer the term brain organoids, a collection of human cells in a petri dish that mimic the ...
03.10.2023 Melting Ice & Undersea Cables: How the Arctic Is Getting Fast Internet High-speed internet is something many of us take for granted. But the FCC says millions of Americans lack access to broadband service. That includes many people who live in the northernmost parts of Alaska, where satellite internet has long been ...
03.03.2023 Encore: Beyond Silicon? The New Materials Charting the Future of Microchips Microchips are in pretty much all of our electronic devices—if it’s got a plug or a battery, it’s probably got a chip. For the past 60 years, most of these have been made of silicon. But new devices demand faster, ...
02.17.2023 Why the Future of Mental Health Care Could Be in Your Gut A growing body of research suggests that the gut microbiome, the bacteria and other organisms that live in the gut, is linked to our mental health. But what if doctors could act on that information to treat mental illness by ...
02.03.2023 How Football Tech May Change the Game for Head Injuries When the game clock starts, football players aren’t just heading out with their pads and a game plan. Technology like helmet sensors that track the hits players take are becoming more common, especially for young players. They’re being used to ...
01.20.2023 Algorithms Are Everywhere. How You Can Take Back Control Computer algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly affect more and more of our lives, from the content we’re shown online, to the music we enjoy, to how our household appliances work. But the results these algorithms produce may be changing our ...
01.06.2023 From Laundry to the Ocean: Fixing the Microplastics Problem in Clothes Our clothes are in need of a refresh, but not in the way you might think. With each wash, everything from sweaters to socks are releasing tiny, microscopic fibers into our water. Almost 35% of the primary microplastics in oceans ...
12.23.2022 Navigating The Future of Maps From paper maps to smartphone apps, the way people navigate the world has changed tremendously due to the rise of the internet. Google Maps is the fourth most popular mobile app in the U.S. by unique visitors, according to Comscore. ...
12.09.2022 Making It Rain: How Cloud Seeding Could Help Combat Future Droughts This past summer, many parts of the world suffered from some of the worst drought conditions in decades. In an effort to create more rain, the government of China turned once again to cloud seeding, a controversial technique that aims ...
11.24.2022 Thanksgiving of the Future: What Climate Change Means for Your Plate Thanksgiving often centers around a meal: turkey, sides and a lot of desserts. This year, many Thanksgiving staples are more expensive due to inflation; in the future, many of those staples will cost even more due to the effects of ...
11.11.2022 The Problem With Plastics: Could New Recycling Tech Help the Planet? World leaders are still trying to figure out how to handle the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste generated every year. Back in the 1990s, it was tough to switch on the TV and not see ads or ...
10.28.2022 Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Future of Cellular Medicine Cells are the basic unit of life, but you could be forgiven if you stopped thinking about them after high school biology. In his newest book, “The Song of the Cell,” physician and author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee explores the myriad ...
10.14.2022 Are Personal Pigs The Future of Human Medicine? In the future, you might leave your doctor’s office with a prescription for a pig whose DNA has been modified to match your own. Scientists are already working on genetically engineering pigs to help predict the progression of a disease, ...
09.30.2022 Beyond Silicon? The New Materials Charting the Future of Microchips Microchips are in pretty much all of our electronic devices—if it’s got a plug or a battery, it’s probably got a chip. For the past 60 years, most of these have been made of silicon. But new devices demand faster, ...
09.16.2022 The Conservation Conundrum: How Do We Decide Which Species to Save? From “save the whales” to “protect the bumblebee,” animal conservationists rally advocates and officials to put resources toward ensuring the survival of a threatened species. But can we really save them all? Or are we overlooking the trade-offs as we ...
09.02.2022 Why Sound Could be Key to the Future of Coral Reefs With climate change warming the oceans, coral reefs remain some of the most vulnerable ecosystems. Keeping an eye on them can be time-consuming and expensive, since it requires divers to do spot-checks to see if the reefs are bustling, lively ...
08.19.2022 AI, Art and the Future of Looking at a Painting Three controversial paintings by Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt were lost to a fire in WWII. All that remained were black and white photos - and art historians have discussed what the paintings’ motifs and colors actually looked like for ...
08.05.2022 How Gene-Edited Crops Could be the Future of Feeding the World In the decade since CRISPR gene-editing technology was first developed, it has been used to address a host of issues, such as developing new cancer treatments, designing faster rapid COVID-19 tests and to make biofuel-producing algae. Proponents say CRISPR could ...
07.22.2022 Making “Organic Architecture” Truly Organic Neri Oxman spends her time thinking about the future of materials science and how it should influence architecture and design. In this session from the Future of Everything Festival, the architect and former tenured professor at MIT’s Media Lab speaks ...
07.08.2022 Fertility and the Future of Health Welcoming a child into your family can be life changing, but for those struggling to get pregnant the process can be emotionally taxing and expensive. Reproductive science is quickly changing, as is society’s approach to the issues around fertility. In ...
07.01.2022 Stocks Rise to Open Second Half of 2022 Also: GM shares rise 1.4% after automaker says profits won’t be affected by computer-chip supply shortages. Kohl’s shares fall 19.6% after calling off its sale to Franchise Group. J.R. Whalen reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
06.24.2022 Building the Metaverse and the Future of the Internet For decades, a virtual reality version of the internet has been a staple of science fiction. The metaverse is the latest iteration and it has the potential to become something more than a new gaming platform. But years before Facebook ...
06.03.2022 Waste Not, Want Not: A Future Without Food Waste Every year, even as millions struggle with food insecurity, about a third of all the food produced for humans in the world is thrown away, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. That not only means wasting water and ...
05.13.2022 Designing the Office of the Future: Building Serendipity The pandemic has changed the way we work and where we work. Now, as companies try to coax their employees back to the office, they are encountering new demands and shifting expectations. In this episode, we bring you a conversation ...
04.15.2022 The Human Genome “Rosetta Stone” and The Future of Health One person’s junk is another person’s treasure. Sometimes it’s even true in science. Nearly 20 years ago, researchers said they had completed a groundbreaking project, sequencing the human genome. But they were missing about 8%. Some researchers at the time ...
04.01.2022 Introducing ‘As We Work’ “As We Work” is a new podcast from the Wall Street Journal about the changing workplace and what you need to know to navigate it. Every week, we’ll speak with experts, Journal reporters, and you about how our jobs intersect ...
03.18.2022 After Higgs Boson: Physics’ Next Move to Understand the Universe It’s been more than a decade since the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) discovered the Higgs Boson, using their gigantic particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. After three years of upgrades, they’re turning the world’s largest machine ...
02.25.2022 Dark Matter, Public Enemy and the Future of Physics Physicist Stephon Alexander was born in Trinidad and grew up in a working class household in the Bronx. Now he’s a professor at Brown University and president of the National Society of Black Physicists. Speaking with host Janet Babin, Alexander ...
02.04.2022 Migratory Birds Struggle and Adapt to a Challenging Future Long-time naturalist and writer Scott Weidensaul has spent decades tracking migratory birds and studying their habits. But there's still a lot science doesn't know. In this episode of The Future of Everything, we talk to Weidensaul about the findings of ...
01.21.2022 Historical Soundscapes Reveal Quieter Future For Natural World A group of researchers reconstructed historical soundscapes using bird data to hear the impact of dramatic declines in birds throughout the world. Host Janet Babin and former WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz explore how these declines in our natural ...

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