Scientific innovation puts the future in focus

When you think of the future, what do you see? Flying cars and robots? 3D-printed organs and AI personal assistants? The technological wonderland we are promised in cartoons, comic books and movies might not be as far away as you think. 

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is home to scientific visionaries who are imagining the systems and technologies that will improve our lives over the course of the rest of this century and beyond. Their current research in fields that include artificial intelligence, batteries" target="_blank">energy storage, quantum and synthetic biology is opening up new vistas of opportunity. 

Robots? Yes, please! 

“We’re really just beginning to explore the human-technology frontier,” said Argonne Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology Sean L. Jones. ​“We’re taking robots and AI out of the laboratory and into our homes, where they can be not just a tool but a true assistant. The future does really look like AI-assisted living, where AI is something that touches every part of your life, and every part of science, as a positive reality.”  

The AI assistants who may soon be organizing our lives are based on foundation models. These models consist of trillions of pieces of information from which the model creates relationships and makes predictions for a logical response. Depending on what information you give the model, this response could be telling a joke or predicting the next COVID variant. 

When it comes to AI and supercomputing, Rick Stevens often looks far ahead. Very far ahead. Stevens, Argonne associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences, has made the case that we need to meet the demand for AI by planning for its power needs and its physical infrastructure so that evolving technology can be updated like building blocks.

Stevens has mused, ​“If we’re going to be building a spacefaring, 10,000-year civilization, we have to have technology like this. We have to be doing more than adding racks of hardware all the time.”  

He sees AI and supercomputing as the drivers that will carry humankind across the galaxy. But before we can punch our way out of the solar system, we need to harness the true potential of artificial intelligence.  

According to Jones, that potential rests in linking AI with additional major opportunities for scientific discovery, including autonomous discovery through robot-assisted experimentation. This could, for example, allow researchers to quickly sort through millions or even billions of potential pharmaceutical candidates without ever needing to do any lab-based experimentation, freeing up scientists to spend time only on the most viable possible solutions.  

Getting high-powered AI will require stronger and faster computers that can do more complex calculations — which in turn will require more energy.

“There is a link between AI, robotics and the energy picture,” Jones said. ​“AI can help us develop new energy solutions, but as we get better with AI and with quantum, those technologies will have additional energy demands.” 

Stevens echoed Jones’ remarks.

“AI needs chips. It also needs huge amounts of energy. The energy community needs AI for innovation and efficiency. There is this increasingly tight coupling between progress in AI and progress in technology and energy,” he said. ​“All of this is going to require more energy, not less. You’re going to have to produce more energy in a clean way and distribute it in a way that’s long-term sustainable.” 

Argonne is already thinking about new technologies that could help meet those energy demands, including low-power microelectronics that can use energy much more efficiently for high-powered computing.  

Into the quantum realm 

Quantum computing and quantum information science, though in their infancy, could have tremendous future impacts.

“At Argonne, we’re thinking about all aspects of the quantum picture,” Jones said. ​“First, we’re imagining what a quantum computer that operates at room temperature would look like — one that could fit on a tabletop instead of filling a building. Then we’re pairing that with the other quantum areas: quantum materials and detectors, quantum simulators and quantum networks. We want to be able to transmit qubits — quantum bits of information — instantaneously over vast distances.” 

Quantum information technology has the potential to revolutionize communication and computing. And quantum science could change how people interact with each other.

“We have quantum states in our brains,” Jones said. ​“Physicists are trying to come up with a framework for how we might use those properties.”

One technology that might emerge from quantum research could be a brand-new kind of internet, said Argonne quantum postdoctoral researcher Jonathan Marcks.

“Being able to network together multiple quantum computers would lead to a huge increase in their power,” Marcks said. ​“With quantum computers, the kind of information you’re trying to work with is very fragile, but it will one day be possible to generate some very large, entangled state between two computers separated by hundreds of miles. This quantum network is something we’ve already begun to explore.” 

At Argonne, Marcks and his colleagues work at a ​“quantum foundry” that produces materials for quantum computers and devices. At the foundry, Argonne researchers produce nearly defect-free diamond thin films — a thousand times purer than jewelry — that can serve as host materials for quantum information. These films are then distributed to other labs to enable further quantum research.  

These materials could also be used as ultraprecise sensors, Marcks explained.

“Imagine having nanodiamonds that you could place inside of cells that could tell you about biological properties at a quantum level,” he said. 

Bring on the batteries 

To enable AI and quantum science, the future of energy storage will also shift dramatically. Shirley Meng, chief scientist at the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS), foresees three big areas in which batteries will change our lives. Meng is also the newly established director of the Energy Storage Research Alliance led by Argonne and professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

“I believe that in the next 10 to 20 years, we’re going to see a tremendous growth in the number of batteries that we use in our daily lives, everything from transportation to electronics to backup storage in our homes,” Meng said.  

Meng points to heavy-duty trucking, a slice of the transportation sector that has heretofore been hard to electrify.

“Trucks are only a small number of the total vehicles on the road, but they make up close to a quarter of the total greenhouse gas emissions from transportation,” she said. ​“But recent battery developments and reductions in the cost of batteries are close to making electric heavy-duty trucks a reality, and in fact an electric semi-truck has already been piloted.” 

Meng’s optimism for the transportation sector does not stop there.

“I predict that in my lifetime we’re going to get to an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram or greater. That’s more than double current levels. This could in theory make possible personal air transportation — literally flying cars. It’s not unthinkable,” she said. 

“As long as we stay inquisitive, I can’t imagine the pace of science ever slowing down.” — Sean L. Jones, Argonne deputy laboratory director for science

One of the potential chemistries that could lead to more energy-dense batteries involves using a pure lithium metal anode, which can store two to three times more energy than a conventional lithium-ion battery, which typically uses a graphite anode.

“A lithium-ion anode looks like a bookcase,” Meng said. ​“By using a pure lithium metal, we’re just stacking the ​‘books’ on top of each other, which saves weight and increases energy density.” 

In addition to transportation, Meng pointed to energy storage for the electric grid as another promising potential avenue for societal transformation.

“Grid storage is a game of a different scale,” she said. ​“But we are developing new chemistries such as aqueous batteries and sodium batteries that could conceivably dramatically reduce the cost of energy storage for wind and solar. At that point, transitioning to a grid sustained by renewables makes economic sense. Pairing batteries with hydrogen as an energy source could also be a critical advance.” 

The third area Meng identified is microbatteries. These batteries, smaller than a fingernail, could power smart devices in our homes and communities, leading to the further development of an ​“internet of things.” For autonomous driving or global logistics, these microbatteries could have a big impact on the global energy transition.  

“Many of the breakthroughs that were not possible in the past are now achievable because of better nanomanufacturing. Even in areas in which we don’t yet have all the tools or our understanding is not yet quite mature, the investment in fundamental science and applied research based at the national labs will rapidly bring possibilities that were once the realm of science fiction into reality,” Meng said. 

One additional key for battery longevity is recycling.

“We’re working on how to engineer the materials so that batteries can last for decades instead of years,” Meng said. ​“When batteries can both last longer and be recycled, their costs will go down, enabling the energy transition.” 

Life reimagined  

Innovations in biology are also shaping the way we manage our health and our environment as we prepare to tackle big challenges such as pollution and pandemics. 

Biological systems in nature can do amazing things. Plants can capture and store carbon. The human immune system can remember and respond to invading pathogens. Researchers have even found bacteria that eat plastic.  

“Nature has a remarkable research and development process,” said Dion Antonopoulos, director of Argonne’s Biosciences division. ​“It’s been refining microorganisms to thrive in environments on the planet for billions of years. In the last 50 years, we’ve developed the tools that will help us fundamentally understand the underlying principles of design for all living organisms. If we can do that, we won’t just be able to tweak nature’s R&D. We’ll be able to design organisms from scratch or program biological systems from the ground up.” 

Antonopoulos is talking about synthetic biology, the field of research dedicated to redesigning or even creating beneficial biological organisms and processes. Like innovations in batteries and quantum, synthetic biology is leveraging advances in supercomputing and AI and pairing them with specialized genetic tools such as the CRISPR-based technology used to selectively modify the DNA in organisms. 

Antonopoulos explained, ​“With genetic engineering, we were confined to what we could program a cell to do. Now, we have the ability to edit biological structures at the protein level. Proteins become the Lego bricks that you can use to build biological processes.”  

Harnessing those processes might help scientists find ways to make environments more habitable. While it’s tempting to imagine fantastical applications like terraforming Mars, we first have a responsibility to undo some of the damage done to our home planet.  

“Environmental stewardship is one of the big goals of synthetic biology,” Antonopoulos said. ​“We are researching ways to program or create microorganisms that can mitigate environmental impacts such as microplastic pollution or the legacy waste of nuclear materials.”  

Researchers are investigating how these processes might be happening in nature and then finding ways to speed up, improve or redesign them.  

“I’m skeptical that we have a good handle on all of the nooks and crannies where organisms are able to live,” Antonopoulos said. ​“By examining organisms that live in extreme environments, we might be able to use their natural processes for a variety of really helpful applications. With synthetic biology, the palette of colors we can paint with has gone from black and white to the full rainbow.”  

Creating the future  

Progress is always marching forward, but new technologies, innovative research and AI have turned that march into a sprint.  

“AI is an accelerator, but it doesn’t have a direction,” Stevens said. ​“Our responsibility now is to lay scientific groundwork so that all those amazing things — the robots, the flying cars, the microbatteries — move from imagination into reality.” 

Argonne’s groundwork for the future also involves training the next generation of scientists to keep pace and add their innovations to this legacy of progress.  

As Jones put it, ​“As long as we stay inquisitive, I can’t imagine the pace of science ever slowing down.” 

Funding for the research described in this article comes from DOE’s Offices of Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.