In an age when algorithms help cars avoid traffic and synthetic microbes could soon deliver our medicine, the boundary between science fiction and science fact is shrinking. The World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 offers a powerful reminder that innovation is not just accelerating — it’s converging, maturing, and aligning itself to confront humanity’s most urgent challenges.

From smart cities to sustainable farming, from cutting-edge therapeutics to low-impact energy, this year’s list is more than a forecast. It’s a blueprint for a near future in which resilience and responsibility are just as crucial as raw invention.

Sensing the World Together

Imagine a city that can sense a traffic jam, redirect ambulances instantly, or coordinate drone deliveries without a hiccup. That’s the promise of collaborative sensing, a leading entry in the 2025 lineup. This technology enables vehicles, emergency services, and infrastructure to “talk” to each other in real time using a network of connected sensors — helping cities become safer, faster, and more responsive.

It’s one of several technologies on this year’s list that fall under the theme of “trust and safety in a connected world” — a trend reflecting the growing importance of reliable information, responsive systems, and secure networks in daily life.

Trust, Truth, and Invisible Watermarks

But as digital content spreads and AI-generated images become harder to distinguish from reality, how do we safeguard truth? Generative watermarking offers a promising solution. By embedding invisible tags in AI-generated media, this technology makes it easier to verify content authenticity, helping fight misinformation and deepfakes.

“The path from breakthrough research to tangible societal progress depends on transparency, collaboration, and open science,” said Frederick Fenter, Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers, in a media statement issued alongside the report. “Together with the World Economic Forum, we have once again delivered trusted, evidence-based insights on emerging technologies that will shape a better future for all.”

Rethinking Industry, Naturally

Other breakthroughs are tackling the environmental consequences of how we make things.

Green nitrogen fixation, for instance, offers a cleaner way to produce fertilizers — traditionally one of agriculture’s biggest polluters. By using electricity instead of fossil fuels to bind nitrogen, this method could slash emissions while helping feed a growing planet.

Then there’s nanozymes — synthetic materials that mimic enzymes but are more stable, affordable, and versatile. Their potential applications range from improving diagnostics to cleaning up industrial waste, marking a shift toward smarter, greener manufacturing.

These technologies fall under the trend the report identifies as “sustainable industry redesign.”

Health Breakthroughs, From Microbes to Molecules

The 2025 report also spotlights next-generation biotechnologies for health, a category that includes some of the most exciting and potentially transformative innovations.

Engineered living therapeutics — beneficial bacteria genetically modified to detect and treat disease from within the body — could make chronic care both cheaper and more effective.

Meanwhile, GLP-1 agonists, drugs first developed for diabetes and obesity, are now showing promise in treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s — diseases for which few options exist.

And with autonomous biochemical sensing, tiny wireless devices capable of monitoring environmental or health conditions 24/7 could allow early detection of pollution or disease — offering critical tools in a world facing climate stress and health inequities.

Building Smarter, Powering Cleaner

Under the theme of “energy and material integration”, the report also identifies new approaches to building and powering the future.

Structural battery composites, for example, are materials that can both carry loads and store energy. Used in vehicles and aircraft, they could lighten the load — quite literally — for electric transportation.

Osmotic power systems offer another intriguing frontier: by harnessing the energy released when freshwater and saltwater mix, they provide a low-impact, consistent power source suited to estuaries and coastal areas.

And as global electricity demand climbs — especially with the growth of AI, data centers, and electrification — advanced nuclear technologies are gaining renewed interest. With smaller, safer designs and new cooling systems, next-gen nuclear promises to deliver scalable zero-carbon power.

Toward a Converging Future

This year’s edition of the report emphasizes a deeper trend: technological convergence. Across domains, innovations are beginning to merge — batteries into structures, biology into computing, sensing into infrastructure. The future, it seems, will be shaped less by standalone inventions and more by integrated, systemic solutions.

“Scientific and technological breakthroughs are advancing rapidly, even as the global environment for innovation grows more complex,” said Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, in the WEF’s official media release.

“The research provides top global leaders with a clear view of which technologies are approaching readiness, how they could solve the world’s pressing problems and what’s required to bring them to scale responsibly,” he added.

Beyond the Hype

Now in its 13th year, the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report has a strong track record of identifying breakthroughs poised to move from lab to life — including mRNA vaccines, flexible batteries, and CRISPR-based gene editing.

But this year’s list is not just a celebration of possibility. It’s a reminder of what’s needed to deliver impact at scale: responsible governance, sustained investment, and public trust.

As Jeremy Jurgens noted, “Breakthroughs must be supported by the right environment — transparent, collaborative, and scalable — if they are to benefit society at large.”

In a time of climate stress, digital overload, and health inequity, these ten technologies offer something rare: a credible roadmap to a better future — not decades away, but just around the corner.

A sweet scent typically lingers around in the air at Kannauj, an ancient city in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. It’s an imprint of the countless occasions when it had rained, of roses that bloomed at dawn, and of sandalwood trees that once breathed centuries of calm.. Though mushy smells are not unique to Kannauj, the city utilized traditional distillation methods to make perfume out of these earthly scents.

Kannauj has had a longstanding tradition in perfume-making since four centuries ago. The city, colloquially known as the country’s ancient perfume capital, still uses rustic copper stills, wood-fired ovens, and bamboo pipes leading to sandalwood oil-filled vessels, or attar as it is colloquially known, to make their perfume. Though it gives a pre-industrial look, a closer peek would reveal an ecosystem of complex thermal regulation, plant chemistry, sustainability science, and hydro-distillation chemistry at work.

When synthetically-made but sustainable perfumes, and AI-generated ones share the spotlight today, Kannauj’s tryst with perfumes offer an alternative, sustainable model in traditional distillation, which is inherently low-carbon, zero-waste, and follow principles of a circular economy; all in alignment with sustainable development goals.

Traditional perfume-making is naturally sustainable

In industrial processing, hydro-distillation is a commonly done to separate substances with different boiling points. Heating the liquids produce vapors, which can later be liquefied in a separate chamber. Perfumers in Kannauj follow the same practice, except it promises to be more sustainable with the copper stills, a process colloquially known as dheg-bhakpa hydro-distillation.

There’s no alcohol or synthetic agents in use. Instead, they heat up raw botanicals – such as roses, vetiver roots, jasmine, or even sunbaked clay – to precise temperatures well short of burning, thereby producing fragrant vapor. The vapors are then guided into cooling chambers, where they condense and bond with a natural fixative, often sandalwood oil. Plant residue is the only byproduct, which finds use as organic compost to cultivate another generation of crops.

Trapping earthly scent to make perfume

In the past five years, Kannauj’s veteran perfumers noticed a quiet, but steady shift in their timely harvest and produce. Rose harvests have moved earlier by weeks. Vetiver roots grow shallower due to erratic rainfall. Jasmine yields are fluctuating wildly. The local Ganges river, which influences humidity levels essential for distillation timing, is no longer as predictable. For an entire natural aromatic economy built on seasonal synchrony, this uncertainty has rung alarm bells.

“The scent of a flower depends not just on the flower itself,” Vipin Dixit, a third-generation attar-maker whose family has distilled fragrance for decades, said to EdPublica.

“It depends on the weather the night before, on the heat at sunrise, on the moisture in the air. Even the soil has a scent-memory.”

As a result, perfumers in Kannauj have begun to adapt, applying traditional wisdom through a modern scientific lens. Local distillers are now working with botanists and environmental scientists to study soil microbiomes, measure scent compounds using chromatography, and develop community-based rainwater harvesting to ensure sustainable crop health.

One of the most surprising innovations is trapping petrichor — the scent of first rain — through earth attars. Clay is baked during extreme heat waves, mimicking summer conditions, then distilled to trap the scent of rain hitting dry soil. This aroma, called mitti attar, is one of the few scents in the world created from an environmental phenomenon; and not a flower.

At a time when the world is scrambling to save biodiversity, the humble attar may become a template for green chemistry — one that doesn’t just preserve scent, but also restores the relationship between science, nature, and soul.

As rescue and recovery operations continue following the June 12, 2025, plane crash in Ahmedabad, aviation safety experts are now focusing on the technical investigation phase. With 241 lives lost, the search for the cause isn’t just about accountability—it’s about prevention.

The Black Box: Aviation’s Memory Keeper

1. What Is the Black Box?

Despite the name, the black box is actually orange — for visibility. It consists of two components:

• Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR): Captures conversations and audio from the flight deck.
• Flight Data Recorder (FDR): Logs dozens to hundreds of parameters — speed, altitude, engine status, control inputs.

These devices are housed in titanium or steel and can withstand:

• Temperatures above 1,000°C
• Underwater pressures up to 20,000 feet
• Crashes with up to 3,600 G-force

They also emit underwater locator beacons for up to 30 days.

2. Forensic Engineering & Flight Reconstruction

Beyond black boxes, investigators use:

• Radar data and air traffic control logs
• Wreckage analysis for structural failure clues
• Satellite-based tracking systems like ADS-B
• Weather data for turbulence or wind shear insights

Forensic teams often reconstruct the flight path virtually or even physically using recovered debris to determine failure points.

3. Human Factors & AI in Modern Investigation

New tools like machine learning and human factors analysis are used to identify procedural errors or lapses in judgement.

In many modern investigations, AI helps:

• Filter large datasets (e.g., over 1,000 flight parameters per second)
• Detect patterns missed by the human eye
• Predict similar risk scenarios in future flights

What Happens Next in the Ahmedabad Crash?

Authorities, in coordination with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), are likely:

• Retrieving and analyzing the black box
• Interviewing air traffic controllers
• Reconstructing the aircraft’s final seconds using both data and simulation

The final report may take months, but it will be critical in issuing safety directives or revising standard procedures.