It can be tempting, as Adam Savage likes to say, to reject reality and substitute your own. The world is complex. There are difficult trade-offs. Sometimes we are wrong, our “tribe” is on the wrong side of history, or things just don’t go our way.  Any parent has seen how toddlers often respond when they don’t get their way – the behavior can be described as a temper tantrum.

Part of neurological maturity is being able to deal with disappointment, to face an uncomfortable reality. Often adults, however, have the same reaction to reality as a toddler, their temper tantrums are just more sophisticated. This is where discipline, rules, institutions, and critical thinking come in. Society needs these things to function, or else we are living in the Lord of the Flies.

These guardrails of society and human behavior, however, require a shared reality. There has to be some way to determine what is likely to be true, which facts are legitimate and which are incorrect, and to agree upon what has happened in the past. This is no easy task, and we have entire institutions and professions dedicated to sorting this out. There is no process or institution that is perfect, but we need some shared process to avoid chaos.

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If you follow science and technology news closely over years certain patterns emerge. First, most advances are incremental. True “breakthroughs” are rare, despite how overused that word is in reporting. At best there are milestones – an incremental advance that reaches a critical level that will likely change the application of a technology. Second, most advances do not pan out. They add to our total knowledge, helping us inch forward, but most technological developments will not be ultimately utilized themselves. This leads to a third conclusion: it is very difficult to predict which technologies will flourish and which will be dead-ends.

All this makes science communication tricky, if you’re interested in doing it right. It’s easy just to hype potential advances and applications without context, but context is mostly what science communicators should be communicating.

With all that in mind, a couple of recent science news items caught my eye as having the potential for exciting future applications, but with all the above caveats applying. The first relates to 3D printing, which is a technology that is clearly being widely used and has tremendous potential, but it’s difficult to predict how widespread it will become. That is another difficulty in prediction – even if a technology works and is useful, we don’t know how it will be adopted. It may have a narrow niche application, or may change the world, and predictions err in both directions. But the story of 3D printing is not over yet, and it remains to be seen how much additive manufacturing will displace traditional manufacturing.

The new advance is the development of a 3D printable smartgel. This is a hydrogel that can alter its shape in response to light and temperature. A hydrogel is a solid that contains water, like jello or modern contact lenses. This is definitely a material that panned out and has many applications. The smartgels are smart because they can change their form. OK – so what? That is the big question – can this property be exploited for a usable purpose? This is the “killer app” question for any new technology. Even if it works, what application will justify high demand? Sometimes technology is developed to fill a very specific purpose. At other times technology is developed because it can be, and then goes in search of a purpose. This is definitely a form of the latter, and this is also where the wild speculation comes in.

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One of the side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was an exponential increase in the use of telemedicine – doctor visits over the phone or video. But the rapid adoption of this technology has had some growing pains, including exposing a predictable divide in socioeconomic status, age, and people of color. There are also technical issues that are still being tweaked. But overall, the adoption of telemedicine has been a great opportunity.

Part of the reason for the dramatic rise in telemedicine, sparked by the pandemic, is the fact that there was so much deferred potential for its use. In other words, many healthcare offices and many patients already had the technology and capability to engage in telemedicine, all that was waiting was for the regulatory switch to be thrown. Insurance companies, including Medicare and Medicaid, were simply not allowing the technology to be widely adopted (by simply not paying for it). The pandemic forced their hand, and once we got the green light, we were massively up and running within days.

But of course there were some rough spots, as you might imagine with any rapid adoption of new technology or procedures. In my office we are now on our third video conferencing application to use for telemedicine in the last 9 months. Along the way functionality has improved. The core application is simple, a secure video connection between health care provider and patient. Initially it was little more than that. Then we added the ability to have an assistant prep the patient beforehand, to make sure their video was working and to get basic health information related to the visit. But we realized we needed the ability for third parties to join the visit, which could be a family member, a student being trained, or a medical translator.

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