18 bright ideas for 2018, from flying taxis to companion robots

Designer solar 

If you want solar panels, you don’t necessarily need to make your home look as if it’s covered with cereal boxes. Many companies are developing technology that lets homeowners integrate photovoltaic cells right into their houses’ existing architecture. 

Tesla, the electric car innovator, makes solar tiles that look like ordinary roof shingles. The company has installed them on about a dozen homes so far, including that of the company’s founder, Elon Musk, and orders for more are already sold out well into 2018.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers at Michigan State University in East Lansing has developed transparent solar cells that capture invisible wavelengths of sunlight, meaning that they can double as windows. Scientists estimate that 75 billion square feet of windows exist in the United States, and that replacing them all with transparent solar panels could supply 40 percent of the nation’s energy.

And once your roof and windows are generating electricity, you might as well plug the rest of your house into the sun as well. A team of Australian researchers has developed solar-powered paint. It works by soaking up water vapor from the air and then using the energy from sunlight to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. The collected hydrogen is used in fuel cells.

These technologies will take time to become affordable – the solar paint, for instance, isn’t expected to be commercially viable for a few years – but they represent the rise of solar as an increasingly practical energy source.

No hands on deck

Fully autonomous cars for the masses may still be years away, but unmanned transport may show up sooner in a different venue – on the wide-open seas. 

In Norway, Yara International plans to transport fertilizer via an electric-powered ship that would travel along the Trondheim Fjord. The ships are scheduled to be piloted by remote control in 2019 and to go fully autonomous the following year. This year in Copenhagen, Denmark, Rolls-Royce demonstrated an autonomous tugboat. And a Boston-based start-up, Sea Machines Robotics, is working on a container ship to move goods across the North Atlantic without a human at the helm.

Proponents say that autonomous ships offer several advantages over crewed ones: They are less prone to error, less