10 IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE YOUR NEXT 25 YEARS

Predicting the future is considered a fool's game. But it's one many of us like to play.

And seeing as we asked a selection of experts about the biggest breakthroughs of the century so far (p38), we couldn't help but wonder what ideas we'd be talking about in the decades to come... presumably while sitting in a bar on the Moon, sipping anti-ageing, dark matter martinis.

Hundreds of scientific papers cross the BBC Science Focus news desk every week, so there are plenty of 'tea leaves' for us to read in the hopes of discerning the direction that tomorrow's winds may be blowing. And so, with the fool's game proviso above, here's our pick of the 10 technologies we think will be defining our daily lives in 2050.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is ours. Of course, we would love to hear what your lists look like. Send your predictions to us at reply@sciencefocus.​com.

NANO-MEDICS WILL REBUILD US

Nanotechnology works on the minuscule size of nanometres - billionths of a metre. To get a feel for this scale, a human hair is 80,000–100,000 nanometres across.

While the concept of such technology conjures up images of miniature surgical machines, travelling through the bloodstream to operate directly on affected body parts, it's more about making use of the distinctive physical and biological properties that occur at this very small scale.