6 Technologies From Science Fiction You Didn't Know Are Already Here

From science fiction to science reality, some of these technologies will arrive sooner than you think.

Another year has come to pass and we'll bet that you've already seen your fair share of memes floating around your social feeds about it being 2019 already, and still no sign of flying cars or jet packs.

Well, that may not truly be the case. We live in exciting times where great leaps in technological advances might actually have passed us by without us knowing it. Case in point, flying cars and jet packs do exist, so do designer babies, flexible screens and bionic limbs. We take a look at six technologies that are actually available, the developments behind them, and what's stopping them from becoming mainstream just yet.

GENE EDITING COULD HELP MAKE THE HUMAN RACE HEALTHIER

Don’t expect designer babies though. By Koh Wanzi

Genetically modified human embryos sound like the stuff of science fiction. For the most part, having a baby is like a random roll of the genetic dice. It’s difficult to say for sure what your child will look like, or if they’ll even end up healthy.

But what if you could change that? A targeted, genetic modification technique called CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, can edit DNA in both human embryos and adults with precision. It’s a powerful tool, eff ectively allowing scientists to cut and paste a DNA sequence up to 20 bases long into a genome at any point.

CRISPR takes a leaf from the book of bacterial defense mechanisms. Bacteria defend themselves from viruses by stealing sequences of the invaders’ DNA, which they then incorporate into their own with the help of an enzyme called Cas. These new sequences are known as CRISPR. RNA copies are made of these sequences, and they help identify virus DNA and guard against future attacks.