The biggest innovations of our time will likely be those that help address humanity’s needs, rather than those that simply create the most profit. Good ideas come from doing things differently, exploring new territory and taking risks. As you will see from these six extreme projects, the spirit of ingenuity and innovation is alive and well.

These six epic science projects range from lungs grown in laboratories to long-term human settlement of the cosmos.

Lab-Grown Lungs
Biomedical engineers have built many types of human organs in the lab, but, until recently, they’ve lagged on lung tissue. Two studies last year demonstrated very different approaches to the process. One research team has grown an artificial lung from harvested rat lung tissue and successfully implanted the new lung into a live rat. According to Nature.com, “the study provides proof of principle that such regenerated tissue may one day be used to treat patients with serious lung disorders.” Another research team has created a different kind of lab-built lung, called lung-on-a-chip, that mimics a living, breathing human lung on a microchip. The device, made using human lung and blood vessel cells, acts similar to a lung in a human body and is intended to be used as an in vitro model system for testing drugs or the toxic effects of a variety of substances without the use of animal models. Both lab-grown versions of lungs could one day serve as a way to sidestep animal testing and organ transplantation.

Researchers successfully grew a rat lung in a laboratory.
Image credit: Yale Daily News

Onkalo Waste Repository
It’s one of the great questions of our age: What to do with nuclear waste? In the world’s first attempt at a permanent repository, scientists and engineers are working on a 1,710-foot deep, 3-mile-long spiraling tunnel into the granite bedrock near the Olkiluoto nuclear power plants in Finland. The subject of a recent documentary that explores some of the philosophical questions raised by the facility, the Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept corrosion-resistant copper canisters of the country’s spent fuel until about 2120, at which point the final encapsulation and burial will take place and the access tunnel will be back-filled and sealed. Once sealed, the facility will remain undisturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period of time. Sweden is in the design phase of a similar repository.

EarthScope
Described as the largest science project on the planet, EarthScope is an earth science program set up to explore every facet of North America’s geological makeup and track its evolution. Using thousands of geophysical instruments over millions of square miles across the continental U.S., EarthScope provides a framework for broad, integrated studies, including research on fault properties and the earthquake process, strain transfer, magmatic and hydrous fluids in the crust and mantle, plate boundary processes, large-scale continental deformation, continental structure and evolution, and composition and structure of the deep earth. Scientists from multiple disciplines have joined together to conduct research using the large influx of freely accessible, high-precision data being collected.

Researchers at the EarthScope-supported Visualization Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Image credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Visualization Center (via National Science Foundation)

NEPTUNE Canada
Oceans cover almost three quarters of our planet’s surface, yet they are mostly unexplored. The NEPTUNE Canada project offers a unique approach to understanding the biological, chemical, physical and geological processes unfolding underwater. NEPTUNE Canada is the world’s largest undersea observatory and the first regional-scale underwater ocean observatory that plugs directly into the internet. Consisting of some 530 miles of cable and 130 instruments with 400 sensors, the advanced cabled seafloor observatory gives anyone with an internet connection free access to what will be a huge amount of data from the bottom of the sea. The data is sent along cables to a freely explorable database at the University of Victoria. The 25-year project will focus on underwater volcanic processes, ocean-atmosphere interactions, climate change, ocean productivity, fish stocks and much more.

Feature on NEPTUNE Canada project begins at 2:05.

Large Hadron Collider
Buried deep beneath the countryside on the Franco-Swiss border is the world’s largest particle collider and most expensive scientific instrument ever. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a 20-nation consortium and the world’s leading particle physics laboratory, in collaboration with more than 10,000 scientists and engineers from more than 100 countries, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to unlock the fundamental physics of the universe, including determining whether the hypothetical Higgs boson (commonly referred to as the “God particle”) exists and how the universe formed, as well as possibly finding dark matter and new dimensions. Last year, LHC physicists announced they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of their high-powered probe into the secrets of the cosmos.

100-Year Starship
What began as an idea about how to further explore the outer reaches of space is now starting to take shape, as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in May issued a request for information seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle in support of the 100 Year Starship Study. The project, seeded by DARPA but with the Department of Defense and NASA also involved, aims to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the many disciplines required to make long-distance space travel practicable. Simply put, the idea is to identify groups interested in working on a project that could someday enable long-term human settlement of the cosmos.

Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Center, announces the establishment of the 100 Year Spaceship program.

Additional Reading

Big Science: The 10 Most Ambitious Experiments in the Universe Today
by Gregory Mone, Brooke Borel, Katherine Bagley and Jennifer Abbasi
Popular Science, August 2011

21 Scientific Research Projects Starting this Fall that Could Change the World
by Robert T. Gonzalez, Keith Veronese and Annalee Newitz
io9, Aug. 25, 2011