From artificial intelligence to earth science, you can find the latest key information in almost every field in one volume.
The 'Future Science Trends' series, which is added every year, is characterized by comprehensively covering the light and dark sides of the cutting-edge technologies we face, as well as background knowledge on various scientific fields.
In particular, this "2026 Future Science Trends" is the only book that examines not only the usefulness of AI, which is already deeply embedded in our daily lives, but also how scientists actually utilize artificial intelligence in their laboratories.
It also quickly covered cutting-edge scientific and technological news and pilot operation sites to address the climate crisis.
Read the keywords that will define 2026 in an easy and fun way, including "future science trends" that don't lose their timeliness and expertise.

Genes that appear at night suppress genes that are active and awake during the day, playing a role in cell recovery and regeneration, and repairing damaged DNA, and inducing sleep in humans by secreting melatonin.
In this way, the biological clock mechanisms of plants and humans are very similar, regulating the 24-hour physiological rhythm and are deeply related to sleep, growth, and aging.
Aging is not simply the result of the passage of time, but rather the cumulative result of cellular decline and molecular damage.
Therefore, the field of physiological medicine has recently been paying attention to the connection between the biological clock of plants and aging, and research on this topic is also actively being conducted.
--- From "Time and Slow Aging of Plants"

Up to now, there has been a limitation that thorough separation and disposal are required to recycle waste organic matter as basic raw materials.
However, no matter how carefully you separate and dispose of waste, there are bound to be impurities such as adhesive left behind after removing the label.
Therefore, when waste organic matter is dissolved, it is mixed with over 100 different chemicals, and is only used in industrial boilers or to manufacture low-quality urethane.
To address these issues, South Korea recently launched the 'Plasma-Used Waste Organic Waste to High Value-Added Basic Raw Material Conversion Project Group' in 2022.
The business unit conducted research with the goal of converting various waste organic materials, such as waste oil, waste organic solvents, and waste plastics, into basic raw materials for plastics, such as ethylene and propylene.
And in September 2025, it was announced that a plasma conversion process had been developed that could recycle mixed waste plastics into basic raw materials without separate disposal.
--- From "The Rebirth of Waste Organic Materials"

Geostratigraphy can be considered an extension of biostratigraphy.
It is a science that determines time in absolute numbers, beyond the 'relative time' that fossils tell us.
At one time, I observed rocks with a loupe and hammer, measured angles by hand, and recorded them on site.
But now that role is taken over by electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and scanners.
Rather than drilling directly into the rock, geologists analyze thousands of meters of data obtained from core samples.
In the 21st century, all of this data has been converted to digital.
Drill cores are scanned in high resolution, and the images are trained by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence can automatically classify the shape, color, particle size, and chemical composition of fossils and read the 'time of the strata'.
Analyses that once took scientists months can now be completed in a single day.
--- From "AI that Reads Time Recorded by the Strata"

Nestled in the Chilean Andes, the Vera Rubin Observatory is currently at the forefront of AI use in astronomy.
The observatory is working on an ambitious project called LSST, which stands for "Space-Time Heritage Survey," which will observe the southern hemisphere sky every night for 10 years to document the changing face of the universe.
The Rubin Observatory observes the universe every day, generating 20 terabytes of data.
This is equivalent to about 4 million high-quality photos taken with a smartphone.
It is expected that a total of 60 petabytes of data will be collected over 10 years, which is more than the data collected from all the digitized books in the world's libraries.
It's literally a wave of starlight coming towards us.
--- From "AI that Reads the Universe"

Today, artificial neural networks are used almost synonymously with artificial intelligence, but until the 2000s, artificial neural networks were a minor subfield of artificial intelligence.
Before that, the mainstream approach to artificial intelligence was for developers to 'explicitly write' programs that perform intelligent tasks.
In contrast, artificial neural networks could 'conceptually' learn how to perform intelligent tasks on their own without explicit programming.
However, the reason why artificial neural networks could not become mainstream was because the learning method had not been specifically invented and there was a lack of computing resources for learning.
--- From "Memories and Conversations of Chat GPT"

Physics has made a crucial contribution to human understanding of the natural world.
However, modern physics research is much more challenging than in the past in terms of the amount and complexity of data and the difficulty of calculations.
Accordingly, AI has become an essential tool for physics researchers, enabling them to process massive amounts of experimental and simulation data in real time and automate research design and complex modeling. The use of AI is becoming a part of physicists' daily work, moving beyond mere assistance to enable fundamental innovations in research. Without the adoption of AI technology, modern physics research will inevitably lose its competitiveness, directly impacting the pace of scientific and technological advancement.
Therefore, the meeting of physics and AI has become a necessity rather than an option.
--- From "AI and Physics: Inevitable Collaboration"

In 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, led to increased public interest in accelerators in Korea as well.
Yet, it's often difficult to understand what accelerators do and why they cost so much.
This has happened repeatedly in the 100-year history of accelerators.
Scientific curiosity alone doesn't easily justify the cost of acquiring massive experimental equipment.
This is also true for the fact that Lawrence obtained research funds by building an accelerator for cancer treatment to continue developing synchrotrons.
So, accelerators started out to solve fundamental questions about how the world is made, and are now expanding into various fields of application, such as medicine, nanotechnology, bio, energy, and semiconductors.

--- From "From Particle Accelerators to Light-Emitting Accelerators"

We now live in an age of science and technology.
Artificial intelligence, robots, autonomous driving, smart cities, metaverse…
It is literally every day that new technologies called ‘innovation’ are being released.
Yet, on the other side of this dazzling technological advancement, our society still faces complex and burdensome problems.
Aging population, climate crisis, social polarization, digital exclusion, youth unemployment, and regional extinction.
None of these problems are easily solved.
So people ask:
Can technology solve these problems?

--- From "The Future of Science and Technology We Create"