Here’s the simplest way to read it. The ten picks fall into three families:

• Energy & materials: structural battery composites; osmotic power; advanced nuclear; green nitrogen fixation.

• Bio & health: engineered living therapeutics; GLP-1 drugs for neurodegenerative disease; autonomous biochemical sensing; nanozymes.

• Digital trust & perception: collaborative sensing; generative watermarking.
  The report frames these under four big trends: trust & safety, next-gen biotech, industrial sustainability, and integrated energy/materials—with “convergence” as the master key. Translation: progress now arrives as combo meals, not à la carte. World Economic Forum

What’s actually new here?

Some entrants aren’t brand-new ideas; they’re newly plausible because ingredients finally matured.

Take osmotic power. People have dreamed for decades about harvesting electricity from the salinity difference where rivers kiss the sea. What stalled it was membrane performance and economics. Better materials and smarter system designs have nudged it toward viability—maybe not as the star of the grid, but as clean, predictable baseline near estuaries and industrial brines. World Economic Forum

Structural battery composites are another “quietly radical” shift. Instead of bolting a battery into a car or drone, you make the body itself store charge. If safety standards catch up, that’s lighter electric vehicles, longer-range drones, and eventually aircraft designs that don’t look like today’s flying buses. The math is seductively simple: less dead weight, more useful work. The messy bit is certification—engineers and regulators will want boringly repeatable performance under heat, vibration, and crash stress. World Economic Forum

Advanced nuclear rounds out the materials-and-energy arc. From small modular reactors that standardize construction to alternative coolants and fuel cycles, the theme is simplify and scale rather than build ever larger bespoke plants. Fusion remains the grail—ITER in France looms in the background like a cathedral under construction—but even incremental fission advances could matter in a grid that needs firm power to backstop capricious wind and sun. World Economic Forum

And green nitrogen fixation might be the most underrated climate lever in the set. Making ammonia the old way devours roughly 2% of global energy; greener routes—bio-based catalysts, enzyme-like systems, or renewables-powered processes—promise the same fertilizer without the fossil appetite. Because fertilizer underpins half the world’s food, a cleaner ammonia chain hits climate and food security in one swing. World Economic Forum

Biology becomes programmable… again

On the bio front, the center of gravity is shifting from making drugs in factories to making factories inside you. Engineered living therapeutics imagine microbes that live in the gut and manufacture medicines on demand, potentially cutting costs and turning chronic injections into steady, body-like dosing. It’s chemo-meets-compost bin, only sanitary. Safety switches, containment, and long-term monitoring will be crucial; a therapy that evolves is powerful—and complicated. World Economic Forum

Then there’s the class of GLP-1 drugs—famous for diabetes and weight management—now being investigated as tools against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The mechanism story is still being written, but early signals suggest reduced brain inflammation and faster clearance of toxic proteins. If even modest benefits hold in large trials, the spillover to caregivers, health systems, and workforce productivity could be huge. World Economic Forum

Autonomous biochemical sensing connects the dots: always-on, self-powered monitors for disease markers, hormones, pollutants, and spoilage. We already live with a preview—continuous glucose monitors—so imagine that ethos spread to menopause care, food safety, or water quality, with data streaming to edge AI that flags problems before they snowball. This is public health as a sensor network, not just a clinic. World Economic Forum

Nanozymes, meanwhile, are the pragmatic cousins of enzymes: tough, cheap, and comfortable outside biology’s delicate temperature and pH windows. Think cancer therapies that catalyze reactions inside tumors, water treatment that shrugs off grime, and rapid food-borne pathogen tests. The promise is broad; the homework is safety, ethics, and lifecycle risk so we don’t fix one problem by seeding another. World Economic Forum

Trust, but verify (with math)

We’re drowning in synthetic media. Generative watermarking is the low-drama fix: embed invisible tags in AI outputs so systems can spot what’s machine-made. It’s not a silver bullet—watermarks can be stripped or forged, and adoption is uneven—but as seatbelts go, it’s better than gripping the dashboard. Its usefulness rises with interoperability and legal bite. Pair that with collaborative sensing—cities, mines, and factories stitched together with cameras, LIDAR, environmental probes, and edge AI that learn in chorus—and you get institutions that can perceive and act in real time. Both are infrastructure for trust: knowing what’s real and what’s happening now. World Economic Forum

How to tell hype from heat (2025–2027)

A few near-term signals will separate bright ideas from workhorses:

• Standards & safety: Watch regulators on structural battery composites (especially for aviation) and watermarking frameworks that different platforms actually honor. If standards land, adoption accelerates. World Economic Forum

• Evidence that matters: Clinical readouts for living therapeutics and GLP-1s in neurodegeneration—efficacy is table stakes, but durability and side-effect profiles decide policy and insurance. World Economic Forum

• Cost curves & scale: Osmotic pilots competing on levelized cost with tidal or solar-plus-storage; small modular reactors hitting to-budget, to-schedule delivery rather than becoming museum pieces. World Economic Forum

• Wins beyond pilots: City-scale collaborative sensing that measurably cuts congestion, emissions, or emergency response times, not just demo-ware. World Economic Forum

The weird, useful mash-ups to expect

If convergence is the plot, the next chapters look like this:

• EVs as batteries with wheels, their carbon-fiber bones storing charge while AI choreographs when to drive, when to feed the grid.

• Bio-factories inside patients, tuned by continuous biochemical sensors, dosing just-in-time rather than just-in-case.

• Ports and rivers as power plants, osmotic stacks sipping at salinity gradients in the background while nuclear smooths the peaks and valleys.

• Cities as organisms, perception stitched from collaborative sensors, distrust defused by watermarking and provenance trails.

None of that requires magical thinking. It requires boring excellence: interoperability agreements, open standards, testbeds, clinical rigor, permitting that’s fast and sane, and procurement that buys outcomes, not boxes.

Bottom line

This year’s list isn’t promising a single moonshot. It’s promising better plumbing—mamaterials that pull double duty, biological systems that compute and produce, networks that see and verify. That’s unsexy until you realize civilization is plumbing. Get the pipes right and the future has water pressure.