This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

This is a snapshot of this magazine's potential stories, for the next 50 years: 148 life-changing technologies, trends and big ideas that you need to know about right now. "Nothing on the map is something a scientist today isn't working on," says Alex Ayad, who runs Imperial College London's Tech Foresight Practice, which makes data-driven predictions about science and technology. The concentric timeline, created by Ayad and British futurist and writer Richard Watson, divides these emerging ideas into five categories -- nanotech, neurotech, greentech, digital tech and biotech -- and separates them into three time zones:

Present, at the graph's core; the Probable (from 2015 to 2030), which is further outwards; and the Possible (beyond 2030), at the graph's outside edge. The data was sourced with the help of Imperial's Smarties, a community of 900 graduates who pool their knowledge to solve unique problems. For an idea to qualify in the Present timezone, such as prosthetic limbs controlled by thought, or DNA dating agencies, there had to be at least 1,000 known instances of its use. The most surprising insight was the interconnectedness of the five categories. "The further along in time we moved towards the Possible category, the more we found the various trends become interdependent, and began to merge with one another," Watson says.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK