11 Google projects that could change the world

Dubbed the Titan Aerospace Solara 50, the drone can stay airborne for five years straight thanks to the 3,000 solar cells on its wingspan.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said the idea is to use both Loon and Titan to provide reliable internet coverage to the roughly 4 billion people on earth without it, Verge reported.

The research team is developing tiny magnetic particles called nanoparticles that can attach to cells, proteins, or other molecules. Google X is also developing a wearable that would use a magnet to count the particles consistently. The system could provide an early warning system for cancer.

Source: Wall Street Journal

About 1.24 million people worldwide die each year in collisions, with that number expected to rise to 2.2 million by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

But having driverless cars on the road can greatly reduce the number of accidents. According to a study by the Eno Centre for Transportation, if 90% of the cars on the road were autonomous, the number of US accidents would fall from six million a year to 1.3 million.

Google's driverless cars are leading the industry, having driven over 1.7 million miles in autonomous mode since 2009.

The smart contact lenses project is run by Alphabet's Verily company, which was originally named Google Life Sciences. The lenses would be solar powered and collect biological data about the wearer.

Sensors embedded in the contacts could collect information like body temperature and blood-alcohol content. The lenses could also have glucose sensors to measure sugar levels in your tears.

The spoon allows people suffering from tremors due to Parkinson's Disease to eat without spilling their food. It reduces shaking by 76% on average.

The spoon was designed by Lift Labs, which Google bought in September 2014, and is now run under Google X.

Now run under Alphabet's Google X division, Makani Power makes an airborne device called an "energy kite" to create renewable energy.

An energy kite is a plane-like device equipped with rotors. The rotors help lift the kite off the ground, and once its in flight the wind forces the rotors to act like individual turbines. Makani claims the system generates 50% more energy than traditional turbines and uses 90% less materials.

As part of a project called the Baseline Study, Alphabet is collecting anonymous genetic and molecular information starting with 175 people, later ramping up to thousands more, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The hope is that the data will assist researchers in detecting heart disease and cancer much earlier.

For $25 a year, Google will store your genome in the cloud as part of an effort to collect millions of genomes to aid in scientific research.

Run under Google X, the system could aid in collecting "cancer genome clouds" that would allow scientists to share information and run virtual experiments, MIT Review reported.

Run by Calico, a company under Alphabet that stands for California Life Company, the project's researchers are looking at things like genes that correlate to longer lifespans in certain people. There's still very little information out there about what Calico is working on.

When Google's AI system AlphaGo beat a world champion at the complex game of Go, it garnered a lot of praise. That's because, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk pointed out, experts in the field though AI was 10 years away from achieving that feat.

If Google's AI continues to advance on the track it's on today, it could open a world of possibilities, like building conscious machines.