Report from the Royal Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Summit

The article presents a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering's global grand challenges summit. The rate and nature of global change seems to be outside of the abilities of current science to predict or control. The developing world's increasing communications connectivity and economic needs are significantly affecting the global marketplace. The result will be potentially millions of new workers, many of them knowledge or information workers, added to the global community. Their economic needs will also create more opportunity for environmentally conscious and energy-savvy devices. The design and manufacturing of systems that are composed, in whole or in part, out of biological material at macroscopic scales are projected to become commonplace. Data and matter are becoming interchangeable. The next revolution will be due to our ability to simply turn data into things and work across scales that span nine orders of magnitude.