With a new year fast approaching, it's always fun to make predictions. Thanks to our federal government, that's easy to do. The feds have been monitoring the future. Sound like Big Brother has extra sensory powers? Not to worry. "Monitoring the Future" is the name for a survey of high school students. Our "future," get it? The survey is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has been tracking student use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco since 1975.

For the first time in a while, survey results give an encouraging glimpse of our "future." Use of marijuana, some club drugs, cigarettes and alcohol decreased among teens from 2001 to 2002. The survey also found use of the drug "Ecstasy" significantly declined for the first time after rising rapidly in recent years.

While the government monitors the "future," in the very near future doctors may monitor patients with an implanted device similar to the black boxes that record data in airplanes. These tiny monitors are placed in the body to track the function of a person's organs.

Medtronic, Inc., a company that manufactures pacemakers, already has its first implantable monitor available. Doctors place them in people who suffer mysterious fainting spells to help make diagnoses. The device, called the Reveal, is only two inches long and weighs just a few grams. Other implants are being developed to monitor blood pressure and heart rate – even inside the heart itself. Doctors predict the implantable monitors will help them treat patients for less cost with fewer hospital visits.

Another high-tech device may improve the quality of life for nursing home patients. It's a robotic dog. The National Science Foundation funded a robotics study that determined the little doggie robots decrease social isolation, increase physical activity and improve morale. All that without doggie mess.

The robots are manufactured by Sony and cost about 1300 hundred dollars. They're small and black with a flat face and no resemblance to a particular breed. They can walk slowly, right themselves after a fall and chase balls. They'll act up if you ignore them, waving their paws and squeaking.

A dog that squeaks? Well, if you don't want to listen, you just switch it off. Children also may benefit from these mechanical pets. Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Washington are studying whether the robots will help children with cognitive, social and moral development.

I suppose one advantage of robot dogs is that they don't shed.

And speaking of hair, a Seattle biotechnology company is investing millions of dollars to develop a way to grow hair in your ears. Why would you want to grow hair in your ears? Because that's how you hear. Tiny hairs deep inside the human ear are crucial to the ability to hear. Up until now, scientists believed that once those auditory hair cells are damaged, it's impossible to grow them back.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center developed a way to grow auditory hair cells in the ears of mice. Now a company called Sound Pharmaceuticals is attempting the same technique for humans. Don't throw your hearing aids away yet. The researchers admit they have a long way to go. Scientist Matthew Fero says a whole series of obstacles need to be overcome. But if they succeed, they estimate the market for ear hair growth will top a billion dollars.

Of course, billion dollar sales are commonplace in the world of pharmaceuticals. The world's largest biotechnology company, Amgen, has released a sales forecast for just one of its drugs – Enbrel, used for treating rheumatoid arthritis. The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a new factory for producing the drug, which means Amgen will have more of it available to sell. Amgen expects sales of up to 1.4 billion dollars in 2003 alone.

Think about that. One arthritis pill times a billion dollars times all those other pills the pharmacies are dispensing. As the late, great Senator Everett Dirksen once said, "A billion here, a billion there, and before long, we're talking real money!"

Click here to read more about the Monitoring the Future Survey.