The San Francisco–based accelerator IndieBio's Demo Day is delightfully awkward. Finally, with the room settled and the house lights turned down, the CEO of each of the 12 science-focused startups in the program steps to the stage, stumbles through a breathtakingly dense five-minute pitch of mind-bending products like 3-D-printed kidneys, lab-grown fish, and pheromone-based insecticide, and then asks for funding. The halting presentations are symptomatic of the program at IndieBio, which strives to turn scientists with big ideas into successful CEOs within four months. So this September, at IndieBio's Demo Day (the three-year-old accelerator's fifth fundraising event), it was staggering when Matías Muchnick, in a Tasmanian Devil–adorned Hawaiian shirt, gave a clear, concise, funny presentation about the way his company, NotCo, would change the food industry. Most of the IndieBio companies are speculative (the 3-D-printed kidney could be available in seven to 10 years), but NotCo entered the accelerator with a product ready for market. Included in the pitch from Muchnick and his two cofounders--Karim Pichara and Pablo Zamora--was a sample of NotMayo, a vegan mayonnaise currently sold in 220 stores throughout Chile.

Ride-hailing startup Lyft announced last week that it's making its own self-driving car technology--a move that could help it meet an audacious goal of having autonomous vehicles chauffeur most of its passengers around by 2021. It sounds a bit far-fetched, considering that autonomous cars are still largely in the testing stages, but Lyft is just one of many companies saying that 2021 will be the year that these vehicles finally get out on the roads en masse. So, sure, it could happen. And going along with that positive line of thinking--assuming that we will, in fact, have self-driving cars in 2021--we wondered what other technological marvels and milestones await us in that magical year. According to an array of predictions from tech companies and market researchers, plenty of changes are coming, including many more developments in transportation, lots of people spending time in virtual reality, lab-grown chicken, and, just maybe, male birth control.