Every year, Popular Science Magazine publishes their 100 top innovations of the year.
They have 10 categories namely: Automotive, Computing, Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Personal Health, Aviation & Space, Engineering, General Innovation, Home Tech and Recreation. Here are the winners in the respective categories:
Automotive: Bugatti Veyron 16.4. The fastest production car ever with 746kw output! Built by Volkswagen and sold at a loss of almost $1.5 million! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron
http://www.bugatti-cars.de/bugatti/index.html
Computing: One Laptop Per Child. The goal of OLPC, a non-profit organisation, is to provide each child a laptop, especially in developing countries. It costs only $130. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$100_laptop
http://www.laptop.org/
Gadgets: Sony Reader PRS-500. On the way to no more paper! Download your favourite books onto this baby and empty your shelves! http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/pa/prs/index.html
Home Entertainment: Nintendo Wii. They went back to the drawing-board with the controls of this gaming console: less is more in this case. It only uses a couple of buttons that doesn’t take you years to master. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii ; http://wii.nintendo.com/
Personal Health: Custom Grown Bladders. None of the patients that received newly built bladders, built from their own cell tissue, had organ rejection problems! http://www.wfirm.org/
Aviation & Space: QinetiQ and Surrey Satellite Technology Topsat. A fridge-size spy satellite, which uses a new folded-optics camera will be very popular as they are small and inexpensive as far as satellites go. http://www.sstl.co.uk/index.php?loc=114; http://www.qinetiq.com/
Engineering: Beijing National Swimming Center. The official swimming facility of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China will not contain a single piece of steel or concrete. It will use network of steel pipes linked together by 12,000 load-bearing nodes. http://www.arup.com/eastasia/project.cfm?pageid=1250
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_National_Aquatics_Center
http://en.beijing2008.com/72/79/article211987972.shtml
General Innovation: HP Memory Spot. It’s a two-millimeter-square chip that has half a megabyte of flash memory and can swap all its data in less than a second. You will be able to read data (including music and video files) off it using devices such as iPods for instance. It transmits data via a tiny built-in antenna over high-frequency radio waves. http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2006/jul-sept/memoryspot.html
Home Tech: Bostitch HurriQuake Nail. This nail was engineered to withstand up to 170mph winds, earthquakes and is designed to withstand being pulled and twisted out of its place by hurricanes. http://www.bostitch.com/
Recreation: Celestron Skyscout Personal Planetarium. This is the best tool for amateur astronomers. Simply point the device towards a star in the heavens and it will give you all the info you need on it. Or if you’re looking for a specific star, it will tell you where it is with blinking arrows. It incorporates a GPS, compass and determines the angel it is being held at. http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/new/
These are honestly some of the most brilliant innovations I have ever seen and will definitely be posting on some of these items in the future. These things are one of the main reasons why I started this blog. Call me a nerd, but I find it very exciting!
See also my post on the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards.
2 comments:
I enjoy reading about progress. With all our problems, we often forget that there is a silver lining. Whistler, http://sentimentaljourneys.blogspot.com.
Very Informative. Keep it up!
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