Best of What's New 2010: Our 100 Innovations of the Year

The most marvelous time of the year

By Mark Jannot Posted 11.16.2010 at 3:30 pm 14 Comments

Best of What's New 2010

It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job: the moment in mid-October when a binder is dropped on my desk containing each page of our December Best of What’s New issue slotted sequentially into place so that I can truly immerse myself in this, our annual celebration of superlative technological innovation.

I flip and peruse, slow and steady, trying to capture the full sweep before going back through and allowing myself to get sucked in by individual marvels. By the time I’m done poring over the entire package, I’m reliably gobsmacked by what human ingenuity has delivered in a single year. A solar-powered plane that will fly all night. A remote-controlled rescue buoy that can speed to a drowning swimmer 10 times as fast as any lifeguard. A completely reinvented crutch that’s actually comfortable to use. And 97 more! No matter how gloomy my mood, no matter what ails me, this is a cure for it.

Another of my cherished tasks at this time of year is to referee the debate here about which of the honorees will be anointed with our grandest Grand Award, Innovation of the Year. I still remember with fond nostalgia the 2006 battle, when the $1.2-million Bugatti Veyron lost out to Bostitch’s one-cent HurriQuake nail. And this year we had a similar contest, a duel between power and practicality, engineering audacity and design elegance, adrenaline and virtue. The Porsche 918 Spyder concept hybrid supercar was a tough contender, demonstrating that a top speed of 198 mph and a top fuel efficiency of 78 mpg can coexist under the same extremely beautiful hood. But even the realization of no-compromise motoring was not a match for our ultimate winner, an ingeniously simple and inexpensive green box that will make it possible to grow trees in the Sahara. To see why the Groasis Waterboxx is our Innovation of the Year, click here.

See the full list here

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14 Comments

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RGK

11/17/10 at 8:30 am

Apparently they haven't innovated how to get rid of spam on the PopSci site. I just flagged 4 posts on this article alone. Anybody else getting sick of this yet?

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ZeroCool100

11/17/10 at 10:08 am

Yeah @RGK these spammers are getting REALLY annoying. Go spam somewhere else. And they put the same stuff on one article 3 or 4 times. Oh well, I guess all you can do is to just keep flagging them.

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Shadouness

11/17/10 at 2:34 pm

This is nice:
http://www.popsci.com/

Hey guys, you people are the technology here! The best yet. That's something good.
But yeah, they are annoying.

Click now
http://www.popsci.com/
jk

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lbln31

11/23/10 at 7:34 pm

good news,there's Fashionable.
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( http://www.shoppinglove.org)
sdfwerwer

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dgdc44

11/23/10 at 9:00 pm

maybe you can find answers here:

you can find many cheap and fashion stuff

=== http://www.supershops.org ===

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lbln22

11/24/10 at 10:05 am

( http://www.shoppinglove.org)
sdfsdwere

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astuteverbosity

12/02/10 at 11:49 am

YOU MUST NOT SPAM!!!

a bunch of extremely annoying spammers (or u can say idiots). you spam more than 100 thousand times a year on all different articles and are famous for low-quality pointless messages.

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OnePunch

12/10/10 at 9:42 am

Do you do independant testing on these products? How do you arrive at your decisions?

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lmlb61

12/16/10 at 11:26 pm

http://xrl.us/bh8n3s Here we can find many cheap and fashion of things
vnvbnvngh

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Scythelord

12/21/10 at 5:29 am

The iPad is hardly an important innovation. More like an impotent one.

Don't think I can think of another company that can sell so much high dollar junk on image alone as Apple can.

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stevetenpounds

12/22/10 at 11:21 am

i think the iPad it the most not wanted innov in the history on man

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JPnyc

12/29/10 at 1:22 pm

the iPad was the best answer to a question nobody asked.

perhaps that's exactly why it became so successful.

"Learn to Live & Live to Learn"
Alexander von Humboldt

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futurewiz14526

01/30/11 at 11:13 pm

In my eyes, the Sony NEX-5 deserves to be the grand award winner and the ipad shouldn't even be on the list. The ipad is basically an ipod touch with a larger screen so you can't bring it to places easily. The only reason why people buy it is because they are afraid that the ipod's screen is too small or if they want to spoil their children with expensive, totally not useful gagdets. It doesn't deserve to be called a "tablet computer" becuase you can't really run any programs or get anything done on it. The best you can do is read magazines and books, which hurt your eyes.

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HeatMan1

02/15/11 at 11:33 pm

My vote goes to the MIP winner Powerblanket for their revolutionary new Heat Spreading Technology used for heating pipelines, large tanks, drums, totes, and other temperature sensitive materials. Powerblanket delivers a barrier of uniform, directional heat to everything it comes in contact - engineered for use in the world's coldest locations.