2009 invention awards

"Let's run it through from the top. This is going downhill."

Dean Kamen is standing on a six-inch riser in an almost empty room in the basement of Westwind, his 32,000-square-foot house in Bedford, New Hampshire, trying to get this thing right. It's crunch time for FIRST, the high-school robotics competition Kamen founded two decades ago in an effort to get kids jazzed about engineering, to make science as sexy as sports. (FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.)

In less than a month, 42,000 students on 1,700 teams will gather at 43 regional championships to showcase the ball-throwing 'bots that each team has spent six weeks assembling in novel ways from nearly identical boxes of parts. At stake -- besides glory -- is $9 million in scholarships.

Trapped on a high floor? Reach for today's featured Invention Award winner.

As the 9/11 inferno unfolded on television, one question kept dogging Kevin Stone: Why weren't the people trapped in the World Trade Center able to make their way to safety? "I said to myself, This is crazy," recalls Stone, an orthopedic surgeon and seasoned inventor in San Francisco. "There should be a better way to exit a skyscraper when something like this happens."

Today's featured Invention Award winner: ReWalk, the lightweight, affordable, powered smart exoskeleton.

After breaking his neck in a 1997 fall, Israeli engineer Amit Goffer learned that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He soon concluded that this mode of transportation was outdated and began work on the ReWalk, the only wearable exoskeleton that allows paraplegics to stand, amble, and even climb stairs.

Today's featured Invention Award winner kills two birds with one stone: providing a simple and cheap alternative energy source while widening the market for delicious fried foods. Everybody wins!

The nondescript six-foot-tall box behind Finz restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, looks like a tool shed, but actually it's a self-contained grease refinery and five-kilowatt generator. Engineer James Peret's Vegawatt is the first all-in-one device that processes grease to continuously provide a building with electricity and hot water, heralding a significant change in alternative-fuel applications. "It's a brilliant idea," says Josh Tickell, author of Biodiesel America. "A waste stream to an energy source, with no intermediary."

Remember that awesome scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise just wiggles his hands in the air to sift through information? Today's featured Invention Award winner brings it to life.

When he's wearing the SixthSense, a combination miniature projector, webcam and notebook computer, Pranav Mistry can snap photos just by making the shape of a frame with his fingers.

Invention: Greensulate
Inventor: Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre
Cost: $1,500
Time: 2 years
Is It Ready Yet? 1 2 3 4 5

Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre want to line the walls of your home with mushrooms. The young entrepreneurs have created a strong, low-cost biomaterial that could replace the expensive, environmentally harmful Styrofoam and plastics used in wall insulation, as well as in packaging and a host of other products. Wind-turbine blades and auto-body panels aren't out of the realm of possibility, either.

For all you holiday anglers, today's featured Invention Award winner is something to aspire to: a fishing lure that doesn't pollute once it ends up on the bottom of the lake.

Ben Hobbins didn’t set out to clean up his local lakes, but his IronClads baits do exactly that. The Wisconsin inventor’s idea — fishing lures that are extra-strong, eco-friendly and nontoxic — solves a serious, if little-known environmental problem.

Today's featured Invention Award winner really requires no justification--it's an unmanned, armed tank faster than anything the US Army has. Behold, the Ripsaw.

Cue up the Ripsaw’s greatest hits on YouTube, and you can watch the unmanned tank tear across muddy fields at 60 mph, jump 50 feet, and crush birch trees. But right now, as its remote driver inches it back and forth for a photo shoot, it’s like watching Babe Ruth forced to bunt with the bases loaded. The Ripsaw, lurching and belching black puffs of smoke, somehow seems restless.

Today's featured Invention Awards winner is the Audeo, a voice synthesizer that gives back the ability to speak to those with vocal cord or neurological damage. Be sure to check out the rest of 2009's Invention Award winners here.

When Michael Callahan was 17, he lost his short-term memory when he hit his head in a skateboarding accident. "The neural pathways were all wrong," he recalls. Within weeks, he was back to normal, but the incident left him thinking, how could he help people who had permanently lost abilities that most of us take for granted? Five years later, he came up with the Audeo, a tiny device that detects electrical activity between the brain and vocal cords and turns it into audible speech.

Right now, somewhere in America, there’s an inventor in a garage on the verge of something big. It might not be a cure for leukemia or a rocket to Mars, but some unexpected innovations can be almost as profound. Like the fisherman who made a lure that doesn’t damage the environment. Or the college kids who built a shock absorber that saves fuel by turning potholes into power. Here in our third annual Invention Awards, we present these and eight other standout inventors whose creativity and hard work are making our lives better, as well as the secrets for getting your own great idea out of the garage and into the world.