2010 invention awards

Four years ago, when Matthew Callaghan was a surgery intern at the University of California at San Francisco, the medical world was buzzing over the prospect of a global flu pandemic. One of the biggest potential problems was logistical: Because 95 percent of the ventilators in the U.S.—which keep critically ill patients breathing when their respiratory system is unable to function—are already in use, thousands of patients would die for lack of available life support. Ventilators cost hospitals from $3,000 up to $40,000 for state-of-the-art models, making it impractical for most hospitals…

Dutch flower exporter Pieter Hoff often spent nights in his beloved lily fields to monitor them. One evening, he noticed that the first droplets of morning condensation were collecting on the leaves of his lilies well before midnight.

One day in 2006, stuck in bumper-to-bumper Bay Area traffic, Amir Abolfathi had a eureka moment. Formerly vice president of R&D; for Invisalign, a company known for transparent dental braces, he had recently been chatting with a friend who was working on hearing aids. Abolfathi knew that bone was a good sound conductor. What if he could somehow make a removable oral hearing aid—one that could channel sound from wearers' teeth to their ear through the bones in their head?

Nobody would have expected the biggest innovation in modern snowmobiling to come from a self-taught engineer, a broken-down all-terrain vehicle, and a drag strip. No one except for those who know Shawn Watling. The 35-year-old Toronto millwright, who installs and services mammoth printing presses, is a former jock, a closet mathematician, an amateur chess champion, and a serial inventor with four patent-pending inventions to his name. He also has a lifelong addiction to snow and speed—he first rode on a snowmobile at nine months old and has been drag-racing snowmobiles and other vehicles for…