Uno
Cost to Develop: $45,000
Time: 2 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Just before his plane dipped into the clouds above Beijing International Airport two years ago, Ben Gulak caught the last clear view of the sun that he would see for two weeks. On the ground, the 17-year-old, who was on a family trip to China, quickly spotted a source for much of the thick haze hanging over the city: smog-spewing motorbikes. Thousands of them, everywhere. “Right then,” he says, “I decided that I wanted to create an alternative mode of transportation, something clean and compact.”

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Sky Serpant
Cost to Develop: $250,000
Time: 9 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Today’s largest wind farms are the size of small towns, made up of turbines 30 stories tall with blades the size of 747 wings. Those behemoths produce a great deal of power, but manufacturing, transporting, and installing them is both expensive and difficult, and back orders are common as the industry grows by more than 40 percent a year. The solution, says inventor Doug Selsam, is to think smaller: Capture more power with less material by putting 2, 10, someday dozens of smaller rotors on the same shaft linked to the same generator.

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The Kanzius RF Field Generator
Cost to Develop: $1 million+
Time: 5 years
Prototype | | | | | Product

When a man with no medical degree and a diagnosis of fatal leukemia builds a cancer-curing machine in his garage, you might think it merely the desperate attempt of a dying man to escape his fate. And you’d be right. The weird thing is, it just might work.

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The Cyclone
Cost to Develop: $2 million
Time: 8 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
As long as the internal combustion engine has been around, garage tinkerers have been trying—in vain—to best it. But Florida boat engineer Harry Schoell, a lifelong inventor with a portfolio of patents, thinks he’s got the answer, in the form of a reinvented steam engine.

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Viper
Cost to Develop: $250,000
Time: 2 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
If we’re ever going to see a true era of commercial space travel—a day when Virgin Galactic is just another spaceline—Tim Bendel believes we need a better rocket engine. Specifically, something that is to the space industry what the internal combustion engine was to the nascent car industry a century ago: a standard, off-the-shelf option that can power any manner of vehicle, from tourist ship to lunar lander. And it has to be affordable to companies not owned by billionaire Richard Branson.

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Hillman Composite Beams
$500,000
Time: 12 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Last November, John Hillman stood beneath a bridge built with prototype plastic-and-concrete beams of his own design. Then he signaled for his team to release a nine-million-pound coal train. “You can do all the calculations you want; you can do tons of lab testing. But at the end of the day, you run a heavy-axle coal train over the bridge, and that pretty much tells you whether or not it’s gonna hold,” Hillman says. It didn’t budge.

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Bel-Air
Cost to Develop: $236,000
Time: 1 year
Prototype | | | | | Product
Your home could be emitting toxic gases. Just ask the victims of Hurricane Katrina, whose emergency trailers, made with glue-laden particleboard, let off so much formaldehyde that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that residents should “spend time outdoors” and “make relocating to permanent housing a priority.” Even in more expensive new homes, the concentration of emissions from things like furniture, carpet and paint can be two to five times as high as it is outdoors. But most air filters only catch particulates such as dust and pollen rather than organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene, and the filters that do trap those gases need frequent replacement. So Mathieu LeHanneur and David Edwards built an ultra-efficient filtration system that eliminates toxins using nature’s own hazmat squad: plants.

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K3 Promoter
Cost to Develop: $100,000
Time: 8 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Gordon Link, a diabetic and foot amputee, is not looking to climb Mount Everest, run a marathon, or snowboard off a cliff. “I just want to walk without stumbling like I’m a drunk,” he says. It may not sound like a tall order, but until he was fitted with a prototype prosthetic foot that simulates the body’s natural movements, walking on uneven ground was like navigating an obstacle course. “Hitting a low spot of even one inch with my old foot was like a non-amputee stepping into a four-inch hole,” he adds. “Not good.”

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Paragon Diving System
Cost to Develop: $1.2 million
Time: 7 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Diesel oil and raw sewage slowly trickled into Taber MacCallum’s eyes as he swam toward the sunken research ship he’d been called to help salvage. It was 1989, and Hurricane Hugo had devastated Puerto Rico three days before, dumping fuel and municipal waste into San Juan Harbor. As the young diver and analytical chemist worked to raise the ship, the seals on his diving equipment disintegrated in the muck that crept into his helmet. Every time MacCallum exhaled into the putrid water, his helmet let a few drops back in.

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The Super MoneyMaker Pump—yes, that's the real name—sucks up water from sources as many as 30 feet below the ground, can spray it up to 40 feet high, and can even push it through 1,000 feet of hose to cover a larger section of land. In all, the pump can irrigate two acres of land, and costs only around $100.

MIT professor Martin Fisher and his team at KickStart, a nonprofit, invented the pump for small-scale farmers. Since it's human-powered and easy to use, it allows them to irrigate crops all year round, instead of just waiting for the rainy season.

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