"The Oscars Of Invention"
“For 45 years, the prestigious R&D 100 Awards have been helping companies provide the important initial push a new product needs to compete successfully in the marketplace”.
“The winning of an R&D 100 Award provides a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that the product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year”.
I just read the paper on “The 45th Annual Awards - R&D 100″, which comes with this month’s issue of the R&D Magazine. These are the 10 which interested me the most.
INTERFACES:
Integrated Primary Flight Display - Honeywell International. Gives commercial pilots situational awareness by means of computer generated, promptly alerting them about obstacles on the flight path.
BrainGate Neural Interface System - Battelle Memorial Institute. Involves sensors implanted onto the motor cortex of the brain, decoding and translating brain signals to allow a user control a device by thought alone.
Novint Falcon and Novint/Sandia 3-D Touch Software - Novint Technologies. Sensations such as force feedback, tactile feedback and proprioception can be communicated to and from a conventional PC letting users feel weight, shape, texture, dimension, dynamics and force effects through the action of electronic motors attached to a interchangeable grip device.
Printed Active Display - Motorola. Light-emitting inks and paper thin printed circuits used to create display materials that light up. It does not require special printing equipment.
SENSORS:
ElectroNeedle Biomedical Sensor Array - Sandia National Laboratories. A device that when pressed against the skin can make rapid diagnostic measurements. This provides painless and quick measurement of biologically relevant molecules without having to extract fluids (e.g. blood) for later analysis. It identifies biological markers just beneath the skin’s surface.
Adaptive Sensor Fleet (ASF) - NASA. Traditionally, NASA and NOAA have used passive systems such as drifting buoys to take measurements in low-atmosphere and oceanographic research. ASF provides a new sensor architecture managing deices operating autonomously. The technology can be expanded to aircrafts, satellites, or other vehicles and hardware.
Mindstorms Nxt - Lego. Robotic Lego kits equipped with 32 bit microcomputer processors, flash memory, open source software, Bluetooth connectivity, servo motors, and rotation, speed, sound, light and touch sensors.
COLLABORATION & KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT:
Access Grid Release 3.0: - Argonne National Laboratory. This online collaboration program allows teams to communicate using videoconferencing with life-size displays and full duplex, hands-free audio. The software is open source.
Piranha: Dynamic, High Speed, High Volume, Knowledge Discovery Engine - Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Innovative algorithm relaying on intelligent agents to independently examine documents, e.g. dynamic document streams (more than 10,000 new documents in less than two minutes) can be processed to enable similar document discovery, duplication elimination, rapid categorization, and automatic classification of new documents.
FreeFlow Variable Information - Xerox. Imaging printing technologies ensuring that documents cannot be counterfeited: MicroText, GlossMark, CorrelationMark, and FluorescentText.
José de Francisco 
Chicago, 13 October 07 
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“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this article: [1] Mobile Blogging (6): Use Your Phone As A 3G Modem. [2] Mobile Phone Concepts: Egy Studio. [3] Project Ergofuturo: ErgoTrans (1991 Product Concept). [4] “Visual Futurist: The Art & Life Of Syd Mead”. [5] Bionics, Biomimetics, Biognosis, Biomimicry, or Bionical Creativity Engineering. [6] BusinessWeek: “Web Strategies That Cater To Customers”. [7] Toyota’s Personal Mobility: MWV Concept. [8] Intellectual Property And Innovation In Virtual Worlds. [9] MANet: Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. [10] Design Concepts: Future Car.
As a scientist I understand that our economic system came to play in human life in the last 10,000 years.
Inventions are helping the economy to derail man from its balance with nature since the most advanced country and largest economy is now around 33% obese reaching 41% by 2015.
Inventing machineries seems to be easier than inventing ways to keep man working for physiological need. Also, new inventions help to produce excessive food that lets energy pack on human bodies.
It seems that invention is boosting the economy and hurting human existence.
Who is going to invent a way to use human intelligence to achieve a balance with nature?
Elson Silva, Ph. D.
15 Oct 07 at 3:45 am