ideonexus.com

This year the World Economic Forum dropped the U.S. to Third Place as an engine of technology innovation behind Denmark and Sweden, but Americans continued turning out great ideas, as did the rest of the world.

We all started thinking really hard about energy as oil prices hit record highs. Saint Louis researchers invented batteries that run on sugar. A London-based defense firm’s Solar Plane Set a
54 hour Record flight time. Researchers at MIT successfully demonstrated the transfer of electricity Without Wires, opening the doors to whole new realms of innovation. This renewed interest in energy alternatives was best symbolized by New York shutting down the last DC power station in existence, started by Thomas Edison.

In a year where the release of Windows Vista totally sucked lemons and forced many people to unnecessarily scrap their old computers for upgrades able to run the bloated OS, more people turned to the much more eco-friendly Linux and its Ubuntu flavor for relief. A growing open source culture for a human race that produced 161 exabytes of data the year before, an explosion of information nicknamed the “Digital Big Bang.”

Information technology created new forms of employment, as World of Warcraft and other worlds made gold farming a way to make a living in China. Sex got more wired as a Master’s Student developed a sexual videogame using wired underwear, and biology became less of a nuisance as Menstration Became Optional. The U.N. Warned of impending human clones, and roboticists figured out the trick to getting children to accept their creations.

Amateurs and professionals proved their maker skills as scientists developed Stem Cells from Skin, and amateurs pulled Stem Cells from a Placenta. Google offered $30 million for a robotic Moon rover mission, while Make Magazine sent a Balloon to Space, and unfortunately lost it.

A frustrated Professor built expensive microfluidic devices using Shrinky Dink, and an Astrophysicist replaced expensive time on Supercomputers with Eight PlayStation 3s. Makers short cut microscopes costing hundreds of dollars with 30 minute USB microscopes and Microscopes made from bamboo.

I think the DIY hero of the year was the One Laptop Per Child project. It ended up costing $100 more than the original $100 goal, but the buy one for a needy child, get one for yourself gave the project a good start and opened the educational tool up to the world of hackers, who will improve on it, finding better ways to accomplish the educational project’s goals. That’s the nature of open source.