2008-2009 Coolest Inventions

BY: Katelyn Primmer

Enhanced Fingerprints

John Bond developed a technique for analyzing fingerprints on a gun after it's been wiped clean.

Sweat corrodes metal, so Bond applied an electrical charge and a fine carbon powder to a gun's corroded part, revealing a fingerprint pattern.

Police are already using the technology to reopen some cases.

Invisibility Cloak

Scientists at UC Berkeley have engineered two new materials-one using a fishnet of metal layers, -the other using tiny silver wires

Neither absorb nor reflect light, causing it instead to bend backward.

The principle at work is refraction, which is what makes the cloak seem invisible

Synthetic Organism

J. Craig Venter managed to piece together de novo the genome of a living organism from a batch of man-made compounds.

He chose a very small organism with one of the smallest genomes on the planet, but splicing together its more than 582,000 base pairs was no easy feat.

Venter has yet to boot up his product in a cell to prove that it truly is alive, but that should come within the year.

Once that happens, he believes it will be possible to mix and match genomes to generate an endless list of organisms that can perform all sorts of molecular magic, from turning sugar into fuel or digesting oil spills in oceans to even churning out cures for disease.

Bionic Hand

The world's first commercially available bionic hand was created by Touch Bionics

It is multi-articulating, meaning each finger has its own motor.

Artificial hands are often hooklike, limited to simple open and close gestures, but the iLimb has more subtle capabilities, like a credit-card grip for grasping narrow objects.

It also has a power hold for larger things like coffee mugs.

ipod Touch

It's a fantastic MP3 player that not only plays music and games, but also stores contacts and calendar info.

The Touch does most of the same stuff as the iPhone, minus the calling (and the monthly service and data fees).

The iPod Touch has Wi-Fi connectivity and can run hundreds of apps and games from Apple's app store.

The Touch also makes it easy to sort, find and play your choice of thousands of songs within seconds.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Almost every nation keeps collections of native seeds so local crops can be replanted in case of an agricultural disaster.

The Global Seed Vault, opened this year on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is a backup for the backups.

It's badly needed — as many as half the seed banks in developing countries are at risk from natural disasters or general instability.

The vault can hold up to 4.5 million samples, which will be kept dry at about 0°F (-18°C). Even if the facility loses power, the Arctic climate should keep the seeds viable for thousands of years.

Hadron Collider

The world's biggest particle accelerator The mammoth machine will send protons wheeling in opposite

directions at nearly the speed of light, then smash them together at 6,000 times a second to try to answer such deep questions as why mass exists and whether the universe has extra dimensions.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the massive particle accelerator straddling the Swiss-French border — didn't destroy the world! The contraption didn't really work but it is a huge scientific breakthrough. In September, the 17-mile collider was switched on for the first time, putting to rest the rumors that the machine would create an artificial black hole capable of swallowing the planet or at least a sizeable piece of Europe.Things looked good at first, until a helium leak caused the collider to shut down after less than two weeks. Repairs are underway and the particles should begin spinning again sometime in June.

If we can get it to work right it could lead to many discoveries like, if you believe the big bang theory, how exactly that happened and answer many other questions on matter and stuff like that