2-4 Best Inventions Of 2010

Radhika: Hi, I'm Radhika Jones, I'm an assistant managing editor at Time.

Josh: And I'm Josh Quittner, editor at large at Time.

Radhika: We have been working on Time's annual 50 Best Inventions package for the last few months.

And it's all here on this wall, which is this is our our layout for the magazine.

Josh: What's what was your favorite thing?

Radhika: My favorite thing is right here, it's called the straddling bus, um, and this is a bus that's going to be road-tested in China hopefully next year.

It's a solution to gridlock, um, as the writer says, not by taking people off the road but putting more people on the road. It's a gigantic bus that sort of straddles two lanes of traffic and can fit like a thousand people, um, up above. And so cars can go under it, pass each other underneath it, and meanwhile all the people are getting where they need to go.

Josh: Of course jetpacks, I mean what that was really another one of our requirements for 50 greatest inventions, there had to be a jetpack. The jetpack can actually stay aloft for what about 30 minutes something?

We think that the use for this is going to be among first responders. It could be good for emergency situations and it could also be really fun to, um, amuse the neighbors.

Uh, this was a really amazing invention. The idea was it was, uh, it would enable, uh, paraplegics to to walk after a fashion.

So what's really significant about this is, uh, thanks to the, uh, miracle of computer technology, the, uh, robotic prosthetic legs use artificial intelligence to read the wearer's arm motions and get everything in sync. Um, this was something obviously that wasn't possible until recently.

We really dug the, uh, Plastiki. This was, uh, a plastic sailboat that was constructed entirely out of discarded plastic bottles. It sailed, uh, in the spring of this year from, uh, San Francisco to Australia.

If you look at the sailboat you'll see in the hull that it actually used, uh, plastic bottles, 12,500 of them, uh, pretty fantastic when you consider that 8.7 billion, uh, plastic bottles are used by Americans a year. It's a real gigantic waste and this kind of suggests that we could be using this material, uh, as something that has value.

These are really cool. These are called Looxcies and, uh, there've been a number of these things through the ages, but this is really getting the form factor down right. I mean every well-dressed geek is going to be packing a pair of Looxcies. The basic idea is these are hands-free video recorders. Now anything you see, the camera sees, um, and you can even send with just the push of a button a 30-second stream up to your Facebook page.

Radhika: This is Sugru. It's kind of looks like Silly Putty, but it's much more useful. Well the the little tagline is "hack things better". Um, it's a very easy sort of moldable putty that basically acts like superglue.

Josh: It it seems like a real interesting material that we've needed for a long time.

Radhika: Yes. We think we will see more of this.

Josh: More Sugru.

Radhika: Yes. The one thing we couldn't get this year, at least I didn't see it in any of the suggestions, was a time machine.

Josh: Right.

Radhika: Um, so for next year, inventors, send us your time machines.