Popular Science Magazine Announces the "Best of What's New": Top 100 Tech Innovations of 2009

"Best of What's New is about finding innovations that simply blow us away, pushing us past what we thought was possible," says Mark Jannot, editor in chief of Popular Science. "This year's winners represent incredible breakthroughs both simple and complex-from a stethoscope that looks ordinary but may save billions of dollars in medical testing, to wallpaper that can withstand the pressure of a bomb blast, to an extraordinary telescope that may answer the question of whether we're alone in the universe."

The 2009 Best of What's New Grand Award winners by category are:

Health: 3M Healthcare Littmann Electronics Stethoscope Model 3200, with Zargis Medical Corp. Cardioscan: A modern makeover of the classic diagnostic tool, this stethoscope wirelessly beams a patient's heartbeat to a PC equipped with Cardioscan software, which can detect heart abnormalities. The system, which also won the coveted Innovation of the Year award, may help doctors diagnose-or dismiss-concerns more confidently, preventing unnecessary tests and saving billions of dollars. 

Gadgets: Canon EOS 5D MARK II: This is the first digital SLR that shoots full high-definition video. It's the camera that snapped Obama's official presidential portrait, along with commercials, network television shows and indie flicks. It has a 21-megapixel image sensor that captures views the same size as 35mm film, and unlike small camcorders, it can be used with a variety of lenses. 

Security: X-Flex Blast Protection System: Meet the world's toughest wallpaper, designed for use anywhere that's prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like war zones and natural disasters. The paper bonds so tightly that it prevents walls from collapsing in an explosion, and a single layer can stop a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall. The U.S. Army is considering papering bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Engineering: TKTS, Times Square: The new TKTS booth in New York City's Times Square is the largest load-bearing glass structure in the world. The secret is a plastic film called SentryGlas Plus, which is 100 times the strength of typical laminates and binds sheets into structural pieces that are five times as strong as a wood frame. Up next? All-glass skyscrapers. 

Automotive: 2010 Mercedes S400 Hybrid: This is the world's first production car to switch from the nickel-metal-hydride batteries of today's hybrids to a lighter, more powerful lithium-ion battery designed expressly for automobiles. The result is a 29-mpg luxury sedan that actually costs less than its traditional counterpart. 

Recreation: Sea-Doo GTX Limited iS255: Rocketing along the water at 60 mph in a personal watercraft is a lot of fun, but these recreational boats account for a quarter of all accidents largely because they have no brakes. Sea-Doo has released the first personal watercraft with on-water braking. 

Aviation & Space: Nasa Kepler Space Telescope: While the Kepler probe isn't exactly an alien hunter, its mission is to find planets like our own in distant star systems-planets that may be habitable. Kepler is continuously observing 100,000 stars, and scientists hope it will find dozens of these planets over the next four years. 

Home entertainment: Microsoft Project Natal: This prototype is the first gaming system with no controller-the player's movements and voice control the game. Project Natal lets Xbox 360 games respond to anything from full-body lunges to hand gestures, voice input and even facial expressions. 

Green Technology: Steward Advanced Materials Thiol-Samms: This toxin terminator is a simple-looking white powder that can get mercury-contaminated water 100 times as clean as any other method at half the cost. Each grain is engineered to be a molecular sponge designed to absorb half its weight in mercury, which binds to sulfur atoms in the molecule to form a stable powder that's safe for landfills. 

Home Technology: Bosch Full Force Technology: Most pneumatic nail guns don't operate at full power because of the energy that's needed to pressurize a return chamber to reset the piston after each nail is driven. This new line of pneumatic nailers eliminates the return chamber in favor of a blast of compressed air that resets the piston, making the tools 20 percent smaller and 10 percent more powerful than others. 

Computing: Wolfram Research, WolframAlpha: Typical search engines provide links to suggest where the answers to a query may be found. Alpha, the brainchild of software guru Stephen Wolfram, runs algorithms that use context and probability to interpret a query and scour more than 10 trillion pieces of data to deliver an actual answer in text, graphs, charts or maps. 

The article is also available at www.popsci.com/bown2009.