Most exciting innovations of the year

From the first-ever $9 computer to lab-grown rhino horns, this year has been filled with innovations that give us hope for the future. The TI Innovation team compiled a list of our favorite world-changing products and ideas that made significant progress over the last year. We saw scientists make progress on some of the most intractable diseases, buildings become smarter, and gender take center stage. Some of these innovations are still nascent, while others have already had a big impact. All have the potential to change the way we live.
 

An algae-based gel stops bleeding in seconds.

VetiGel, an algae-based gel that can stop bleeding in just 12 seconds, is set to start shipping to veterinarians this fall. After further testing, humans may get it, too.

Created by biotech company Suneris, the gel quickly seals wounds and stops traumatic bleeding, the leading cause of preventable death in trauma victims.

Joe Landolina, Suneris’ CEO, was just 17 when he invented VetiGel. Five years later, Suneris is about to ship its first batch.

VetiGel takes the fibers inside your everyday algae plant and injects them into a wound. The fibers link together like LEGO blocks within seconds, forming a leak-proof seal and stopping the bleeding process. VetiGel doesn’t cause clots and it integrates over time into the damaged tissue, so it never needs to be removed.

“The ability to stop a bleed quickly with no applied pressure is a game-changer,” says Landolina.

This $9 computer is incredibly good.

Hardware is expensive. Chip is not. The world’s first $9 computer, which began shipping this fall, can be used for everything from editing spreadsheets to learning to code.

All you have to do is connect it to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse with adaptors, and you’re in business. Amateur inventors can also create new gadgets, like mobile printers or media players that use Chip as their processors, keeping the overall cost of parts down.

Dave Rauchwerk, CEO of Next Thing Co., previously created a GIF-generating camerapowered by the ever-popular Raspberry Pi, but the microcomputer’s $35 price tag drove up the cost of the camera beyond what’s reasonable for a toy.

Rauchwerk decided that in order to get the cost down his team needed to create a new computer. Chip is a Linux-based mini-PC with a 1 gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of ram, and four gigabytes of storage. All those specs add up roughly to a low-end smartphone with WiFi and Bluetooth.

Ever since Next Thing Co. first started shipping units to its Kickstarter backers in October, tinkerers have been sharing their progress and ideas. “This will be my first ever foray into working with small devices,” one backer writes. We suspect she’s not alone.

The first 3D printed drug is here.

This summer, the FDA approved the first 3D printed prescription drug, a pill for epileptic seizures called Spritam. Eventually, this technology could revolutionize the pharmaceutical world, making it possible to create highly customized drugs.

“This is a milestone in the entire field,” says Michael Cima, an engineering professor at MIT who helped develop the 3D printing used to make Spritam. “You’re making millions of the same thing. The benchmark is now higher for all these 3D printing technologies,”

One immediate advantage of 3D printed drugs is that they are porous and will dissolve in your mouth with just a sip of water, making them easier for people who have difficulty swallowing — such as people who are having a seizure. It’s possible to make porous drugs the traditional way, but it’s a lot harder and more expensive.

Looking ahead, the ability to print drugs might allow for more customized medication. Other researchers have theorized that 3D printing could be a cheaper way to produce drugs for the developing world.

This solar-powered aircraft could bring internet to the world.

Facebook’s plan to bring internet access to the developing world had two breakthroughs this summer: prototyping a solar-powered, internet-delivering aircraft, as well as a lab-tested laser that can transmit data from that aircraft at 10 gigabits per second.

Together, the two could offer wireless internet to even the most isolated regions.

Aquila, as the carbon-fiber plane is named, has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 and one-third the weight of an electric car. It can fly for 90 days straight at an altitude above commercial air traffic and weather patterns and beam connectivity down to people using lasers.

“We started the Connectivity Lab at Facebook to try to change this paradigm by developing a new range of technologies to help accelerate the process of bringing connectivity to the unserved and underserved,” Yael Maguire, the company’s engineering director, tells Tech Insider.

Facebook says test flights for its aircraft should begin later this year. Meanwhile, the company also recently announced a deal with French satellite operator Eutelsat Communications that will use satellites to beam internet across 14 countries in Africa.

CRISPR-Cas9 unlocks the building blocks of life.

This year, scientists modified the building blocks of life using CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that gives us the ability to rewrite DNA, ushering in a new era of disease prevention and elimination, genetically edited plants and animals, and possibly even “designer babies.”

The CRISPR-Cas9 system, dubbed “the biggest biotech discovery of the century” by MIT, is essentially a “search-and-replace” tool for the genome. Don’t want the code that’s related to a particular disease? The tool can be used to snip or potentially swap it out.

“We’re basically able to have a molecular scalpel for genomes,” Jennifer Doudna, a biologist credited as one of the co-discoverers of this genetic editing system, told Tech Insider. “All the technologies in the past were sort of like sledgehammers … This just gives scientists the capability do something that is incredibly powerful.”

As Dustin Rubinstein, the head of a lab working with CRISPR at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us, genetic editing could transform everything from cancer research and neuroscience to chemical engineering and even energy production.

“You’re only limited by your imagination,” Rubinstein said.

The Omni Processor makes clean water profitable.

Who could forget the image of Bill Gates drinking poop water?

It was a cold January morning, and Gates was demoing the Omni Processor, a new Gates Foundation-funded water purifier made by Janicki Bioenergy. The machine turns human feces into drinkable water and valuable energy.

The Omni Processor is already being tested in Dakar, Senegal, and Janicki is slated to sell the first full-size processor, which can convert 14 tons of sewage into electricity and drinkable water each day, to a utility company in Dakar next year, with more communities to follow.

The key to the machine’s success is its ability to make money by creating power.

“If you go into developing countries, it’s not the government providing services,” says Gates Foundation’s senior program officer, Doulaye Koné. “It’s entrepreneurs.”

So the Gates Foundation is helping create a system where the profit margins are right for entrepreneurs who clean out the latrines in Dakar neighborhoods to sell human waste to the utility company that owns the Omni Processor.

Sanitation is usually a money-losing proposition in the developing world, which is part of why governments and corporations aren’t invested in making it better. But if you can make money on sanitation, suddenly it’s a public health boon that pays for itself.

A tableware set makes it easier to eat with Alzheimer’s.

Eatwell is a new tableware set that uses bright colors, ergonomics, and clever design to make eating with cognitive decline easier. After garnering attention as the winner of the 2014 Stanford Design Challenge, it’s finally being released this month.

By 2050, an expected 131 million people will live with dementia, mostly due to Alzheimer’sdisease. There is no cure, but smart design can restore some of the confidence that disease takes away.

Creator Sha Yao designed Eatwell’s bowls with a slanted basin that collects food on one side, so contents can be easily scooped up. Spoon handles are curved to fit the natural alignment of the human hand, and an anti-tipping cup includes a wide, sturdy base.

Yao selected shades of blue, red, and yellow because research shows that a person with dementia can consume 24% more food and 84% more liquid when they are served in brightly colored containers.

Brookdale, a leading assisted living provider, will host a pilot program in its facilities for large-scale user testing later this year.

The world rallies around a new Ebola vaccine.

Early tests suggest that a new Ebola vaccine developed this year may be close to 100% successful. It’s a reminder that medical advances can happen incredibly fast when the public and private sector work together.

Last year’s Ebola outbreak was the largest in history, infecting some 28,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and claiming more than 11,000 lives. It sparked worldwide panic — and a call to action.

Developed by pharmaceutical company Merck and sponsored by the World Health Organization, the Ebola vaccine (rVSV-ZEBOV) surpassed expectations this summer when it was administered to over 4,000 subjects in Guinea. A week out, not a single recipient had contracted the disease.

More recently, researchers found one dose of the vaccine would protect macaques within seven days of being infected with Ebola. Further testing in more controlled conditions is required to show the vaccine’s true effectiveness. It’s also impossible to know whether the protection provided by the vaccine is long term.

What’s miraculous about this drug is not just the science behind it but also how quickly it sped through the trial phase. Scientists, drug companies, and governments worked togetherto get the vaccine through a 10-year process in just one year.

Ultra-precise weather prediction is within reach.

Satellite company Spire is on the way to providing better data on weather than we have ever seen before. The company is doing it with a fleet of mini satellites, with 20 going into orbit by the end of the year and 100 planned for the near future.

These small and cheap satellites will deliver 10,000 data readings per day by the end of 2015 — a full five-fold increase over the 2,000 readings a day delivered by publicly funded weather satellites, according to CEO Peter Platzer.

With better data, we can more accurately predict, for example, if a hurricane bearing down on the East Coast is a dangerous Sandy or a mild Joaquin.

And it’s not just about numbers Spire’s satellites don’t “look” at the Earth like conventional ones but rather listen. Using GPS Radio Occultation technology, satellites receive GPS radio waves to collect temperature, pressure, and moisture data, which meteorologists can use to calculate predictions.

Genetically modified mosquitoes are fighting diseases.

Oxitec is pioneering the use of genetically modified mosquitoes to combat two painful, mosquito-borne viruses: dengue and chikungunya.

Oxitec cooks up mosquitoes in a lab and injects them with an additional “self-limiting” gene. They release the non-biting male mosquitoes into the wild, where they find and mate with female mosquitoes, who do bite. Their offspring inherit the genes and die before they grow old enough to reproduce. If the release is successful, the mosquito population crashes and humans have a lower risk of infection.

More than 100 million of these “friendly mosquitoes” have been let loose in field trials in Panama, the Cayman Islands, and Brazil — reportedly reducing target mosquito populations by more than 90% in each case.

This spring, the company launched its first municipal partnership with the city of Piracicaba, Brazil, where it began releasing mosquitoes over a 10-month span. Brazil also hosts Oxitec’s year-old production facility, where 2 million mosquitoes are made each week.

Meanwhile in America, the FDA is reviewing an Oxitec application to release several million engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, where dengue arrived in 2009 and 2010.

Google Translate makes traveling so much better.

In July, Google released a new feature for its Translate app that provides instant visual translations for more than 20 languages, making it possible to get around almost anywhere on your own.

Before this update, users had to hold up their phone to the image they wanted to translate, take a photo, and wait. The new feature eliminates that friction: users just hold their phone to the image, open the camera, and watch as text is magically translated.

Want to check out a foreign menu? You can do it in seconds, flipping the pages and watching the items get translated in real-time. Don’t know what that sign means? Now you can find out instantly.

“For the future, we’re working to improve the quality of the languages we currently support and to add more languages,” says Barak Turovsky, product lead for Google Translate. “Breaking down language barriers is what we’re working towards, so is our eventual aim to support as many languages and writing systems as possible.”

Lab-grown rhino horns will stop poachers in their tracks.

This year, biotech startup Pembient figured out how to create real rhinos horn in a lab — an innovation that could disrupt the deadly practice of poaching, which has endangered the global population of black rhinos.

The horns have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years and have increasingly become a status symbol. In South Africa alone, the number of rhinos poached has increased by over 7,000% since 2007. According to Pembient, over 1,200 South African rhinoceroses were poached in 2014, and the asking price for rhino horn has climbed above $60,000 per kilogram.

Pembient uses yeast cells to create the same keratin that’s in rhino horns. That keratin is combined with rhino DNA to form an ink for 3D printing a horn with the same physical and genetic properties as a wild horn.

“Right now, the poachers and wildlife trading syndicates are the ones that are incentivized to kill wildlife due to the high prices various wildlife products command,” Pembient founder Matthew Markus tells Tech Insider. “By making bio-identical products we want to drop those prices and destroy those incentives, thereby putting our competition out of business.”

A new vaccine could destroy dengue fever.

A worker fumigates a residential area in the Philippines to ramp up defenses against dengue.

Later this year, French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur is expected to license a dengue vaccine in 20 countries, a major milestone in the World Health Organization’smission to reduce mortality from the mosquito-borne virus by at least 50% by 2020.

Sanofi Pasteur announced last fall that its vaccine candidate — the culmination of 20 years of research — may reduce the number of dengue disease cases by 60% in children and adolescents for up to one year.

About half the world’s population is at risk for dengue, which causes flu-like illness, sometimes severe pain, and occasionally a lethal iteration of the disease.

Some of the vaccine’s success stems from its unconventional approach. Scientists start with a yellow fever vaccine and swap some parts so that the body identifies it as dengue and immunizes against the disease. That strategy averts some safety issues that have tripped up other potential dengue vaccines, though it also might explain the Sanofi vaccine’s middling effectiveness.

Still, Sanofi Pasteur’s progress could mark the beginning of the end for the virus, which has no approved treatment. The pharmaceutical company has already begun manufacturing the vaccine, getting ready to save millions from a painful, often debilitating disease.

The password is finally dying.

What better password than your face?

If you’re still trying to remember passwords, then we’re sorry. A bunch of forces are coming together to kill the annoying and flimsy web password for good.

Fingerprint logins are at the forefront, offering a faster and more secure way to sign into your phone, make purchases on Amazon and more.

In a short time, this feature has become essential for mobile devices.”

Last year, only Huawei and Apple could lay claim to having the technology at a usable state, but now we have the Samsung Galaxy S6, HTC One A9 and M9+, Xperia Z5 and Z5 Compact, and even the LG V10,” writes The Verge.

Facial recognition passwords are another solution. Microsoft’s Windows Hello boasts the ability to let you log in with your face, your finger, or your eye.

Even Yahoo has a new trick to get around the password, letting users log in by responding to a text message.

As for sites that still rely on passwords, more and more people are switching to password managers like 1Password. Once you do, you won’t be able to manage life without it.