Chitchat The 25 Best Inventions of 2016

frenchbriefs said:

Only thing useful on that list is solar tiles and cannabis pills.

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Perhaps you can reserve your cynical opinion with this useful kit?

The Artificial Pancreas

Minimed 670g / Developed by Medtronic

In order for people with diabetes to stay healthy, they must continually check their blood sugar and adjust it with insulin or snacks. Medtronic aims to render this tedious process obsolete with its MiniMed 670G, a.k.a. the “artificial pancreas,” which has been in development for years but was only recently approved by the FDA. (It will be commercially available next year.) Once users attach the iPod-size device to their body, it measures their blood-*sugar levels every five minutes, providing more insulin or withholding it as needed. For now, they still need to manually request a dose after they eat. But Medtronic is working on a fully automated version, which Fran Kaufman, chief medical officer of the company’s diabetes group, says she hopes will help the 1.25 million people living with Type 1 diabetes “spend less time managing their disease and more time enjoying life.”

China’s ‘Heavenly’ Space Station

Tiangong-2 / Developed by China’s National Space Agency

When China’s newest astronauts, Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong, arrived in orbit earlier this year, they docked at some impressive digs. Specifically: the orbital laboratory Tiangong-2 (Heavenly Palace 2), which is more than 34 ft. long and nearly 14 ft. wide and includes an exercise area and a medical-*experiment bay. Yes, that’s all modest compared with the multimodule International Space Station (ISS), which is roughly the size of a football field, but it’s a remarkable machine all the same. China, after all, built Tiangong-2 on its own, just over a decade after launching its first man into space; the ISS is a collaboration among 15 nations, including space veterans like the U.S. and Russia. China’s next move: launching the core module for a much bigger space station, set to happen sometime in 2018.

A Prosthesis That’s Built To Play

IKO / Developed by Carlos Arturo Torres

By design, most prostheses aren’t fun—they’re built to fill a utilitarian need. And while that’s fine for adults, who need to work, it can be tough on kids, who want to play along with their friends. Enter Iko, a prosthetic arm built by Carlos Arturo Torres to enable children to replace a lost limb with one that could have come from Inspector Gadget. When they need a hand, they have one. But they can replace it with any number of toy-like attachments, all of which are compatible with Lego products. (Torres developed the device while working at Lego’s experimental Future Lab in Denmark.) Torres is still finalizing distribution details, but his larger hope is that Iko will destigmatize disability—like it did for 8-year-old Dario, an early tester. Before the test, one of Dario’s friends told Torres he felt sorry for Dario, because there were things he couldn’t do. That changed after the friend watched Dario use Iko. “I want one too,” he said.

A Crowd-Pleasing Electric Car

Chevrolet Bolt / $40,000

For most buyers, electric vehicles fall into two camps: too expensive (think the $66,000 Tesla Model S) and too limited (the Nissan Leaf gets just 100 miles per charge). General Motorsaims to bridge that gap with the Chevrolet Bolt, which touts crowd-*pleasing features, like more than 200 miles of driving on a single charge, at a relatively low cost. “This is an opportunity to take electric cars mainstream,” GM engineer Pamela Fletcher says of the Bolt, set to launch in December. One industry analyst estimates that GM could sell as many as 80,000 Bolts next year, which would boost the overall market by almost 67%—a small but significant step toward reducing our collective reliance on planet-*warming fossil fuels.

A Bracelet That Helps Kids Give Back

UNICEF Kid Power Band/ $40
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One in four American children doesn’t get enough exercise, and 1 in 4 children globally doesn’t get enough food. UNICEF’s Fitbit-like Kid Power Band, designed by San Francisco-based Ammunition, aims to address both problems at once. Its mobile app encourages kids to be physically active with videos from stars like Pink and Alex Morgan. Once they meet step goals, it awards them points, which translate to real food packages that UNICEF sends to malnourished children all over the globe (funded in part by sales of the device). The band “allows kids to feel like they can change the world,” says Rajesh Anandan, who co-created it. Since Kid Power Band’s soft launch in 2014, participants have collectively walked over 7 million miles to feed more than 30,000 severely malnourished children.

Controversial?

Headphones That Make Wireless Cool

Apple Airpods / $159

Apple has a history of changing the technological status quo, from digitizing music to making phone screens touch-*sensitive. So when the tech titan announced that its iPhone 7 would not have a 3.5-mm headphone jack, which has been standard on most audio gadgets for decades, it also previewed a compelling alternative. Unlike many of their Bluetooth predecessors, Apple’s AirPods not only have microphones (enabling you to control your phone via Siri) but also can detect when they’re in your ears—*allowing you to automatically pause music, for example, if you pop one out to have a conversation. But their most convenient feature may be automatically pairing with an iPhone, which eliminates the need to dig through settings menus.

The Speaker That Speaks Back

Amazon Echo / $180
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Echo may look like a standard Bluetooth speaker, but at its core lies one of modern society’s holy grails: the ability to talk to your tech. This isn’t a new idea; Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana have been around for years. But in many ways, Amazon’s version, Alexa, which is embedded in Echo, is more powerful. Since its 2014 launch, Amazon has greatly expanded Alexa’s functionality; it’s now integrated with dozens of third-party apps, enabling you to call a car (via Uber), turn off lights (via Philips Hue bulbs, among others) or even order pizza (via Domino’s). And Amazon appears determined to keep its edge. It recently launched a junior version of the Echo (the $50 Echo Dot), and it’s working to make Alexa even more intuitive. “We don’t want to teach someone how to speak to Alexa,” says Daren Gill, who heads product and customer experience for Alexa. “They should be able to just speak the way they naturally do.”

A Personal Air Purifier

Wynd / $89

No matter where you live and work, you’re breathing in chemicals and pollutants, some more dangerous than others. And while changing that norm will take years, if not decades, of policy work, there are interim solutions. Among them: Wynd, a portable air *filter—*roughly the size of a water *bottle—that creates a clean-*climate bubble by sucking up pollutants in your immediate vicinity, including ones that can contribute to cancer and heart disease. “What we breathe matters,” says Ray Yu, creator of Wynd, which raised more than $600,000 on Kickstarter and should be commercially available next year. “We want to enable everyone to enjoy a healthy air environment, no matter where they live or travel.”

Barbies That Look More Like Real Girls

Mattel Barbie dolls / $10 each

For 57 years, the world’s most famous doll has been stick-thin, setting an *unrealistic—and, studies show, *damaging—beauty standard for generations of young women. That all changed in January when Mattel, faced with slumping sales, decided to make Barbie look more like the girls who play with her. Although the original doll still exists, she now has three additional body types (petite, tall and *curvy)—a shift that has boosted global sales of the Barbie Fashionista brand by 44%. Of course, society is still a long way from solving its body-image issues; that’s “a heavy burden for [Barbie’s] tiny shoulders,” says Robert Best, a Barbie designer. But the new shapes, along with the new skin tones and hair textures introduced last year, are undeniably a step in the right direction.

yinyang said:

Perhaps you can reserve your cynical opinion with this useful kit?

The Artificial Pancreas

Medtronic​

Minimed 670g / Developed by Medtronic

In order for people with diabetes to stay healthy, they must continually check their blood sugar and adjust it with insulin or snacks. Medtronic aims to render this tedious process obsolete with its MiniMed 670G, a.k.a. the “artificial pancreas,” which has been in development for years but was only recently approved by the FDA. (It will be commercially available next year.) Once users attach the iPod-size device to their body, it measures their blood-*sugar levels every five minutes, providing more insulin or withholding it as needed. For now, they still need to manually request a dose after they eat. But Medtronic is working on a fully automated version, which Fran Kaufman, chief medical officer of the company’s diabetes group, says she hopes will help the 1.25 million people living with Type 1 diabetes “spend less time managing their disease and more time enjoying life.”

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cut all sugar intake and reduce the amount of carbohydrates in ur diet and ur diabetes will go away and u will lose weight quickly.ur liver is the organ that processes sugar or fructose in ur body,too much sugar consumption can lead to liver disease or failure which adds a burden to ur pancreas which produces insulin that converts sugar in ur body to fat.sugar is a poison like alcohol,it shares the same chemical structure as sugar and is made from fermenting sugar or carbohydrates,similar to alchohol,sugar is a poison that can only be processed by one organ in ur body,the liver.ur liver is one of the exceptional organs in ur body,it has tremendous amounts of regenerative ability,even a liver that is highly damaged that is 1/7th of its normal healthy size has the ability to recover and grow back into its normal state assuming all poisons and toxins have been purged from the body.

unknown to many diabetics,insulin is a major source of weight gain and obesity,