As R&D Magazine rapidly approaches its biggest day of the year—the Oct. 16 R&D 100 Awards event—we’re shifting gears a little bit in our R&D Daily newsletter. We’ve already begun posting winners to our micro-site, but are also giving each one of them time in the sun on the R&D Daily.
The daily menu of top R&D news will continue during and after the awards event, but as you may have noticed, the R&D 100 Awards winners are slightly different animals.
R&D Daily’s diet can be described as the “eureka” moments of science. Fundamental discoveries—the ability to use advanced optical techniques to “curve” light, for instance, or the realization that polarized water molecules could be electromagnetically forced to flow through carbon nanotubes at breakneck speeds—see the light only after inspired hypotheses, diligent experimentation, and exhaustive trial and error.
Intellectual curiosity is lonely without ingenuity, however, and the R&D 100 Awards winners—which represent actual, developed products available for purchase, license, or free use—are the fruits of a different kind of labor. The awards recognize the effort needed to bring an innovation to the marketplace, and, as a result, many winners represent creative thought that is hardly vertical. The Volumetric 3-Component Velocimetry System, talked about in today’s R&D Daily, for example, is a good example of how existing technologies—pulsed lasers, compound optics, large dataset computations—can be leveraged and improved to create profitable, useful instruments.
Others, such as Sandia National Laboratories’ FastBit Bitmap Indexer, also featured in today’s R&D Daily, mark a significant evolution of existing multi-level search tools and compression techniques. It’s also a great example of a flexible innovation. Originally designed for one thing—particle physics research—the search engine was shown to be exceedingly quick at parsing genomic data and matching online advertising content. The same goes for another Sandia winner: before the Xyce circuit simulator, which can model circuitry with millions of transistors, was re-developed for the general semiconductor market it was first put together to help ensure circuitry stability in radioactive environments.
Finally, some, like the MycoMax, are surprising but elegant solutions to an existing problem. Read on as we count to 100 of the top innovations of the year.
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