Innovation

Technology Review's Young Innovators Under 35 for 2007 awards have been announced.

2007 Innovator of the Year: David Berry (Renewable petroleum from microbes)
2007 Humanitarian of the Year: Tapan Parikh (Univ. of Washington - Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies)

More about microbial petroleum later after I research the topic a little bit later today.

(grr...Facebook is everywhere. Mark Zuckerberg makes it to the list!)

Here is the complete list.

J. Christopher Anderson Creating tumor-killing bacteria Erik Bakkers Combining semiconductors David Berry Renewable petroleum from microbes Sanjit Biswas Cheap, easy Internet access Josh Bongard Adaptive robots Garrett Camp Discovering more of the Web Mung Chiang Optimizing networks Adam Cohen Making molecules motionless Javier García-Martínez New zeolites for cracking petroleum Ali Khademhosseini Living Legos Tadayoshi Kohno Securing systems cryptographically Tariq Krim Building a personal, dynamic Web page

Ivan Krstic´ Making antivirus software obsolete Jeff LaPorte Internet-based calling from mobile phones Ju Li Modeling designer materials Karen Liu Bringing body language to computer-animated characters Christopher Loose Beating up bacteria Anna Lysyanskaya Securing online privacy Tapan Parikh Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies Babak Parviz Self-assembling micromachines Kristala Jones Prather Reverse-engineering biology Partha Ranganathan Power-aware computing systems Neil Renninger Hacking microbes for energy Kevin Rose Online social bookmarking

Marc Sciamanna Controlling chaos in telecom lasers Rachel Segalman Cheap electricity from heat Shetal Shah Cushioning preemies Abraham Stroock Microfluidic biomaterials Desney Tan Teaching computers to read minds Doris Tsao Shedding light on how our brains recognize faces Luis von Ahn Using “captchas” to digitize books Xudong Wang Powering the nanoworld Lili Yang Engineering immunity Mehmet Yanik Stopping light on microchips Mark Zuckerberg Circle of friends

Very humbling to see what these people under 35 have achieved.

“Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress” - Ted Levitt

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And then there are those involved in such "interesting" research as extracting vanilla from cow dung* or exploring whether rats "sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards" (emphasis mine.)

See the list below. All worthy winners of the Ignobel. :)

(* It seems Toscanini's Ice Cream, one of the finest ice cream shops in Cambridge, MA, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.")

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

• MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
• PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
• BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
• CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
• LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
• LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
• PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
• NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup
• ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
• AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.” - Albert Einstein