Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s an athletic shirt that logs data based on the body’s movement. Specifically, it monitors a baseball pitcher’s motion and mechanics and indicates to others if the pitcher is tiring, or even provoking injury.

The Story: Elbow injuries suffered by pitchers in Major League Baseball occur frequently and result in tens of millions of dollars in losses each season, representing the money that must be paid in salaries to pitchers who cannot perform due to injury.

To address this issue, three Northeastern University engineering students have developed a data-logging …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s an accessory for your bike that enables you to turn braking into electric power to motor your bike when you need an extra burst of speed, or you just feel like letting the motor do the work for you.

The Story: MIT researchers have debuted the Copenhagen Wheel at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — a revolutionary new bicycle wheel that not only boosts power, but can keep track of friends, fitness, smog and traffic. Though it looks like an ordinary bicycle wheel with an oversized …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a referendum on the long-held belief about all species, including humans, that we are, by nature selfish, when in fact researchers have found that in order to preserve mankind and enable ourselves to thrive, we need to help one another.

The Story: In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.
In contrast to “every man for himself” interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s software that automatically locates deforestation and forest degradation from satellites, and then delivers those images in highly detailed, easily searchable maps.
The Story: Tropical forest destruction accounts for some 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But quantifying these emissions has not been easy, particularly for tropical nations. New technology, developed by a team of scientists at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, is revolutionizing forest monitoring by marrying free satellite imagery and powerful analytical methods in an easy-to-use, desktop software package called CLASlite.
Thus far, 70 government, non-government, and …

Why it’s Breakthrough: This discovery could lead to a male “pill,” giving men the same control over their fertility women have had since the 60s. Plus, it could lead to breakthroughs for those with low sperm counts.

The Story: A new research report published in the December 2009 print issue of The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB Journal) could one day give men similar type of control over their fertility that women have had for the last 50 years. That’s because scientists have found how and where androgenic hormones …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a small, handheld robotic device that can help the visually-impaired navigate around a virtual model of a real building or space.

The Story by Anne Trafton: For many people, it has become routine to go online to check out a map before traveling to a new place. But for blind people, Google maps and other visual mapping applications are of little use. Now, a unique device developed at MIT could give the visually impaired the same kind of benefit that sighted people get from online maps.
The BlindAid …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s an artificial robotic hand with built-in sensors that can actually enable the user to “feel” objects and sensations.

The Story: Motorized prosthetic hands are not brand new, though they’re still breakthrough. However, the next step in this evolution is focused on creating a hand that gives the user unprecedented sensory feedback, according to researchers of the SmartHand Project, a collaboration between researchers from across Europe.
Fredrik Sebelius, of Lund University, in Sweden, says the SmartHand actually addresses this notion of the “phantom hand.” Sebelius says: ”If you push the skin on …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a sponge that absorbs 180 times its weight in toxic sludge, yet doesn’t absorb any water making it perfect for oil spills or other disasters that threaten water and sea life.

The Story: This is yet another marvelous application for nanotechnology. Researchers at Beijing’s Peking University and Tsinghua University have figured out a way to adapt carbon nanotubes into a sponge-like material that can absorb materials and separate them from the water in which they’re residing. Then, the sponges can be extracted and can be squeezed dry, or wrung …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a nano-particle coating that can easily be applied to roads, power lines and lots of other solid surfaces that prevents ice buildup.
The Story: Ice collecting on roads, power lines and even on aircraft have been a gigantic concern every single winter since the industrial age. But now, a team of researchers from University of Pittsburgh has unveiled a way to mitigate the danger of ice buildup by developing a nanoparticle-based coating that’s applied to solid surface materials which then blocks ice buildup.
It’s called a superhydrophobic coating and …

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a software program that instantly studies malicious code and automatically fixes and patches a hacker’s attack – all without the need for any human intervention whatsoever.

The Story: A team of computer science researchers at MIT, headed by Martin Rinard, have developed new software that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.

The software is called ClearView and is designed to apply patches whenever it detects that something has gone wrong with the program. ClearView operates by monitoring a program’s normal behavior and establishing a …