New York Times' Year in Ideas

The New York Times' eighth annual Year in Ideas sketches out 2008's intellectual map, from A to Z. Here's just one example—The Biomechanical Enery Harvester—of something wonderful that you might have missed:

Max Donelan, a professor of kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and director of the S.F.U. Locomotion Lab, described “biomechanical energy harvesting” in a story published in February in the journal Science. He sees plenty of uses for the compact device, which stores the energy it harvests in a small lithium-ion battery. Aid workers in disaster zones or soldiers trying to reduce theweight of their battery packs will benefit. (The first large-scale client is the Canadian military.) “There are people whose lives depend on portable power,” Donelan says.
Five years ago, Larry Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, invented a backpack that made its own electricity from the subtle bouncing motion as its wearer walked — like a scaled-up version of the self-winding watch. It was a cool demonstration of the principle but not really practical for civilians; to generate significant power, Rome’s backpack weighed up to 80 pounds. By contrast, the in-development version of Donelan’s device — with its aluminum frame, transmission system and generator — will weigh less than 2.5 pounds and easily fit underneath a pair of pants.

Stillsuits and Weirding Modules by Christmas 2010.

The 8th Annual Year in Ideas [NYT]