Not A Gift Guide

摘要

I just conducted a census of the 100 tech innovations we spotlight as the best of the year, beginning on page 31, and discovered that exactly 50 of them are not products you can plunk down your cash for. In some cases, that's because the technology-a notably diminutive CPU, an automatically adjusting car-steering system-is a breakthrough component in a larger product. Morernoften, though, there's no price tag on a groundbreaking item because it's not the kind of thing you'll find at Home Depot or Best Buy: a heart that's been stripped of its cells, reseeded with a potential donor's cells, and then reanimated; or a $10-billion particle accelerator destined to answer the grandest questions in science.