A rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built took off from a launchpad in French Guiana on a cloudy Christmas morning last year. In the wake of arriving at its objective in space about a month after the fact, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started sending back shining presents to humankind — stunning pictures that are uncovering our universe in shocking new ways.
In addition, our 35th year has been remarkable due to the JWST’s successful deployment, which earned us our highest award as Innovation of the Year. However, it is only one of the 100 outstanding technological achievements that our editors have chosen to acknowledge.
Months of research, testing, discussion, and debate are represented in the following list. It celebrates exciting inventions that are making big and small improvements to our lives. In addition to improving our ability to entertain ourselves and express ourselves, these technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the nature of the universe and treating diseases.
The list has ten categories, ranging from sports and the outdoors to aerospace. On the big screen, we have naval fighter jets, and on your phone, we have filters from TikTok. There is equipment to assist you in exploring the great outdoors and devices to assist you in enhancing your home and health. We have a lot of gadgets, a very long suspension bridge, and a 747-mile electric vehicle. So lock in, and investigate the victors underneath.
Even though no one can hear a spacecraft hitting an asteroid, NASA’s successful DART experiment demonstrated in September that it is possible to deliberately reroute a space rock. And that wasn’t even the most significant space event of the year—more on the JWST later.
An astronomical instrument surpasses all previous versions once every generation. Just such a creation is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of NASA. JWST went live on December 25, 2021, after spending $9.7 billion and more than two decades in development. With a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST has been capturing the world’s attention ever since it began imaging in February of this year.
The JWST is able to see far into star-forming fields. It is able to look back 13 billion years at old galaxies that are still in their infant stages. It can look directly at exoplanets, where astronomers would have had to reconstruct their scant evidence in the past. It can show us about how those stars and worlds met up from early stage matter, something Hubble could witness.
JWST, on the other hand, is located in the shadow of the Earth, hundreds of thousands of miles further away than Hubble. It won’t ever see the sun. There, safeguarded considerably further by a multi-facet sunshield more slender than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at – 370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, which is one of several places where the gravity of the sun and Earth are balanced.
All of this might just be the beginning of JWST. The telescope may have enough power to last well beyond the 10-year window that was initially anticipated because it used less fuel to reach its perch.
You’ve presumably ended up going through an air terminal sooner or later, squinting up at a screen loaded up with columns of flight data. That’s going to change with a futuristic new product from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences. An installation at Detroit Metro Airport can present passengers with customized flight information. One way to identify yourself to the system in McNamara Terminal is to scan your boarding pass. The overhead screen then displays only personalized information about your journey, such as the gate you need to locate. The system works because the display’s pixels can shine in one of 18,000 different directions. This means that multiple people can see different information on the same screen at the same time.
Believe it or not, some travelers still check their bags, and a new service from this airline with its headquarters in Seattle aims to simplify the procedure. Up to 24 hours before a flight, passengers who are eligible for an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on the e-ink display of this device while they are at home (at first, 2,500 members of the airline’s frequent flier program will receive them; in 2023, they will be available for purchase).
An NFC connection gives the 5-inch-long tag the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone. To avoid waiting in line for a tag, the traveler only needs to drop off the tagged bag where it belongs at the airport after completing this step at home.
