Every year, TIME highlights inventions that are making the world better, smarter and a bit more fun. (See last year’s list here.)
To assemble our list of 2021’s Best Inventions, we solicited nominations across a variety of categories from TIME’s editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process. We then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, creativity, efficacy, ambition and impact.
The result is a list of 100 groundbreaking inventions—including vaccines for COVID-19 and malaria, an emotional support robot for hospitalized children, an environmentally friendly dye for jeans and a brand new pasta shape—that are changing how we live, work, play and think about what’s possible.
Get a print of TIME’s 2021 Best Inventions cover here
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.
