--- title: 2008 Best Inventions of the Year | TIME description: Run, ride, swim, and sing through some of TIME Magazine's best inventions of the year canonical: https://time.com/video/4SLz7ij8/ og:title: 2008 Best Inventions of the Year og:description: Run, ride, swim, and sing through some of TIME Magazine's best inventions of the year og:url: https://time.com/video/4SLz7ij8/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/4SLz7ij8/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 2008 Best Inventions of the Year twitter:description: Run, ride, swim, and sing through some of TIME Magazine's best inventions of the year twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/4SLz7ij8/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 2008 Best Inventions of the Year > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 2008 Best Inventions of the Year [Watch (HLS stream): 2008 Best Inventions of the Year](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/4SLz7ij8.m3u8) (7:01)  _Published 2008-10-30. Run, ride, swim, and sing through some of TIME Magazine's best inventions of the year_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:02 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Best Inventions of 2015](/video/00y0bxBE/) ### The Best Inventions of 2015 [TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: The Choice](/video/g2AkZwa8/) ### TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: The Choice [2007 Best Inventions of the Year](/video/a2AImrv8/) ### 2007 Best Inventions of the Year --- ## Transcript >> Hi, my name is Lev Grossman and I'm a Senior Editor at Time. I'm the person in charge of Time magazine's Best Inventions of 2008 issue. One of the things I like about doing this issue is that you kind of end up retelling the story every year through the technological innovations that got introduced. Instead of telling it in terms of elections and candidates, and wars and horrible financial events, you look at the gadgets and the new ideas people had, and it becomes a, sort of, count of history of 2008. For example, one of the inventions we picked this year was the Tesla Roadster which is essentially an electric car but completely inverted to everything we've come to expect about electric cars. It is not a pokey, little, underpowered golf cart. Instead, it is an incredibly exciting, cool- looking sports car that goes extremely fast and does it with a very low carbon footprint. A couple of other examples. The Aptera which is a completely- bizarre- looking electric car really engineered from the ground up, forgetting everything that you used to know about what cars used to look like or are supposed to look like. For example, the Monotracer which is basically a motorcycle but it's encased within a kind of air dynamic body so it gets incredibly good gas mileage and also, it looks just unbelievably cool. There certainly have been a lot of advances on the green front. One of the ones that I find most interesting is the Global Seed Vault. This is a kind of high- tech bunker that's above the Arctic Circle on which scientists have put millions of seed samples just in case we have a massive ecological disaster, they'll be able to recover the biodiversity of the plant world which we presumably- that we messed up. Another major world event that occurred this year was of course, the Olympics. And we think of that as being a human- powered event that actually, technology plays a big role. One of the reasons that Michael Phelps was so successful this year is that he was wearing an extremely advanced new swim suit design by Speedo which had special ultrasonically bonded seams and also had a kind of compression fabric which literally kept his muscles from vibrating and disturbing flow of the water. Of course, he probably didn't need a lot of compression since he's incredibly fit but you get the general idea. NASA had an extremely successful year this year. It put 2 inventions on the list. One is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which is gonna launch next year and create an incredibly detailed topographical map of the moon. There's also going to be a new Mars rover called the Mars Science Laboratory. The last 2 Mars rovers we sent up were very successful. They're still actually running after 4 years. But they're- scientific instruments are very basic. The Mars Science Laboratory has a full industrial laboratory put on to its sort of 9- foot frame. It's also pound by a chunk of plutonium which I think is very cool. It's- the power should really impress the martians trying to get a look at it. Not all the inventions on the list are hardware. One innovation I wanted to call out this year was Dr. Horrible's Sing- Along Blog which is an internet video created by Joss Whedon who also created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's a musical video blog about a singing super villain. It's just so out there and it really makes the form of, sort of, episodic and video work. We thought it was worthy to include in this [ unk ] and because it has Neil Patrick Harris in it. >> I cannot believe my eyes. How the world's filled with filth and lies. But it's plain to see evil inside of me is on the rise. >> Most years, we have a lot of robots on the list. It's a huge area of innovation. This year, we only have one. It's from MIT and it's called Nexi. It's a new kind of robot called MDS from Mobile. It moves around, dexterous. It can fix things up with its little hands and social. It has a face and can talk and make human- like expressions which are incredibly creepy but still kind of cool and innovative. >> I can tell you that I'm sad, mad, confused, excited or even bored just by moving my face. But I hope you can see that I am very happy to have met you. >> Now, here's an item you wouldn't think would be in need or reinvention- the clock. But an English engineer has created a new kind of clock called the Time Eater Clock. What it does is through an innovative design, try to dramatize the fact that time's passing and each second is something that we can never get back. It's eaten forever. In this case, it's eaten by a kind of weird mechanical, creepy- looking grasshopper. As we do every year, we picked a number one invention of the year and this year, it is the Retail DNA Test pioneered by a company called 23andMe. Essentially, what it is, it is a- comes in this box, you open it up, inside is a vial, you spit into the vial, you send them the spit and they will scan your genome and tell you what health conditions you might be at risk for. We consider this to be an absolutely revolutionary invention that will change forever the way we think about healthcare and the way we think about our personal information. Now, I should add that 23andMe is in some ways, quite controversial. One thing is clear. This is the kind of invention that can never be uninvented. From now on, there will always be a demand for this kind of information. 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