The Year in Bright Ideas

[mandy]

The New York Times Magazine has a section on "The Year in Ideas" with stories on 78 of this year's top (?) ideas including: Celebrity Teeth, Forehead Billboards, In Vitro Meat, Monkey Pay-Per-View, National Smiles, Stoic Redheads, and other ideas.

...we seek to gain some perspective on what has transpired since January by compiling a digest of the most noteworthy ideas of the past 12 months. Like the biographer Lytton Strachey surveying the Victorian Age, we row out over the great ocean of accomplishment and lower into it a little bucket, which brings up to the light characteristic specimens from the various depths of the intellectual sea - ideas from politics and science, medicine and law, popcorn studies and camel racing. Once we have thrown back all the innovations that don't meet our exacting standards, we find ourselves with the following alphabetical catch: 78 notions, big and small, grand and petty, serious and silly, ingenious and. . . well, whatever you call it when you tattoo an advertisement on your forehead for money.

Year in ideas introduction: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazi...as1-1.html
full list of ideas with links to storis on each one: http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/12/1...index.html

[kim]

With remarkable consistency, the monkeys were willing to forgo a little juice - to pay extra, in effect - to look at the more important monkeys or to check out some monkey booty

[sneakymagenta]

Best new invention The Urine-Powered Battery