The top 100 inventions of 2008

A car finish that gets rid of scratches itself, a computer mouse that works on all surfaces – even cat's fur – and plastic made from pig urine are among the best innovations of 2008, according to a science magazine.

Popular Science, a US-based magazine, has selected the 100 top innovations from items featured in its pages over the last 12 months.

The list also includes headphones that tailor themselves to your hearing and a pen that "listens" to what you are writing and turns it into an audio file you can play back on your computer.

Other notable inclusions are the super-fast swimsuit that helped propel swimmers to victory at the Beijing Olympics, a fabric-thin heater used inside gloves, jackets and boots (a boon for skiers) and black fabric that reflects, rather than absorbs heat.

In terms of big-ticket items, the US$10 billion (NZ$18.61billion) atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider and Virgin Galactic's carbon-fibre aircraft designed to blast tourists into space also made the list.

Editor Kevin Cheung said all the innovations in the top 100 had common features.

"The degree of innovation, how different is it? And does it make a difference in everyday life," he said.

He said while some of the items were for leisure or personal use - such as a personal spy plane – many were for the greater good.

Cheung picked as his personal favourites a reanimated heart that scientists can bring back from the dead, and a mobile phone that converts into a microscope.

The reanimated heart could potentially replace heart transplants, Cheung said. The procedure has already been fine-tuned using rats' hearts.

"(Researchers from the University of Minnesota) took the heart and scraped out all the cells so what was left was a skeleton structure," he said.

"Then they put in new cells and the heart started growing and beating."

The mobile phone microscope, meanwhile, can take photos of skin and blood cells and send them to laboratories for diagnosis.

It was successfully tested in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August and also has potential for home use.

Cheung said the next big innovations in the wings were a definitive answer on the link between mobile phones and brain cancer, faster broadband internet through the use of photonic chips and "the perfect electronic car".

As always, necessity remained the mother of innovation, Cheung said, and this was particularly true in an era of climate change and global economic difficulties.

"I really believe technology holds the key to solving the world's problems," he said.