Guest Thinkers — February 22, 2011

The Best 25 Inventions of the Year

The cover story in the current issue of TIME focuses on the 25 best inventions of the year. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Apple iPhone was ranked as the #1 gadget of the year as well as the #1 invention of the year. Other notable inventions of 2007 include: a battery from Sony that runs on sugar, a unique water works project developed by MIT, and a new artificial leg prosthesis. As a sidebar to the cover story, TIME includes a list of the Best Inventors of All Time. (Hint: If your name ain’t Leonardo or Galileo, you never really had a chance of appearing on this list)

[image: TIME]

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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