New York Times Year in Ideas

You've all probably seen this already, but worth posting anyhow.

Some samples:

PRINTABLE BATTERIES



Though you may not be aware of it, the technology already exists to create a video screen thin enough to fit seamlessly into the pages of this magazine. Ultrathin electronic devices can be built using a special inkjet printer that squirts fine layers of complex compounds instead of ink. When the compounds dry, they leave behind sheer metallic films, which in the right combination could act as thermometers, light sensors, even computer chips. So why haven't you seen these gadgets yet? In part because they are hard to power: even the smallest lithium-ion watch battery is too bulky.

The solution is to print batteries too. This year, a research team at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems revealed a 0.6-millimeter-thick battery.

It consists of a stack of metal pastes that act as anode, cathode and electrolyte, bound on top and bottom by carbon layers that collect electricity and deliver it to the attached device. This product can be built right into the device it's powering, as part of the production process, so there's no need for an additional assembly line. And the battery can be made as large or as small as needed, simply by printing more of it. The list of possible applications is endless — from bandages that release medication when they sense an increase in body temperature to wallpaper that changes color at the flick of a switch.

We're not talking megawatts, of course. According to Andreas Willert, one of the researchers, it takes about 15 square centimeters of printable battery to provide the same power as a single watch battery. But 15 square centimeters could be enough to power, say, a blinking magazine cover for a month. The Fraunhofer Research Institution introduced its battery at a nanotech expo in Japan in February. The next step is to open a small production line, which Willert expects will be ready next year. Which means that soon, instead of reading these pages, you might be watching them.

GOOGLE ALGORITHM AS EXTINCTION MODEL



Every species — be it earthworm or great white shark — is entwined in a vast and complicated system of predator and prey called a food web. To determine which species in a food web are most important to the survival of the larger ecosystem, scientists design computer programs to model how the extinction of a given species would affect the other species in the system. This year, two scientists announced that they had found an unexpectedly useful tool for this purpose: the seminal Google search algorithm.

Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago and Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan began with a simple hunch. Google’s search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to identify the most important Web sites on a given topic by analyzing links: a Web page is important if other important pages link to it. How different is this, really, Allesina and Pascual wondered, from an ecosystem, in which a species is important if other important species eat it?

Allesina and Pascual borrowed Google’s PageRank algorithm and modified it to model ecosystems in the natural world. As they explained in September in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the modified algorithm was more efficient than existing ecosystem-extinction models at identifying which species’ extinction would cause the greatest number of other species in the food web also to go extinct. "Our algorithm is faster and computationally simpler," Allesina says.

The PageRank algorithm could be useful in analyzing other networks too. The world features countless interconnected systems ranging in size from the minuscule (metabolic networks within a single cell) to the immense (international financial markets). After publishing the paper, Allesina received e-mail messages from dozens of researchers interested in adapting the PageRank algorithm. "PageRank is a technique for finding hidden flows in huge quantities of data," says Yonatan Zunger, a Google software engineer who used to work on search technology and who contacted Allesina after seeing his research. "There are all kinds of networks. PageRank is enormously applicable beyond the Web."

GOOD ENOUGH IS THE NEW GREAT

"Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere," Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called "The Good-Enough Revolution." Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, "ease of use, continuous availability and low price" are more important.

High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom. And at war, a country that has a fleet of F-16 fighter jets that can cover 1,500 miles an hour is now using more and more remote-controlled Predator drones that are powered by snowmobile engines.

Lo-fi solutions are now available for a range of problems that couldn't be solved with high-tech tools. Music played from a compact disc is of higher quality than what comes out of an iPod — but you can't easily carry 4,000 CDs with you on the subway or to the gym. Similarly, a professional television camera will produce a higher-quality image than a phone, but when something important happens, from the landing of a jet on the Hudson River to the murder of an Iranian protester, and there are no TV cameras around, images recorded on phones are good enough.

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.

COWS WITH NAMES MAKE MORE MILK



For dairy farmers, whether to name their cows may seem like a matter of taste. But it might not be. It could be a business decision.

A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March compared responses to a survey about cow treatment with independently collected milk data and found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent.

More research is still needed. The possible psychological effects on cows of having a name, for example, have yet to be determined. But the results so far reveal a correlation: "The naming," says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, "reflects the humans' attitudes toward the cows, and therefore how they behave around them." Named cows are more often treated nicely, and well-treated, calm and happy cows make more milk. The point, Douglas says, is that it definitely can't hurt to name your cows.

Naming criteria vary widely. Some farmers name cows alphabetically; others recycle parents' names. Herb and flower names are popular in Britain. "You know," Douglas says, "Daisy, Rose, Buttercup." Douglas once named a cow after her sister, Hattie.

But some American dairy farmers scoff at this idea. Barbara Martin, a third-generation California dairy operator, says naming her 2,200 cows would be completely unrealistic. "Everyone," she says, "has an ear tag with a number."

SUBSCRIPTION ARTISTS



This summer, Allison Weiss, a 22-year-old singer who writes melodic songs about "hopeless hope," wanted to produce a 1,000-CD run of a new album she was recording, but she wasn't sure how to get the money to do it. Then she heard about Kickstarter, a Web site unveiled in April. At Kickstarter, creative types post a description of a project they want to do, how much money they need for it and a deadline. If enough people pledge money that the artists reach (or surpass) their financial goals, then everyone is billed, paying in advance as you would for a magazine subscription. For goals that aren't reached, nobody is charged.

In essence, Kickstarter offers a form of market research for artists. For perhaps the first time, an artist can quickly answer a nagging question: Does anyone actually want my art badly enough to pay for it? If the goal is reached, the artist now has a list of subscribers to her vision. And if the goal isn't reached? "It's painful, but it's better to find out early," rather than spend precious time and money on a project nobody wants, says Yancey Strickler, who helped found Kickstarter. More than 1,000 projects have been started on Kickstarter since April, raising money for projects as diverse as a solo sailboat trip around the world ($8,142 raised) and a book by Scott Thomas documenting how he developed the graphic design for Barack Obama's presidential campaign ($84,614 raised).