European Inventor Award Shortlist Unveiled
The Munich-based European Patent Office released a shortlist of inventions and innovations Thursday for the upcoming 2011 European Inventor Award.
The awards ceremony, held May 19 in Budapest, will be centered on the theme of saving and improving lives rather than wild and wacky products that sometimes hit it big.
Among inventions included in the listing, were ones aimed at improving cancer treatment, heart disease diagnosis or early-early warning of Alzheimer’s, road safety, power generation, fiber optics and water purification.
One of the listed inventions, adjustable glasses by University of Oxford’s physicist Joshua Silver, are already being worn by 30,000 people in the world’s poorest countries, the European Union said in a statement.
The EU cited World Health Organization (WHO) data saying that “uncorrected vision problems are responsible for production losses amounting to around 121 billion euros per year.”
“Soon it could cost just a dollar to correct them,” it said of Silver’s nomination in the research category.
Another listed innovation comes from Estonian scientist Mart Min, whose “new method for measuring electrical impedance… has above all made it far easier to diagnose heart disease,” and also Belgium’s Christine Van Broeckhoven’s work on Alzheimer’s treatments.
Sweden’s Per-Ingvar Branemnark is nominated for a lifetime achievement award, one of the pioneers of osseointegration, the titanium-implant treatment that “created a stable connection between the implant and the living bone and today is a standard technique among dentists.”
Other innovations and inventions include:
- Czech Republic’s Blanka Rihova for devising a new method of chemotherapy that spares healthy cells.
- France’s Emmanuel Desurvire for trailblazing work on high-speed mass data transmission.
- United States scientists behind turbines for power generation in shallow or sluggish water.
- Israeli scientists for miniscule camera technology for endoscopy.
- Indian scientists for an ultraviolet technique for water disinfectant.
Still other nominations cover industry — from the steel fibers to radar-based cruise control in cars and early detection of power losses — as well as breakthroughs by small- and medium-sized enterprises, covering silicon implants into tumors, low-emission furnaces and a virtual 3D microscope for scanning tissue samples.
The full list and further details can be found at: http://www.epo.org/news-issues/european-inventor/finalists.html.
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