Howard Hubler made the financial crisis worse: at Morgan Stanley, he lost $9 billion on bad mortgage bets. Now he may speed the recovery. His company, the Loan Value Group (LVG), has launched a program that could dramatically reduce foreclosures. According to studies, strategic defaults — in which the borrower has the money to pay but doesn't — account for as many as 30% of all home-loan defaults. Why? In an estimated 13 million cases, borrowers owe more than their home is worth. Under LVG's patented Responsible Homeowner Reward (RHR) program, banks promise to pay borrowers who continue to pay on time a lump sum — typically 10% of their original loan amount — when they sell or refinance their home. Miss more than one payment and the reward disappears. It's still early (fewer than 5,000 people have been enrolled), but LVG says fewer than 10% of the borrowers in RHR have ended up defaulting, compared with a redefault rate of more than 20% for other loan-modification programs. Hubler says he is confident his current mortgage bet is one that will help, not hurt, the housing market.
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| The Seed Cathedral |
A house of worship for biodiversity, the British pavilion for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is constructed of 60,000 light-funneling fiber-optic rods, each with one or more seeds implanted at its tip. British designer Thomas Heatherwick worked with the Kew Gardens and the Millennium Seed Bank project, whose mission is to collect seeds from 25% of the world's plant species by 2020. The result was a living structure that embodied the Expo's theme of "Better City, Better Life" and rooted digital dreams in the soil from which all life springs. That combination helped make the Seed Cathedral one of the most popular national pavilions at the Shanghai Expo, where Chinese visitors nicknamed it pu gong ying, the dandelion.
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STS-111 Instant Infrastructure |
It's not a bird or a plane. It's a lighter-than-air, unmanned flying vehicle made of ripstop nylon that, if test flights are anything to go by, will be able to soar as high as 9,000 ft. for as long as three days. What will it do up there? If fitted with surveillance equipment, it can keep an eye on war or disaster zones, or it can carry communications technology to link people cut off from the world by, say, a catastrophe that takes out a bunch of cell-phone towers. Eel-shaped for a reason, the STS-111 works through an interchange of gases. In the head, there's a pouch of helium in an envelope of regular air. A pouch in the three back sections contains ethane for power. As the eel rises, the air surrounding the pouches is vented so the helium and ethane can expand. This means the vehicle should be able to ascend and descend without bursting. A ride like this one doesn't come cheap: the estimated price is $2 million to $3 million.
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Terrafugia Transition |
The Terrafugia Transition could redefine the convertible. And door-to-door travel. Designed by a team of MIT aeronautics engineers, including Terrafugia co-founders Carl Dietrich and his wife Anna Mracek Dietrich, the Transition is a street-legal, airworthy, airbag-and-parachute-equipped flying car that at $200,000 is priced less than a Lamborghini. The first models will be delivered next year. True, with its wings retracted like football goalposts, the Transition, whose 100-horsepower engine gets it 35 m.p.g. on terra firma, isn't going to be a match for an Italian sports car. But extend the vehicle's gull wings — and you are requested to do this at an airport — and the rear-propeller-powered Transition can fly two passengers about 500 miles at a cruising speed of 105 m.p.h. After you land, you will not be heading to the rental counter.
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The Straddling Bus |
A boom in car sales has caused traffic mayhem in many of China's major cities. One company wants to improve the situation — by putting even more people on the road. But rather than add more cars, Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment is developing a massive "straddling bus." Cheaper than a subway, the partly solar-powered behemoth will span two lanes and carry up to 1,200 people in a carriage raised 7 ft. above the roadway, thus allowing cars to pass, or be passed, underneath. Passengers on the new bus should rightly expect to feel above it all. The company is awaiting government approval for a trial project in Beijing. If that comes through this year, test runs could begin by the end of 2011.
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Antro Electric Car |
The car of the future, now coming from: Hungary. Yes, it sounds like communist propaganda circa 1967, but the Hungarian designer Antro might just have made a superefficient, supercheap car that could put Western manufacturers to shame. The Antro Solo can hold up to three people — a driver and two passengers, one on either side — who pedal to help drive the ultralight car. The rest of the forward motion comes from an electric motor that's partly powered by solar panels. If you need a bigger car, Antro has a solution: two Solos can be combined, Transformers-style, to create the family-friendly Duo. Look for it in 2012.
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Electric-Car Charging Stations |
It's the chicken-and-egg problem of electric vehicles: until there's a network of road-embedded rechargers (see No. 17) or a series of stations where drivers can charge their batteries — similar to the gas stations we depend on now — an electric car is inherently limited. Coulomb Technologies is working to break that deadlock. The company is building a system of automated charging stations in public places that are connected to utilities, so the charge for your charge can be added to your home electricity bill. And if your utility hasn't partnered with Coulomb, you can call a toll-free number and pay with your credit card.
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Road-Embedded Rechargers |
It's no Soul Train, but some Seoul bus rides could soon be getting a lot more electric. Engineers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology are experimenting with embedding electric strips in roadbeds that magnetically transfer energy to battery-powered vehicles above. The prototype, at an amusement park in Gwacheon, just south of Seoul, is the first system in the world like it, and researchers say the technology could someday enable all electric vehicles to operate with one-fifth the battery size and at one-third the cost.
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| EyeWriter |
How do you communicate when your brain is active but your body isn't? The EyeWriter, a collaboration from the Ebeling Group, the Not Impossible Foundation and Graffiti Research Lab, uses low-cost eye-tracking glasses and open-source software to allow people suffering from any kind of neuromuscular syndrome to write and draw by tracking their eye movement and translating it to lines on a screen. The device was created for Tony "Tempt" Quan, an L.A.-based graffiti artist who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in 2003. After trying the EyeWriter — the first time he'd drawn anything since he was fully paralyzed — Quan said, "It feels like taking a breath after being held underwater for five minutes."
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The Malaria-Proof Mosquito and The Mosquito Laser |
It's been a bad year to be a mosquito. The world's most annoying insect is responsible for 250 million cases of malaria per year — and 1 million deaths. But scientists at the University of Arizona have genetically engineered a mosquito that's immune to the Plasmodium parasite, the malaria-causing agent it transmits with its bite. The next step is to make the new mosquito hardier than the ordinary kind, then release it into the wild (perhaps within 10 years), where it will displace the deadly variety. Meanwhile, former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, working with the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, is developing a laser that can zap mosquitoes without harming other insects or humans. The laser targets the mosquitoes' size and signature wing beat and sends the bugs down in a burst of flame, making their deaths good for public health and, well, kind of cool.
Correction: The original version of this story misstated that former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold was working on the mosquito laser photonic fence with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The fence was created at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., where Myhrvold is CEO.
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NeoNurture Incubator |
The genius of the NeoNurture incubator, developed by university students in the U.S., is that it employs an underutilized resource (old car parts) to address a critical need: functioning incubators to nurture premature newborns. Headlights provide heat; a repurposed dashboard fan circulates air; a door-chime and signal-light assembly is rejiggered into an alarm system that alerts caregivers when things go awry with the heating mechanism. The device can even be powered from a motorcycle battery. Car engineers have nothing on these guys.
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The Plastic-Bottle Boat |
In the four months it took British adventurer and banking heir David de Rothschild and crew to sail a boat made of discarded soft-drink bottles from San Francisco to Australia, Americans used some 8.7 billion plastic bottles. Drawing attention to that waste was the point of Rothschild's voyage aboard the Plastiki, a 60-ft. catamaran built with 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and a fully recyclable plastic material called Seretex and held together with organic glue made from cashew-nut husks and sugarcane. The bottles were packed into the Plastiki's pontoons in a pomegranate-like structure, giving the boat 68% of its buoyancy. Rothschild's mission to change the public's perception of plastic continues as his team brainstorms new ways to reuse the commonly discarded material in everything from surfboards to wind turbines. "Every year in the U.S., we are throwing away a billion dollars' worth of building material," he tells TIME.
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eLegs Exoskeleton |
For paraplegic patients, being able to stand — not to mention take a few steps — under their own power is a cruelly unattainable goal. Or at least it has been. But the makers of eLegs, an innovative exoskeleton, are hoping to change that, one step at a time. The robotic prosthetic legs use artificial intelligence to "read" the wearer's arm gestures via a set of crutches, simulating a natural human gait. It's the first such device to do so without a tether, and it was inspired by military exoskeletons that soldiers strap on to lift heavy packs. The device requires some getting used to, so it will initially be available only at rehabilitation centers for use with a trained physical therapist, but it may hit the home market by 2013.
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| Deep Green Underwater Kite |
Swedish company Minesto's underwater kite resembles a child's toy as it swoops and dives in ocean currents. But since seawater is 800 times as dense as air, the small turbine attached to the kite — which is tethered to the ocean floor — can generate 800 times more energy than if it were in the sky. Minesto calls the technology Deep Green and says it can generate 500 kilowatts of power even in calm waters; the design could increase the market for tidal power by 80%, the company says. The first scale model will be unveiled next year off the coast of Northern Ireland.
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3-D Bioprinter |
Spare parts are available for virtually any machine ever invented. So why not the human body? San Diego–based companies Invetech and Organovo have developed what amounts to a dot-matrix printer for human organs. The device, small enough to fit into a sterile biosafety cabinet, consists of two printheads — one that sprays out a gel that forms a sort of armature for an organ and another that fills in that scaffolding with living cells. The printing tip positions cells with a precision within microns. Livers, kidneys and other replacement components — including teeth — could be built on demand, with no wait for a donor and less risk of rejection, since the cells are harvested straight from the patient. No word yet on a parts-and-labor warranty.
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Faster-Growing Salmon |
Americans love heart-healthy salmon, but with wild populations dwindling, most of the salmon we now eat is farmed, not caught. The problem is that salmon make bad farm animals; it takes 3 lb. of feed to grow 1 lb. of salmon. AquaBounty's solution: splice in a gene from Chinook salmon with DNA from an eellike creature called an ocean pout. AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon can grow twice as fast, making them easier to farm. Environmentalists wary of the first edible genetically engineered animal aren't so sure, however, and have dubbed the creation Frankenfish. A government hearing on the salmon ended inconclusively, but barring any changes, the fish could be headed to market soon.
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| First Synthetic Cell |
Creating life in the lab? It wasn't such a stretch for J. Craig Venter, who successfully co-mapped the human genome in 2001. Even while completing that feat, the genetic cartographer wondered if he could string together DNA and make life of the bacterial kind from scratch. So like a biological Lego builder, he started with off-the-shelf chemicals and, after 15 years of painstaking trial and error, managed to reconstruct the genome of a bacterium that successfully "booted up," dividing and replicating just like any other bug. Such synthetic life, he hopes, will make it possible to, among other things, generate new forms of man-made biofuel and speed up vaccine production by making it easier to create large amounts of whichever strains of influenza are circulating in a particular season.
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| Lab-Grown Lungs |
Growing new body parts has always been more science fiction than science reality, but that balance may quickly be shifting, at least in the lab. Relying on more sophisticated biosimulators that can better mimic body conditions, researchers have re-created the delicate architecture of a rat lung accurately enough for it to assume 95% of a normal lung's inhaling and exhaling functions. The key to their respiratory success was starting with a skeletal rat-lung template, including a matrix of blood vessels and collagen and other connective tissue, then seeding it with stem cells and nutrients to generate lifelike tissue that exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide just like normal lung tissue. The ultimate goal is to replicate the feat on a larger scale: to replace enough human lung tissue to aid patients with emphysema or lung cancer.
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| BioCouture |
Considering the unlovely grubs that produce it, silk is a remarkably beautiful textile. Now Suzanne Lee, a researcher at London's well-regarded Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, has developed a material made by the bacteria that are usually used to turn green tea into the fermented beverage kombucha. As they digest sugar, the bacteria produce a mat of cellulose, which Lee figured out how to harvest and dry. The resulting fabric, which has a vaguely skinlike texture, can be molded and sewn into shirts and coats. It's not perfect yet; if it gets wet, it absorbs up to 98% of its weight and "gets heavy and gooey," says Alexander Bismarck, a chemical-engineering professor at Imperial College London who is trying to devise a more water-repellent culture to grow the bacteria in. But it's a heckuva lot kinder to the planet than polyester.
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Bloom Box |
Inventors have tried to use hydrogen fuel cells as a cleaner way to create commercial electricity, but they've always been limited by the cost. That's beginning to change, however, thanks to a California start-up called Bloom Energy. Its Bloom Box — about half the size of a shipping container — generates electricity using solid oxide fuel cells, which provide juice by oxidizing a fuel source. In the case of the Bloom Box, that fuel source is natural gas, though the company hopes to substitute cleaner sources in the future. Silicon Valley companies like Google and eBay are already using Bloom Boxes for greener backup power, at a cost of about $800,000 each.
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Body Powered Devices |
Everything we do generates power — about 1 watt per breath, 70 watts per step. This year, Michael McAlpine of Princeton University and colleagues figured out how to turn locomotion into power by embedding piezoelectric crystals into a flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material that, when bent, allows the crystals to produce energy. Put the crystals in shoes, say, or implant them directly into the body and they could produce enough power to charge personal electronics or internal medical devices. Elsewhere, telecommunications provider Orange introduced a prototype of Orange Power Wellies — rubber boots that convert heat into current. Campers at Britain's Glastonbury Festival were the first to demo the footwear. (With the current model, it takes 12 hours of walking to charge a cell phone for an hour.) Of course, if you assemble enough people in a tight space, they don't even need to move to generate energy: in Paris, engineers have captured the warmth generated by bodies on the Métro subway to heat a public-housing project on Rue Beaubourg. By 2011, the Métro heating system will cut carbon dioxide emissions from the housing project's heating system by a third.
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Power-Aware Cord |
We'd all like to be more energy-efficient. But watching the meter doesn't intuitively show how much juice is being used minute to minute. The Interactive Institute, a Swedish nonprofit that explores technology and design, had an idea: what if you could actually see the electricity flowing into your machines? The Power-Aware Cord embeds wires around a cable that pulse light in relation to how much electricity is being drawn off the grid. The more current, the brighter and faster the blue light spirals. In testing the device, researchers found that making the invisible visible tuned consumers in to their bad habits, nudging them to power down and offering some surprising appliance insights: when a radio broadcasts drumbeats and bass riffs, its electricity consumption jumps. Talk about being plugged in.
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| The (Almost) Waterless Washing Machine |
You probably don't think about this every time you separate your whites, but the U.S. uses more than 330 billion gal. of water on laundry each year, according to the British firm Xeros Ltd. The company is developing a machine that draws cleaning power from reusable, stain-absorbing nylon beads, requiring much less water — as much as 90% less — than a normal washing machine. (See above for how it works.) A commercial version is due out next year: good news for conservation and your monthly water bill
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The English-Teaching Robot |
Call it the job terminator. South Korea, which employs some 30,000 foreigners to teach English, has plans for a new addition to its language classrooms: the English-speaking robot. Students in a few schools started learning English from the robo-teachers late last year; by the end of this year, the government hopes to have them in 18 more schools. The brightly colored, squat androids are part of an effort to keep South Korean students competitive in English. Not surprisingly, the proposal has worried a few human teachers — and with good reason. Experts say the bots could eventually phase out flesh-and-blood foreign English teachers altogether
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| The Plastic-Fur Coat |
Most of us toss those annoying plastic price-tag fasteners (above right) without a second thought, but Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal's coat gives 29,000 of them a new life. The French avant-garde fashion house — known for transforming shoelaces, combs and wigs into couture dresses — spent 42 hours embroidering the fasteners in a herringbone pattern on a leather coat, turning the disposable into a fashion statement: fake fake fur. "It's a message about sustainability, but done with humor," says Matilda McQuaid, a curator at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, "saying we should look at reusing our resources. We need to stop and think about what we immediately discard."
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Spray-On Fabric |
Cheese, insulation, hair — a lot of surprising things can come out of spray cans. Now we can add clothing to that list. The British company Fabrican has developed a way to bond and liquefy fibers so that textiles can be sprayed out of a can or spray gun straight onto a body or dress form. The solvent then evaporates, and the fibers bond, forming a snug-fitting garment. Not just for clothes, the technology has household, industrial, personal and health care applications. The first runway show of spray-on clothes took place this fall — we'll see if the trend will stick.
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The Deceitful Robot |
O.K., its nose doesn't grow. But Georgia Tech's new robot, which uses algorithms to detect conflict and then assess the best method of escaping from it, can create a false trail, send erroneous communications and hide from an enemy. Although its main purpose will most likely be to aid military search-and-rescue operations, its ability to deceive also brings it closer to successful interactions with humans. And it would make the Jetsons' Rosie even more annoying.
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Woolfiller |
Not many solutions to moth holes have inspired fan pages on Facebook. But Woolfiller provides a surprisingly easy solution to the age-old problem of holey sweaters. Take the special wool and felting needle and poke the needle — which has small hooks along the point — through the wool and your moth-eaten garment. The repeated action binds the fibers together, making a felt patch on your cardigan, sock or rug. Haleen Klopper of the Netherlands created Woolfiller as part of an interactive museum exhibition on sustainability, and so many visitors wanted to buy it that she started making kits. Klopper has come to see moths as design collaborators. Their damage is her opportunity to add a twist — a red square, say, on a blue turtleneck. "When something is broken," says Klopper, "people dare to do new things." Moths, eat your hearts out.
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The X-51A WaveRider |
After decades amassing an immense arsenal to defeat entire countries, the U.S. military is developing tools to fight isolated conflicts requiring speed and precision. The X-51A WaveRider demonstration project, part of the U.S.'s Prompt Global Strike initiative to attack any spot on the globe within an hour, is a prime example. The WaveRider is hypersonic, traveling 600 miles in 10 minutes. Even more incredible, its nose is designed to take advantage of the train of sonic waves it creates by making them break at the optimal angle.
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| Lifeguard Robot |
Her nose isn't coated in bright white sunblock, but she might just save your life. EMILY, or the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard, is a robotic buoy that can swim through riptides at a speed of up to 24 m.p.h. Her inventor, entrepreneur and engineer Tony Mulligan, says that makes her about 15 times as fast as human lifeguards. Powered with a tiny electric pump that shoots a forceful stream of water, the 4-ft.-long robotic buoy has been tested at California's Zuma Beach. The device is operated by remote, but next year's model features sonar technology controlled with an iPhone app that will allow EMILY to detect riptides and submerged objects.
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Less Dangerous Explosives |
Traditional TNT is relatively unstable and can detonate when dropped or when a vehicle carrying it is hit by an IED or a bullet. But the new IMX-101 explosive — while packing the same punch as TNT — is "more thermally stable," says Philip Samuels, a chemical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center. Researchers spent four years working on the material, which is scheduled for production next year. IMX-101 is more expensive than TNT, with an initial price of about $8 a pound, compared with $6 a pound for the usual stuff. But the Army is happy to pay the price — for soldiers' safety, and because the less volatile explosives can be packed more tightly into storage areas, making them more accessible to soldiers in the field.
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Sarcasm Detection |
This is the most important software ever invented. Of course, if a computer using the Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification read that last sentence, it would immediately detect the sarcasm. Developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the tool is designed to spot sarcastic sentences in product reviews. The algorithm has been fairly accurate even in its earliest stages: in a trial involving 66,000 Amazon reviews, it was right 77% of the time, pointing to a future in which computers won't just store your words, they'll interpret your intent
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Super Super Soaker |
The squirt gun has gone professional. Troops in Afghanistan are using a new "water disrupter" to disable roadside bombs. The clear plastic device is filled with water and a small explosive charge that, when set off, generates a thin blade of water that pulverizes the target. Developed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the so-called fluid-blade disablement tool was invented by Steve Todd, an engineer with extensive Navy experience fighting IEDs; Chance Hughs, a retired Navy Seal explosives expert on contract to Sandia; and Sandia mechanical engineer Juan Carlos Jakaboski. So far, TEAM Technologies of Albuquerque, N.M., has produced about 7,000 of the $58 units for shipment to Afghanistan.
We asked director Judd Apatow for his favorite movie invention:
'There have been no innovations in movies this year. Avatarwas the high point. It is all downhill from there.'
We asked pandora founder Tim Westergren for his favorite musical invention:
'I recently discovered the iRealBook iPhone application. The app contains bass, drum and piano tracks for all the jazz standards. It's the perfect technology for a practicing musician: high-quality digital audio, mixable, transposable into any key and completely mobile. Now every aspiring musician has a backup band in their pocket. Man, I would have killed for this back in the woodshed days.'
We asked TIME's senior political analyst Mark Halperin for the year's biggest invention in politics:
'The 140-character political endorsement. Forget the travel, the bunting, the balloons, the rallies and the pesky follow-up questions from the lamestream media. Sarah Palin has re-engineered the laying on of campaign hands with her Twitter and Facebook nods to favored candidates.'
We asked author and comedian Amy Sedaris for her thoughts on the year's best invention in comedy:
'Zach Galifianakis lighting up a joint on Bill Maher. The doors are wide open now!
We asked chef David Chang for his favorite new invention in the kitchen:
'The new iSi CO2 carbonator. It's so simple and easy to carbonate anything, especially liquor. I have a prototype, and it's amazing. Probably going to be in all professional kitchens. And, no, I don't get paid to say this stuff, but it's definitely the coolest gadget I've seen this year.'
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