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."
Flying cars! Jet packs! Lasers that zap malaria-carrying mosquitoes! Here are the year's biggest (and coolest) breakthroughs in science, technology and the arts