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Best innovation moments of 2011 The best moments in innovation for the year 2011.
Space shuttle Atlantis blasts off from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on July 8, 2011. This lift off was the last in the 30-year-old shuttle program.
Chip Somodevilla
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Getty Images
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Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller speaks about the new iPhone 4s at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. on Oct. 4, 2011. The announcement was the first major product announcement following former Apple chief executive Steve Jobs's death in October.
Kevork Djansezian
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Getty Images
Chairman and chief executive of Motorola Mobility Sanjay Jha speaks at a press event during the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 5, 2011 in Las Vegas. Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion cash. The acquisition allowed Google to expand its patent portfolio and, according to Google co-founder and chief executive Larry Page, "enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies."
Ethan Miller
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Getty Images
IBM researchers on Aug. 18, 2011 unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The cognitive computing chips, informally referred to as the “brain chip,” could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.
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AFP/Getty Images
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote address during the Facebook f8 conference on Sept. 22, 2011, in San Francisco. Zuckerberg kicked off the conference introducing the Timeline feature, which Zuckerberg called "a new way for users to express who they are."
Justin Sullivan
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Getty Images
In June, Google launched Google+, providing a limited number of invitations to early adopters. The network received mixed reviews but has since grown, with Gmail and other Google product subscribers automatically receiving Google+ accounts. The social network includes unique features such as “hangouts” and “circles.”
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Reuters
Color co-founder Bill Nguyen holds up his Apple iPhone with photos of himself using the Color application as he poses with staff members at the company's offices in Palo Alto, Calif., on March 10, 2011. Lauded as the next generation of social media applications, Color received $41 million in venture capital funding and was considered one of the most highly anticipated launches of the year. But the product received poor reviews, and the company’s co-founder, Peter Pham, left only months after the company launched publicly.
Paul Sakuma
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AP
Andrew Mason, third from right, founder and chief executive of Groupon, attends his company's IPO at Nasdaq on Nov. 4, 2011, in New York. Groupon, the company that pioneered online group discounts, has begun trading as a public company. The stock jumped nearly 50 percent in the opening minutes Friday.
Mark Lennihan
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AP
Lytro's light field technology camera was one of the year’s most-anticipated technology gadgets. The camera takes "living pictures,” or pictures that allow you to dynamically change the field of focus in a photograph.
Lytro
Andrew Lewis, 22, is a member of Telecomix, a Western hacker group that has been helping pro-democracy activists during this year's Arab Spring. Protesters have used Facebook to post reports of rallies and Skype to avoid tapped cellphone lines. The use of social media to counteract government crackdowns in the Middle East and Northern Africa has ushered in a new era of governing in countries such as Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.
Carol Guzy
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The Washington Post
A physicist explains the Atlas experiment on a board at the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, outside Geneva, Switzerland, on May 20, 2011. The painting shows how a Higgs boson may look in Atlas. Excitement built on Dec. 12 at CERN when scientists revealed that the Higgs, the most sought-after discovery in particle physics, had been glimpsed, according to reporting by the BBC.
Anja Niedringhaus
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AP
Much like the Arab Spring, the protests that arose out of Zucotti Park in New York City produced a wave of populist anger. But, as Post blogger Dominic Basulto wrote, the movement against income inequality maintained a forceful presence online as well, spreading to cities across the country and around the world.
Emmanuel Dunand
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AFP/Getty Images
Team Elastec, pictured here, won the X Prize for oil-spill clean-up in October. The X Prize awards innovators cash prizes for inventions to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. Elastec received the $1 million, first-place prize.
X PRIZE Foundation
"Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter, right, flank a prop representing Watson during a practice round of the "Jeopardy!" quiz show. Watson is being tapped by one of the nation's largest health insurers, WellPoint Inc., to help diagnose medical problems and authorize treatments.
Seth Wenig
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AP
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Section:/national/on-innovations
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