BEST INVENTIONS 2023

For our annual list of the year's most exciting innovations, TIME editors hunted through products and services to select 200 inventions that make the world better, smarter, or just more fun.

- LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MATHIAS HAMMER, WILL HENSHALL, SIMMONE SHAH, AND JULIA ZORTHIAN

A YEAR IN SPACE

Space travel is increasingly routine: humanity made a record 178 successful takeoffs into orbit in 2022. More interest and investment-led to a spate of scientific advancement this year.

That includes efforts to better understand space, like NASA's OSIRISREX, which gathered samples from an asteroid, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2, built to explore the moon. Other innovations turned their gaze back on our planet, like NASA's TEMPO, which monitors air quality in the U.S.; Nuview's LIDAR Satellite Constellation, planned to map Earth in 3D; and Pixxel's work to detect environmental threats with its Hyperspectral Imaging Satellites.

While scientists expanded the bounds of space exploration via NASA's Moxie experiment to separate oxygen from Mars' atmosphere, they also worked to reduce our impact and clean up space trash-which causes risky collisions with the ClearSpace-1 robotic arm. -Tara Law

OUTDOORS

Trunk show

ePlant TreeTag

After wildfires ripped through Maui in August, staff at ePlant set up 15 of their Tree Tags on the Lahaina region's largest banyan tree, which had been damaged, to help arborists understand how to help it recover. The Tree Tag sticks into the trunk, combining sensors and Al to measure growth, keep track of water and light inputs, monitor carbon capture, and store the data in the cloud. "Trees have their own unique way of communicating, and our sensors are like their translators," co-founder and CEO Graham Hine says. Anyone with trees in their yard will find the information helpful in keeping them healthy. -Pranav Dixit

DESIGN

Boundary-pushing instrument