A Waymo vehicle pictured on January 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas. A Waymo vehicle pictured on January 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas. Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? On Wednesday night, I went to a press event in London hosted by the Google-owned robotaxi firm Waymo, which announced it was aiming to make driverless taxis available to Londoners by the fourth quarter of 2026. Even though Waymos have been driving autonomously in a handful of U.S. cities for years now, it's worth paying attention to what's going on in London.

What Happens When Your Favorite Chatbot Dies? Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Sarah Friar speaks during the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Nov. 18, 2021. Sarah Friar speaks during the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Nov. 18, 2021. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.

Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? This summer, I found myself in the strange position of watching a humanoid robot try to load laundry. It squatted beside a washer-dryer unit, reached with one hand into a laundry basket that it was holding with the other, and put some clothes into the drum. But twice in a row, it dropped a piece of clothing and couldn't pick it back up. An engineer with a litter-picker grabbed the fallen cloth and sheepishly moved it behind the machine, out of my line of sight.

A dozen or so young men and women, eyes obscured by VR headsets, shuffle around a faux kitchen inside a tech company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Their arms are bent at the elbows, palms facing down. One pilot stops to pick up a bottle of hot sauce from a counter, hinging at the waist, making sure to keep her hands in view of the camera on her headset at all times. Meters away, two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes. Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again. This was the scene inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning this year. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited.

In 2000 TIME's editors sat down to select three inventions of the year, one each in consumer technology, medical science, and basic industry. They found so many interesting ones along the way that they included dozens of others, from an unbreakable lightbulb to paper that was easier to recycle. It was the start of our annual hunt for the most exciting innovations changing our lives, and the future. Since then, TIME has covered hundreds of inventions, from the esoteric (clouds featured more than once) to essential, including life-changing medicines, technological breakthroughs, new foods, nearly every new Apple product category, and even a few great ideas that didn't quite catch on. As TIME publishes the 2025 list, we're also assembling the Best Inventions Hall of Fame: the 25 most iconic inventions we covered in the past quarter century. Almost all women in the U.S. use contraception at some point in their lives, and in 2001 a new option came on the market, the vaginal ring. As TIME wrote when including it among the year's best inventions, "Some women hate taking pills. In early October the FDA approved use of the NuvaRing, a thin flexible plastic ring that women can flatten like a rubber band and insert once a month into the vagina."

For each of the past 25 years, TIME editors have highlighted the most impactful new products and ideas in TIME's Best Inventions issue. The first, published under a cover featuring the protracted Bush v. Gore presidential vote count in December 2000, covered about 35 inventions, including some that feel a world away: the Ricoh RDC-i700 (a digital camera that could post photos to the internet), the first 3D ultrasound imaging for pregnant parents, and a bike with two pontoons that intrepid cyclists could ride on a lake. Others could just as easily be on the 2025 list. Medtronic's Activa Tremor Control Therapy was featured in the 2000 issue as one of the first forays into deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Parkinson's. This year's issue includes the same company's newly FDA-approved upgrade to the same technology, BrainSense, which continually adjusts to patients' unique tremors.

From the steam engine in 1712 to the first ever iPhone in 2007, each year sees the birth of ever more incredible inventions. And after a year of mind-boggling tech, it's clear that 2024 has been no exception to the rule. The last 12 months have seen brilliant minds from around the world creating some mind-blowing and potentially world-changing breakthroughs. With 2024 almost at its end, MailOnline has taken a look back at some of this year's coolest gadgets and most exciting innovations. From an AI for designing proteins to a real-life pair of Wallace and Gromit's'techno trousers', these inventions are a glimpse of how we all might be living in the future. And when it comes to big breakthroughs, this year has been a resounding success for billionaire Elon Musk.

Every year for over two decades, TIME editors have highlighted the most impactful new products and ideas in TIME's Best Inventions issue. To compile this year's list, we solicited nominations from TIME's editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process, paying special attention to growing fields--such as health care, AI, and green energy. We then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and impact. The result is a list of 200 groundbreaking inventions (and 50 special mention inventions)--including the world's largest computer chip, a humanoid robot joining the workforce, and a bioluminescent houseplant--that are changing how we live, work, play, and think about what's possible.

Self-driving vehicles would not be possible without sensors and so it's not surprising to see two small new sensors in the 2020 Silicon Valley Robotics'Good Robot' Innovation Awards, the Velabit from Velodyne and the nanoScan3 from SICK. Our other Innovation Awards go to companies with groundbreakingly new robots; from the tensegrity structure of Squishy Robotics, which will help in both space exploration and disaster response on earth, to the Dusty Robotics full scale FieldPrinter for the construction industry, and Titan from FarmWise for agriculture, which was also named one of Time's Best Inventions for 2020. Finally, we're delighted to see innovation in robotics that is affordable and collaborative enough for home robot applications, with Stretch from Hello Robot and Eve from Halodi Robotics. The Velabit, a game-changing lidar sensor, leverages Velodyne's innovative lidar technology and manufacturing partnerships for cost optimization and high-volume production, to make high-quality 3D lidar sensors readily accessible to everyone. The Velabit is smaller than a deck of playing cards, and it shatters the price barrier, costing $100.00 per sensor.

A behemoth of a worker, recently recognized by a national publication, that can meticulously and precisely remove weeds growing between sprouting crops is being employed on farms in California and Arizona. Time magazine recently placed the FarmWise Titan FT-35 on its list of Best Inventions of 2020. It is an automated mechanical weeder that can help substitute the pass of a hand-weeding crew, which usually has 10 to 15 people. FarmWise has its operations headquarters, or home base for its team and machines, in Salinas and an office in San Francisco that houses most of its engineers. The company works with farming operations in the Salinas Valley such as Dole and Braga Fresh, plus dozens of other customers.