2005: The year in technology

December 28, 2005 | Source: NewScientist.com news service

Many weird and wonderful new gadgets, gizmos and inventions were revealed in 2005. Autonomous cars, robotic assistants and nano-circuitry provided a bright view of the future, while cellphone viruses, virtual crime sprees and “non-lethal” crowd control weapons hinted at technological troubles ahead.

The busiest inventor of the year was almost certainly Google, which continues to grow from a search engine into a many-tentacled technological titan, with a service for hosting and searching video clips, an Internet phone program, a searchable map of the world and an effort to digitize books from some of the world’s largest libraries, to name a few of its projects.