Until the mid 1990s, lack of battery performance stalled the commercial use of hybrid cars. Things changed with the introduction of a new breed of power-management system, developed by Japanese engineer Shoichi Sasaki for Toyota's hybrid automobiles in 1997. Millions of hybrid vehicles have been sold today.

With climate change wreaking havoc and volatile energy prices affecting home heating costs, the need for both environment friendly and budget-conscious heating systems is greater than ever. Joseph Le Mer's innovative adaptations on heat exchangers delivered just that.

Although the technical description of a reduction gear may send one's head proverbially spinning, in layman's terms, it's simply a gear that slows things down. Bartolomej Janek, the 52-year-old engineer, inventor, and co-founder of the Slovakian company SPINEA, revolutionised the way gears are made by designing a compact reduction gear that maximises a motor's torque at sustained speeds.

Thanks to John Daugman's 2001 patent, iris recognition left the science fiction realm and became possible in real life. The 52-year-old professor at Cambridge University developed a computer algorithm that turns the eye into an electronic fingerprint.

Chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML) was long-considered one of the deadliest forms of cancer, capable of striking at any time, causing extreme pain and worse still, affecting both adults and young children. Before the work of two pioneering medical researchers, a diagnosis of CML and subsequent attempts at treatment guaranteed prolonged pain and no certainty of remission. But now with Glivec, a cancer fighting drug with a 98 percent remission rate, CML has lost much of its former bite thanks to American oncologist Brian Druker and Swiss medicinal chemist Jürg Zimmermann.

Pig iron is an integral, but wasteful building block of steel. Until recently, the only commercially viable way to get molten pig iron was to super-heat iron ore, a process that proved energy inefficient, expensive and harmful to the environment due to the amount of coal and the high temperatures used to melt the iron. In an effort to relieve some stress on the environment and cut production costs, two Dutch inventors, Koen Meijer and Huib den Hartog, discovered a new way to produce pig iron at a low temperature.

Fiona Fairhurst, formerly Product Manager Research and Development , at Speedo, spent years developing the perfect swimsuit. Over the last decade, Speedo's "Fastskin" suit and advancements of that technology have turned heads as the new "silver bullet" in professional swimming, leading to numerous world records and Olympic medals.

Consumers around the world delight in printing high-resolution photos on inkjet printers in their own homes. Scientists are excited by DNA sequencers so small and efficient they fit on a single chip. And even the least science-minded among us cannot help but be thrilled by the prospect of directly manipulating a single molecule of DNA. These are all examples of microfluidics at work. Breakthroughs in this new field of nanotechnology are largely thanks to the sets of very, very tiny tools being developed by applied physicist Professor Stephen Quake.

It's a rare individual who makes two lasting and commercially viable contributions to a single field - rarer still that such a person can make the claim to have bettered the lives of millions in the process. Biomedical engineer Philip S. Green of SRI International, the non-profit research institute formerly known as the Stanford Research Institute of Stanford University, is one such man.

In the 1980s, American inventor Van Phillips' Flex-Foot prosthetic leg brought new hope to amputees. For the first time, those who had lost limbs to accidents, disease or birth defects were able to take part in strenuous athletic endeavours. The breakthrough, born from Phillips' own experience of losing a limb, was updated with patents throughout the 1990s. Today, it is used in some form by 90 percent of all athletes in the Paralympics.