The year 2012 has come to an end with all the doomsday prophecies failing to happen because well we wouldn’t be here now would we! The year 2012 has been a tumultuous year across the board for everybody in all sectors. From battling natural disasters to space exploration we have reached various milestones which should be celebrated for without innovations these achievements would not have been possible.

2012 Olympics

London spent an estimated USD 14.5 billion on hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics between July 27 and August 12 2012. Over 10,000 athletes took part in the Games, and an estimated 27 million viewers watched the Opening Ceremony live on the first day. The Olympics followed London’s grand and gala celebrations in June to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.

The Games received widespread acclaim for their organization, with the volunteers, the British military and public enthusiasm praised particularly highly. The opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle, received widespread acclaim. During the Games, Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, winning his 22nd medal. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei entered female athletes for the first time, so that every currently eligible country has sent a female competitor to at least one Olympic Games. Women’s boxing was included for the first time; thus, the Games became the first at which every sport had female competitors

NASA Mars Rover

NASA’s robotic rover Curiosity, which was launched from the Earth in November 2011, successfully landed on Mars in August this year. The rover’s mission: to assess whether Mars ever was, or is still, an environment able to support microbial life. Some eight months and 350 million miles after departing Cape Canaveral, Fla., the one-ton Curiosity rover arrived on Mars in a high-stakes landing that made unprecedented use of a hovering sky crane. Many things could have gone very badly wrong with the USD 2.5 billion mission, especially in those final minutes. But in the end, it was a picture-perfect landing — as images sent home from Curiosity quickly confirmed.

Breaking the sound barrier

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner thrilled the world when he jumped from a capsule 128,000 feet above the earth and made a record-breaking leap through the sound barrier in October this year. The 43-year-old’s space jump over Roswell, New Mexico was watched live on YouTube by more than eight million people. He set the world record for skydiving an estimated 39 kilometers (24 mi), reaching an estimated speed of 1,342 kilometers per hour (834 mph), or Mach 1.24, on 14 October 2012, and became the first person to break the sound barrier without vehicular power on his descent

Google Glasses

One of the most intriguing pieces of technology introduced during 2012 was the eye wear Google Glass. These aren’t your ordinary spectacles. In this debut version, known as the Explorer Edition, the lightweight frames sport a camera, radios for data communication, speaker, microphone, and gyroscope, the better to reckon your position and orientation. The first recipients, other than a handful of Google employees, should be getting them early in 2013.

And what a spectacular entrance: the glasses leaped into the public consciousness on the faces of two skydivers who plummeted and then bicycled, safely and securely, onto the stage at the Google I/O conference last June. “You’ve seen demos that were slick and robust. This will be nothing like that,” Brin said. “This could go wrong in about 500 different ways.”

This product has the ability to revolutionize modern day networking as how mobile phones once revolutionized the communications industry

Robot arm movement with brain implants

Scheuermann became the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants. Scheuermann was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in the medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers. It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, “One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI.” “This is a spectacular leap toward greater function and independence for people who are unable to move their own arms,” senior investigator Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt School of Medicine said in a release.

The future potential application for the technology being developed here will not only aid disabled people but for able bodied it holds lots of promise as it will enable them to perform more complex functions.