At the end of every year, Time picks the best 25 inventions that are “making the world better and smarter”. Here we have picked three of this year's inventions that could be a part of your life in the near future.

The levitating(悬浮的) lightbulb

    This special lightbulb was invented by US artist and scientist Simon Morris. He got the idea of making a lightbulb float from hoverboards(悬浮滑板)，which he used to dream of having as a kid.

    But the floating is not the most amazing part. The rejection force between the opposite ends of the magnets(磁铁)，which were put in the bottom of the bulb and in the wooden base, does the job. What's new here is a technology called induction (电磁感应). It allows the lightbulb to get power from the base even they are not in contact.

Shoes that tie themselves

    They're not what you think-shoelaces that tie themselves in the way we tie them. Instead, the new shoes have small motors that control their laces. When you step in them, your feet will hit a sensor（传感器）in the shoes and the motor will automatically tighten the laces.

    But the shoes weren't just designed for lazy people's needs. They could actually give athletes an advantage during competition. They are also useful for people who cannot move their arms or fingers easily.

The no-touch thermometer

    Taking your body temperature usually means putting a thermometer (体温计) in your armpits (腋窝) and staying still for minutes. It may be easy for you, but it's an impossible task for little kids.

    Now, with the new thermometer, users can simply put it 2.5 centimeters from a patient's forechead and press the button, and it can get the reading in two seconds.

You can't always predict a heavy rain or remember your umbrella. But designer Mikhail Belyaev doesn't think that forgetting to check the weather forecast before heading out should result in you getting wet. That's why he created lampbrella, a lamp post with its own rain- sensing umbrella.

    The designer says he come up with the idea after watching people get wet on streets in Russia. “once, I was driving on a central Saint Petersburg street and saw the street lamps lighting up people trying to hide from the rain. I thought it would be appropriate to have a canopy (伞蓬) built into a street lamp.” he said.

    The lampbrella is a standard-looking street lamp fitted with an umbrella canopy. It has a built-in electric motor which can open or close the umbrella on demand. Sensors (传感器) then ensure that the umbrella offers pedestrians shelter whenever it starts raining.

In addition to the rain sensor, there's also a 360° motion sensor on the fiberglass street lamp which detects whether anyone is using the lampbrella. After three minutes of not being used the canopy is closed.

     According to the designer, the lampbrella would move at a relatively low speed, so as not to cause harm to the pedestrians. Besides, it would be grounded to protect from possible lighting strike. Each lampbrella would offer enough shelter for several people. Being installed (安装) at 2 meters off the ground, it would only be a danger for the tallest of pedestrians.

      While there are no plans to take lampbrella into production, Belyaev says he recently introduced his creation to one Moscow Department, and insists his creation could be installed on any street where a lot of people walk but there are no canopies to provide shelter.

    If you think American cooking means opening a package and throwing the contents into the microwave oven (微波炉)，think again. On the one hand, it's true that many Americans have cold cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and instant (方便的) dinners. From busy homemakers to working people, many Americans enjoy the convenience (方便) of fast food that can be ready to serve in 10 minutes or less. On the other hand, many Americans realize the importance of cooking skills. Parents—especially mothers'—see the importance of training their children- especially daughter's. Most Americans think that there's nothing better than a good home-cooked meal. But with cooking, as with any other skill, good results don't happen by accident.

    Probably every cook has his or her own way of cooking. But there are some basic skills that most people follow. For example, baking is a main method (方法) of preparing food in America. For that reason, Americans would find it next to impossible to live without an oven. American cooks pay special attention to the balance of foods, too. In planning a big meal they try to include meat, a few vegetables, some bread and often a dessert. They also like to make sure the meal is colorful. Having several different colors of food on the plate usually makes for a healthy meal.

    For those who need guidance in their cooking, or for those who have just run out of ideas, recipes are a great help. Recipes list all the ingredients for a dish (generally in the order used), the amount of each to use, and a description of how to put them together.

    Many people drink coffee to quickly increase their energy. Scientists say there may be another reason to drink coffee. They studied the link（联系）between coffee drinking and the risk of death from some diseases, and found that drinking moderate（适量的）amounts of coffee each day may help protect against heart disease, cancer and other diseases. David Jacobs of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis worked on the study with researchers from the University of Oslo.

    The researchers used information about 27,300 women. They were between 55 and 69 years of age when they entered the study. During a fifteen-year period, almost 15.75% of them died. The researchers found a link between the amount of coffee the women reported drinking and their risk of dying from heart disease. Coffee drinking was measured in cups. One cup is about 225 grams.

    There was a reduced risk of death from heart disease among women who drank from one to three cups of coffee each day. A reduction（减少）in the risk of death from other diseases was also seen. But Professor Jacobs says the risk reduction for death from heart disease decreased in women who drank more than three cups a day.

    The researchers say antioxidants（抗氧化剂）in coffee might reduce the risk of heart disease. Earlier studies found that coffee has high levels of antioxidants. Antioxidants have been shown to help prevent heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

    Even by the standards of poor countries, India is alarmingly — and unnecessarily — dirty. It needs to clean up. Most time of year, its capital, Delhi，smells as if something is burning. That is because of many things: the carcinogenic diesel（柴油）that supplies three quarters of the city's motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest and so on. All these make Delhi's air the most poisonous of any big city.

    This does not just make life unpleasant for a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll from breathing PM 2.5 alone at 1.2—2.2 million a year. The lifespan of Delhi residents is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of Chicago-Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a government think-tank estimates, without measuring its contribution to slower killers such as kidney disease. Some 600 million Indians, nearly half the country, live in areas where clean water is in short supply. As pollutants taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon（季风）rains more abnormal, the country is poisoning its own future.

    Indian pollution is a danger to the rest of the world, too. Widespread dumping of antibiotics（抗生素）in rivers has made the country a hotspot for anti-microbial（抗微生物）resistance. Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, grew by 6% a year between 2000 and 2016, compared with 1.3% a year for the world as a whole.

    In the past India has explained its failure to clean up its act by pleading poverty, noting that richer countries were once just as dirty and that its output of waste per person still lags far behind theirs. But India is notably grubby（肮脏的）not just in absolute terms, but also relative to its level of development And it is becoming grubbier.

    It is true that some ways of cutting pollution are expensive. But there are also cheap solutions，such as undoing mistakes that Indian bureaucrats（官僚）have themselves made. By funding rice farmers, for instance, the government has in effect cheered on the overusing of groundwater and the burning of stalks. Rules that encourage the use of coal have not made India more self-reliant, as intended, but instead have led to big imports of foreign coal while blackening India's skies. Much cleaner gas-fired power plants, meanwhile, sit idle.

    Reliant on big business for funding and on the poor for votes, politicians have long ignored middle-class complaints about pollution, failing to give officials the backing to enforce rules. That is a pity, because when India does apply itself to ambitious goals, it often achieves them

    Next year it will send its second rocket to the Moon.

    Narendra Modi, the prime minister, promised with admirable frankness when he took over to rid the country of open defecation（缺陷）. Four and a half years and some $9 billion later, his Clean India campaign claims to have sponsored the building of an astonishing 90 million toilets. This is impressive, but India is still not clean. Its skies, its streets, its rivers and coasts will remain dangerously dirty until they receive similar attention.

    Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been there around 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age, would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests might have reacted to the cold, dry climate of the ice ages, but till now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

    Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO2 from the atmosphere and helping to solve global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tons of CO2 each year: equal to the total amount of CO2 given off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to the future climate change? If it gets drier, will it survive and continue to draw down CO2? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.

    Unfortunately, collecting information is incredibly difficult. To study the past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen (花粉) kept in lake mud. Going back to the last ice age means drilling down into lake sediments (沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery . There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and aeroplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled (未取样). So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon forest reacts to climate change.