Technological overoptimism lurks as a persistent risk to both professional and amateur watchers of advances, from artificial intelligence to the flying car. But sometimes new technologies actually live up to some of the wildest expectations for them.

This year’s SciAm 50 awards are replete with instances of new machines or chemicals that come close to the true meaning of innovation as something entirely new. One winner has created an instrument that measures fluids in zeptoliters, or sextillionths of a liter. (You know, the zeptoliter, the measurement unit that is 1,000th of an attoliter?)

Another innovator has devised a method that could recharge a phone without plugging it in. All you would have to do is sit at the dining room table, phone in pocket, a few feet away from a recharging coil hidden in the ceiling. Still another visionary is paving the way for treating mysterious and deadly prion diseases such as mad cow and kuru.

Award winners highlighted here have the potential to contribute much more to human health, consumer electronics and numerous other fields than if they were simply offering another antidepressant that tweaked serotonin levels or ratcheting up the speed of a microprocessor. What they have done is decidedly new.

SciAm 50 for 2007
Research Leader of the Year
1. The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium

Business Leader of the Year
2. Amyris Biotechnologies

Policy Leader of the Year
3. X Prize Foundation

Other Research, Business and Policy Leaders
Connections to an Untethered Future
4. Marin Soljacic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (research)
5. Apple (business)
6. Robert Ghrist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Vin de Silva, Pomona College (research)

Getting from Here to There
7. Manjunath N. Swamy, Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School (research)
8. Hans Boumans, Netherlands Organization for Applied Research (research)

Fueling Alternatives
9. James A. Dumesic, University of Wisconsin–Madison (research)
10. Radoslav R. Adzic, Brookhaven National Laboratory (research)
11. Shelley D. Minteer and Tamara Klotzbach, Saint Louis University (research)

Fighting Toxins in the Home
12. Patricia A. Hunt, Washington State University (research)
13. American Pharmacists Association and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (policy)

Advances in Ultrameasurement
14. Peter W. Sutter and Eli A. Sutter, Brookhaven National Laboratory (research)
15. Groups of physicists at Hokkaido University, Japan, and the University of Bristol, England (research)

Mosquitoes Enlisted to Beat Malaria
16. Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, Johns Hopkins University (research)
17. Bruce A. Hay, California Institute of Technology (research)