Alison Van Houten
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Articles by Alison Van Houten
Saket Soni Wants to Protect the Workers Rebuilding Communities After Disaster
by Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Custom Feed: See the stories that matter most to you. Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, hundreds of thousands of residents fled, many never to return. Saket Soni did the opposite: He relocated to the waterlogged city—a seemingly confounding choice to anyone who doesn’t know him.
Saket Soni Wants to Protect the Workers Rebuilding Communities After Disaster
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TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2026: Culina Health
Apr 30, 2026 Access to registered dietitians Just 1 in 500 Americans have seen a registered dietitian, even though millions have nutrition-linked chronic conditions. In-network with most major U.S. insurance plans, Culina Health virtually connects patients of all ages with registered dietitians (RDs), no referrals needed. Three-quarters of patients pay nothing out of pocket, and the average copay with insurance is $33 per visit—about 60% less than competitors.
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2026: Boston Dynamics
The Agile Mobile Robot Spot® The Agile Mobile Robot Spot®Courtesy Boston Dynamic In early 2026, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas left the dance floor for the factory floor, with its first industrial deployments slated for majority-owner Hyundai's new auto plant in Georgia. “The world is built around humans,” says Nik Noel, VP of marketing and communications, and Atlas is designed to work in real-world spaces, with fully rotational joints that let it move in ways people cannot.
National Trust for Historic Preservation: Return to home page
On a March day in 2025, Carolina Mountain Club’s Tom Weaver and some 35 volunteers ascended Tennessee’s bald-top Walnut Mountain and surrounded a three-walled log hut like ants. Within about five hours they had dismantled the 1938 Appalachian Trail shelter, which had been slated for removal by its owner, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC).
Riding the Hallyu
Since the mid 1990s, South Korean culture has exploded on the global stage, from K-beauty to the highly choreographed musical performances of K-pop groups such as Blackpink and BTS to Oscar-winning films (think Bong Joon Ho’s white-knuckle satire Parasite).
A hub of invention
Originally published in The Anteater, Winter 2025 In 2020, Beall Applied Innovation moved into a sparkling new home at UCI Research Park. The 31,000-square-foot Cove, a state-of-the-art hub in which innovators can work and connect, was a portent of even more exciting things to come.
Aerflo System: The Best Inventions of 2025
"Aluminum cans are only around 50% recyclable in the United States," says Aerflo co-founder Buzz Wiggins. "The rest goes to waste." His company’s solution—a water bottle with a svelte carbonation unit built right into the lid—aims to reshape the $40 billion sparkling water industry. Leading up to its launch in 2024, the company miniaturized its design and worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation to become the first federally permitted business to ship CO₂ through the USPS.
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Comcast NBCUniversal
The Comcast-owned media conglomerate NBCUniversal had fingers in every pie in 2024. During the Paris Olympics, Snoop Dogg donned a dressage-style jacket and made international headlines as a special correspondent covering the games, helping drive 30.4 million viewers on average each day across platforms including its streaming service Peacock. In November it announced it would spin off some of its cable TV networks, including MSNBC, CNBC, and E!, as the giant aims to focus its offerings.
Arm: 2025 TIME100 Most Influential Companies Original
U.K.-based Arm designs chip architecture—the set of instructions that tells a device what to do—and licenses it to manufacturers including Apple and Nvidia. Arm-based chips’ performance and efficiency outperform competing computer architectures, and its chip designs reach more users by orders of magnitude. Arm generated more than $4 billion in revenue from April 2024 to April 2025.
Palantir
Named after J.R.R. Tolkien's infamously fallible seeing stones, Palantir makes software for managing and analyzing highly complex, unwieldy datasets. The long-time U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor doesn't pull any punches. In mid-April, news broke that the Trump administration—which has set a goal of deporting 20 million immigrants, and detained lawful U.S. residents—is paying Palantir $30 million to make a new tech tool that will aid deportation efforts.
Cloudflare
Cyber attacks were not in the headlines during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, thanks in part to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which it says blocked over 6 billion election-related threats the week of Nov. 5 alone. One of the world’s largest network infrastructure and security firms, Cloudflare shores up about a fifth of the internet.
Engie
Engie's WindFloat Atlantic wind farm off the coast of Portugal. Credit - Courtesy Ocean Winds/PPI The need for renewable energy has become even more urgent amid the explosion of power-sucking data centers powering AI’s advance. France-based energy supplier Engie, which is one of the largest energy companies in the world and operates across six continents, is demonstrating how huge global energy suppliers can kick fossil fuel habits.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:45 AM EDT Making steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, is notoriously polluting. But Electra, a Boulder-based company looking to change that, opened its first pilot plant in 2024 and has already partnered with the largest U.S. steelmaker, Nucor. Electra zeroed in on the iron-refinement step of the process, where 90% of steelmaking’s CO2 emissions occur.
Pivot Bio N-Ovator: the 200 Best Inventions of 2024
By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:45 AM EDT Although carbon dioxide takes center stage in greenhouse gas talk, nitrous oxide (N2O) is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture and third biggest overall. However, many companies have stalled out on curbing their scope 3 N2O emissions, the indirect emissions not made by the company itself or from its energy use. "These changes have to happen at the farm," says Chris Abbott, CEO of ag tech company Pivot Bio.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:44 AM EDT To test its anti-flammability technology, NanoTech Materials slathered an egg in its Wildfire Shield coating and set it ablaze. It remained raw. Meant for buildings, the product contains their Insulative Ceramic Particle (ICP), a powder that can be integrated into other materials, like drywall or shingles, to improve fire resistance and reduce heat penetration.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:44 AM EDT When it comes to women's pain? "Nobody cares," says Ikram Guerd, global marketing VP for medical device company Aspivix. It wasn't until this August that the CDC even officially urged ob-gyns to offer medication to people having IUDs inserted.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:27 AM EDT To make handbags that look like marbly prosciutto, TomTex actually uses chitosan from mushrooms and discarded shrimp shells. The materials are more than just aesthetically versatile.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:26 AM EDT ZeroAvia's ZA600 hydrogen-electric powertrain can propel a 19-seat aircraft without releasing any carbon. It's only emission: Water vapor. Inside is a fuel cell that converts green hydrogen into electricity.
%secondary_title%: The 200 Best Inventions of 2024
By Alison Van Houten October 30, 2024 7:26 AM EDT Polluting, potentially explosive lithium-ion batteries hamstring the promise of electric cars that could be lighter and more environmentally friendly—not to mention phones, medical devices, and other consumer electronics that also rely on this liquid-electrolyte technology. In the move toward solid-state batteries, Sakuu's Kavian platform for 3D printing electrodes stands out for not using any liquids.
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2024: Ember Technologies Original
May 30, 2024 7:44 AM EDT These days, Ember does far more than make mugs that keep coffee warm. It's applying its temperature-regulating technology—with over 150 patents—to everything from baby bottles to the Ember Cube, the world’s first self-refrigerated, sensor-enabled, cloud-connected shipping box.
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2024: ThyssenKrupp Nucera
May 30, 2024 7:40 AM EDT "If you want to protect the climate, there is no way around green hydrogen," ThyssenKrupp Nucera CEO Werner Ponikwar says. His company specializes in building high-efficiencyalkaline water electrolyzers to power steel mills and other fossil-fuel intensive industrial sites, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Watershed: 2024 TIME100 Most Influential Companies
May 30, 2024 7:37 AM EDT After raising an additional $100 million this February, Watershed became the most valuable climate-software company on the planet. The subscription-based digital dashboard helps corporations easily measure emissions to not only report but also, critically, to act. Guided by an advisory board of global climate-policy experts, Watershed facilitates peer comparison, effectively nudging clients forward in a race to slash emissions.
CoreWeave: 2024 TIME100 Most Influential Companies
May 30, 2024 7:33 AM EDT Amid the chip shortage, CoreWeave's hoard of high-powered graphics processing units made it one of the largest GPU-specialized cloud-service providers. "If you’re using AI in any part of your life—whether it’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot—there’s a good chance you’re using CoreWeave’s AI infrastructure," says co-founder and CEO Mike Intrator.
Nubank: 2024 TIME100 Most Influential Companies
May 30, 2024 7:30 AM EDT In an increasingly digitized economy, the 1.4 billion people who live on cash alone are left behind. "You are completely marginalized," says David Vélez, CEO of Brazil-based Nubank, the world’s most valuable digital bank.
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2024: The Good Charcoal Company
May 30, 2024 7:29 AM EDT Charcoal often comes from South America under dubious environmental circumstances, but Good Charcoal Company’s products are sourced from overgrown Namibian acacia, which reduces biodiversity and groundwater recharge when left unchecked. By employing local ranchers to harvest trees, the company helped restore 40,000 acres of grasslands in southeast Africa last year.
Transcripta Bio: 2024 TIME100 Most Influential Companies | TIME
May 30, 2024 7:29 AM EDT Rare diseases affect some 400 million people worldwide, but no effective treatment exists for 95% of them.
Behind the Revival of Ponce Hall, a St. Augustine, Florida, Landmark
In July 2022, a water pipe burst in freshly upgraded Ponce de Leon Hall, the Spanish Renaissance Revival–style heart of St. Augustine, Florida’s Flagler College. Few people were in the building at the time, and no one was hurt, but the incident caused significant damage. It catalyzed a $100-million-plus renovation and restoration that included structural repairs as well as electrical, plumbing, and HVAC modernization. But it also shed new light on the National Historic Landmark.
Humane Ai Pin: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
October 24, 2023 7:00 AM EDT These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. The two former Apple execs who started Humane* envision a screen-free future, and the Ai Pin is their first step. Once the lightweight Humane Ai Pin attaches magnetically to your clothing, it becomes your AI-powered personal assistant.
Token of Affection: The Feline Keepsake Stowed Away at the Pope-Leighey House
Inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House in northern Virginia, Marjorie Leighey kept hidden away a porcelain perfume bottle shaped curiously like a perky, orange cat. It had a tiger-striped tail, a bronze-colored crown, and a crisp collar topped by a red bow tie. In the early 1960s, Leighey’s Wright–designed house had been slated for demolition to make way for Interstate 66.
Neuralangelo: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Creating 3D models of real-world objects once required the kind of time, money, and expertise only available to movie studios and video game developers. With Neuralangelo, all it takes is a smartphone camera. The AI model, built by NVIDIA Research, turns 2D video into lifelike 3D replicas, capturing fine details of complex materials like roof shingles, panes of glass, and smooth marble.
onX Recent Imagery: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
When planning a hunt or a backcountry hike, knowing the latest on-the-ground conditions—like whether a cornfield has been harvested or a mountain pass is dry—is invaluable. OnX, which makes apps geared to hunters, off-roaders, and other backcountry adventurers, this year added a “recent imagery” feature, which provides paying users (in every U.S. state but Hawaii) unparalleled visibility thanks to satellite images provided by Planet Labs.
Dedrone City-Wide Drone Detection: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Drones can be as disruptive as they are beneficial. Dedrone’s City-Wide Drone Detection product throws a virtual shield around a geographical area, warning law enforcement within seconds if a drone has entered the designated airspace. Dedrone tracks a proprietary blend of signals from drones, including radio frequency, ADS-B data (also used in planes), and RemoteID beacons, to identify the location of incursions.
Hyperice Heated Head Attachment: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
SPECIAL MENTION: Hyperice’s Heated Head Attachment is a gift to aching muscles. The attachment fits most percussive massage guns and adds heat, complementing massages to ease muscles and hasten recovery.
Apple Vision Pro: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
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Just about every big tech company has tried to develop virtual or augmented reality headsets with mass appeal. Apple might be the first to pull it off. Unveiled in June and set to hit shelves in early 2024, the Vision Pro features micro-OLED displays, a dozen cameras, six microphones, five sensors, and a new Apple-designed R1 chip. There’s plenty that makes this headset unique, including gesture controls—wearers can navigate with eyes, hands, and voice—and the sheer number of apps it supports.
By Jared Lindzon Verified, Chris Stokel-Walker Verified, Alison Van Houten, Charlotte Alter Verified
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TIME
Verified
COROS Heart Rate Monitor: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. Heart rate is great for gauging effort during exercise, but wrist-based optical sensors can be thrown off by everything from skin color to the weather, and chest straps—generally considered the gold standard in tracking—can be uncomfortable.
Ryse Recon: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Cross a human-sized drone with a motorcycle sidecar and you get the Ryse Recon, a one-person ultralight aerial vehicle that takes off and lands vertically. Thanks to a self-flying mechanism powered by AI, when you’re ready to touch down you simply press the “Land Now” button. The flotation devices beneath each of the six propellers even let you land on water. Out in the spring, the Ryse Recon is intended to help ranchers and farmers quickly reach hard-to-access parts of their land.
Flo Anonymous Mode: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion access in June 2022, fears arose that legislators might leverage companies’ data to track women’s reproductive health. So that September, period-tracking app Flo put out a new option called Anonymous Mode, which can “completely decouple health information from the identity of the user,” according to chief technology officer Roman Bugaev.
Naqi Neural Earbuds: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
When David Segal’s friend Keith broke his neck and pelvic bone at 18 and became a quadriplegic, his life changed immeasurably. Keith’s experience led Segal to invent Naqi Earbuds, which he calls “a safe, noninvasive, universal, invisible, and silent command and control system.” Electrical signals made by clenching your jaw or lifting an eyebrow turn into commands; wearers hear a voice to help navigate the invisible user interface.
Hunter Douglas Aura Illuminated Shades: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Shades used to have one job: keep the light out. The Aura Illuminated Shades do that, helping keep your home energy efficient, but they also create light of their own.
Cionic Neural Sleeve: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Frustrated by the mobility-support options offered to his daughter Sofia, who has cerebral palsy, Jeremiah Robison, founder and CEO of Cionic, set out to make a garment to power “a more normative gait.” Cionic’s Neural Sleeve, which began shipping in January following FDA approval last year, analyzes real-time data from sensors in the fabric, then sends electrical signals to elicit targeted muscle contractions in the legs.
AudioShake: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
When one of the biggest rock bands recently landed a deal to use its hit 1970s song in a commercial, its members were overjoyed. There was one problem: the admakers wanted only the instrumentals, and all the band had was the final mix. So the rockers’ team approached AudioShake, whose AI program isolates elements of prerecorded audio to strip it into its constituent parts.
Axiom Holographics Hologram Zoo: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
At the hologram zoo you don’t just see an elephant – you see a herd of elephants that stampedes toward you and then runs through you. “It’s really about showing people things they have never seen before,” says Bruce Dell, CEO of the Hologram Zoo, a 16,000-square foot complex in Brisbane, Australia, that projects lifelike wonders such as polar bears and whales in action. Dell’s secret? He slashed the cost of hologram tech by building a factory to do everything in-house.
Group Project New York City Better Bin: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
New York City’s trash bins have a new look. The iconic cans that have been largely unchanged since the 1930s—simple, green wire-mesh baskets—will be replaced with a sleek modular unit that is cheaper and also lighter, reducing the chance of injuries to sanitation workers. The Better Bin also has a hinged flip lid to prevent dumping microwaves and TVs, and a perforated shell to impede rats. Colin P.
Iambic Model T: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Shoes are built around a last, a foot-shaped form that hasn’t seen much innovation in a millennium. That’s changed with the Iambic $550 Model T shoe. There are no size options; instead, you submit foot photos and complete a comfort questionnaire. Then AI algorithms, developed using a grant from the National Science Foundation, generate a custom-designed plastic last, the basis for Iambic’s quality, handmade leather sneaker. When it’s time for your next pair, send Iambic pictures of tread wear.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier Supercomputer: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
To answer some of the most pressing questions we have—will Earth heat up by one degree Celsius in the next 50 years, or a catastrophic six?—we need supercomputers that work faster and in much greater detail than typical computers. Developed for ORNL by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Frontier is the world’s first exascale computer, which can calculate more than one quintillion floating point operations, or FLOPs, per second— faster than the seven next most powerful supercomputers combined.
Loftie Clock: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
Smartphones make for problematic alarm clocks. When they’re in your bedroom, you’re tempted to squeeze in some extra screen time, which is bad for sleep quality. The Loftie Clock has many of the same features available on your smartphone—from white noise to guided meditation to a soothing wake-up alarm—without the urge to doomscroll. The device will even lull you to sleep with AI-generated bedtime stories, personalized to what you find relaxing.
NASA MOXIE: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
If astronauts ever land on Mars, they’ll need air to breathe and (barring one-way colonization) a way to get home. We are closer to both possibilities thanks to NASA’s MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), a small device attached to Mars’ Perseverance rover that separates oxygen atoms from the limited amount of carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere.
Water Automation aquaHALT: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
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These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. As a building manager in New York, Greg Capizzi often had to deal with a common problem: leaky toilets, which not only waste water, but can cause costly damage to units below the faulty throne.
By Jared Lindzon Verified, Chris Stokel-Walker Verified, Alison Van Houten, Charlotte Alter Verified
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TIME
Verified
Snoo Smart Sleeper: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. “Babies are used to sleeping with a rhythm [in utero],” says inventor Dr. Harvey Karp, co-founder and CEO of Happiest Baby, maker of the Snoo. “Why should we rip that away the instant they’re born?” The popular bassinet lulls infants with automated rocking and shushing.
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