The Best Inventions Of The Year

Spandex Space Suit

With manned space exploration in the doldrums, maybe what NASA needs is a new outfit for its astronauts. Enter Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics at MIT, who is developing the Bio-Suit. It's a formfitting space suit made of elastic polymers that improve mobility. Because it applies pressure directly to the skin instead of pressurizing the air inside the suit, the way today's bulky suits do, it's also much lighter.
Available: 2016
mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html