By Avi Baskin, Sandra Chen, Heather Hammel, Rachel Hwang, Mike Lazarus, Aaron Light, Minna Shmidt and Sanyee Yuan.

Best Inventions 

The Aptera hybrid

Recognized as a motorcycle, this hybrid beats the hybrid Prius’ 72 miles per gallon by nearly a time zone. At a steady 55 mph during normal driving conditions, it can pack in 230 to 300 mpg.
With gas prices in San Francisco exceeding $3.60 per gallon and Americans averaging about 15,000 miles a year, Aptera owners save nearly $2,000 on gas a year. The electric version doesn’t require gasoline at all.  Instead, Aptera owners can simply plug their Aptera into an ordinary 110-watt wall outlet overnight for about 120 miles of battery the next day.
Although the Aptera is not yet available, potential buyers can reserve their car online for $500. The car costs approximately $29,900 for the Hybrid and $26,900 for the all-electric option.

The iPhone
Apple’s latest bank-breaking product hit the market at a daunting $400, but the phone has proven to be the prototype of future cell phones. The iPhone is an Internet-ready combination PDA, camera and music player with an interactive touch screen. Roughly the size of an iPod with just as sleek a design, it allows users to flip through virtual pages with only their thumb. The only obvious drawback is the iPhone’s steep price. There are other non-brand name PDA/phone/music players out there for less — they just aren’t as pretty.

The Amazon Kindle
The Amazon Kindle is the first electronic book service device that can be used without a computer. Books are downloaded off of Amazon’s Whispernet, which operates through Sprint’s EVDO network rather than the Internet. The Kindle displays books page-by-page on a six-by-six screen. Users can store up to 200 titles from the over 88,000 titles offered on the Whispernet store. The Kindle sold out in the first five and a half hours after its release despite the $400 price tag.

Best Music
Coco
“Bubbly” has become the ultimate song of the year, slowly but surely taking over the airwaves throughout the past months. As the single has climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, its singer Colbie Caillat and her debut album Coco have garnered more attention as well.
Caillat’s lyrics are flowing thoughts similar to the ones that run through all of our heads. If life were a musical, it’s very likely that people would be singing aloud Caillat’s songs as conversations to one another.

Graduation
Not even the loss of his mother can slow down Kanye West. Graduation, West’s third album, skyrocketed to the top of the charts shortly before the tragic passing of Donda West due to complications following plastic surgery.
Graduation marks a major growth in West’s maturity. Tracks such as “Good Morning” and “The Glory” display a different, more serious side of the Chicago rapper, while top singles “Stronger” and “The Good Life” have a lighter feeling to them.
Graduation is West’s most complete and balanced album to date and music listeners of all genres can’t wait to see what he has in stores next.   

One Cell in the Sea
Raw, real and emotional: These three words sum up the sound of A Fine Frenzy’s debut album, One Cell in the Sea. Headed by singer-songwriter Alison Sudol, who named the band based on a line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Fine Frenzy blends haunting melodies with deep, poetic lyrics.
Their songs reflect personal experiences, as Sudol relates tales of losing, finding and remembering love. Listening to this album is perfect for those times when we feel like being by ourselves and need help  dealing with seemingly unbearable pain and stress.

Best Comebacks
Spice Girls
Tears, smiles and lots of “zigazig-ahs” is the best way to describe the Spice Girls’ return to the pop scene. Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger Spice — the five girls who empitomized “girl power” during our childhoods — are back and ready to take on the world with their infectious lyrics and their original, but complimentary, styles. The group just released their Greatest Hits album and although their two new songs aren’t much to rave about, their top hits, including “Wannabe” and “Stop,” are floating back into the minds of teenage girls everywhere.             

Skinny jeans
Accentuating every curve, skinny jeans are quickly replacing the tired flares. From dark to light washes, Levi’s to Sevens, skinny jeans do the unthinkable, combining comfort and trend. Teenage girls are now picking up this trend started by rockers in the 1980s. But be careful: skinny jeans can make or break a figure. While they aren’t for everyone, skinny jeans are a refreshing change.

Best Book
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By 9:30 a.m. on July 21, the release date of the final installment in the Potter series, the ticket stubs were already on number 139. One-hundred-thirty-eight other Potter fans had gotten to Borders in the hour and a half that had passed since opening.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is an international phenomenon. The book, which has been translated into many languages, sold 2.2 million copies from Amazon on the opening night alone. 11.5 million additional copies were sold within the first ten days.
In the final volume of the seven-book series, we watched as Harry and his friends and rivals matured into beautifully flawed and realistic people. Deathly Hallows taught a few final lessons: Stay loyal to your friends, do what is right as opposed to what is easy and, the simplest and truest, believe in the strength of love.
It’s easily the best book of 2007.

Best Sports Moments
This year has not been the brightest in Bay Area sports history. The Giants finished in the cellar of the National League West, Cal football lost a shot at the national title game after embarrassing themselves at homecoming and the Raiders and Niners put together would still be the worst team in the league. However, a few bright spots stand out.

Warriors in the Playoffs
After 12 straight seasons without reaching the playoffs, the Warriors rewarded the faithful this year. Though Golden State faced the Dallas Mavericks — whom many considered to be the best team in the NBA — they successfully played their “run and gun” style  and stuck by a new catchy slogan “We Believe.” Warriors’ fans rocked Oracle Arena as the Warriors rocked the top-seeded Mavericks and a number-eight seed took down the number one for the first time in basketball history. Although the Warriors were eliminated in the next round, they gave both old and new fans a ride they will never forget.

Barry Barry Barry
Amid steroid allegations, Barry Bonds established his legacy as the most powerful hitter of all time, capturing baseball’s homerun record at 756. Against the Washington Nationals, Bonds hit a bomb to deep right center field, giving a fan a $750,000 souvenir. Although many baseball fans hate Bonds because of his alleged steroid use, they cannot deny him the title of home run king, and possibly, the greatest player ever.

Stanford over USC
In one of the most improbable upsets of all time, the lowly Stanford Cardinals walked into the USC Trojans’ Coliseum and eeked out a 24-23 victory.
Backup quarterback Tavita Pritchard, in the first start of his career, connected with receiver Mark Bradford on fourth and ten, giving the Cardinals the go ahead touchdown. The number two ranked Trojans were knocked from the podium and their national title hopes were decimated. 

Best Movies
No Country For Old Men
This movie is about a working-class Texan named Llewelyn Moss who finds $2,000,000 at the place of a drug deal gone wrong in the countryside, which sets off a long, complicated, violent chain of events. 
Ultimately, the money, and most of the original plot, becomes extraneous and the movie becomes a reflection on our primal urges, with the characters acting as members of an endangered species desperately trying to forestall their extinction.  The best movie of the year, No Country For Old Men is a disturbing meditation on violence and how pitiful ordinary human feelings and emotions have become in a world of increasing brutality.

Superbad
Teenagers love Superbad for the same reason that middle-aged men love American Beauty: it speaks to them. Although seemingly just the simple tale of two (three if you count McLovin) friends trying to obtain alcohol for the first and last party of their high school careers, Superbad is so much more, practically becoming a cultural artifact. Not just resorting to teen-movie clichés, the movie is honest and, above all, right in its portrayal of American adolescents.  The fact that it also has some of the funniest one-liners of the past decade is almost beside the point.

Ratatouille
The quality of family-friendly fare may have dropped over the last couple of years but, as the fantastic Ratatouille shows, we can still rely on Pixar.  The tale of a rat with aspirations to be a chef in the human world, Ratatouille manages to be inspirational without getting lost in the sap or banality to which most other children’s films fall victim.  In fact, what makes the movie so enjoyable is its way of being child-appropriate while being full of subtleties which direct the film toward an older audience as well.