88 Times Other Countries Totally Outclassed The U.S. With How They Do Things

With so many of these innovations, it’s not just the U.S. lagging behind — many other countries should adopt these genius inventions as well. Take the hands-free sunscreen machine, for example, aka SnappyScreen. It’s the perfect solution for sun protection without getting your hands oily and gross.

Developed as a startup in 2014 by Cornell graduate Kristen McClellan, SnappyScreen started out as a business offering its machine to luxury resorts, hotels, water parks, country clubs, and private homes. Today, it also offers sunscreen in spray, stick ,and lip balm form. Many hotels in the U.S., Mexico, the Caribbean, and Aruba now have the machine.

While the idea is genius, the execution leaves something to be desired, especially for people sensitive to the sun. As the team at How To Be A Redhead writes, the machine offers at most SPF40, and spray-on coverage often isn't enough for full protection as it is, so it’s better to double-apply even with the machine.

We’re all humans, yet there’s one thing we often feel ashamed about — our bodily functions. Public restrooms can often become places of embarrassment; for example, 41% of Brits worry about other people hearing them in the bathroom.

Japanese engineers have solved this problem by introducing privacy sounds. Satoshi Wakuda, the creator of one such innovation, Sound Decorator, is a device that plays the sound of gurgling and splashing water for 25 seconds so that those who visit the restroom don’t have to feel mortified by the sounds that they’re making.

Similar noise-makers first appeared in Japan in the 1980s, and Wakuda and his team tested many different sounds: birdsong, jet aircraft and car engines, violins and piano, and radio static, but the sound of water turned out to mask toilet noises the best. “The noise of one liquid can mask another,” Wakuda explained. “It’s like the ‘cocktail party effect.’ You can’t follow a conversation when there are other people talking in the room.”

No matter how much we don’t like to admit it, many of us are unhealthily dependent on our smartphones. Research shows that pedestrians are distracted when they’re on their smartphones and are at high risk of falling and injuring themselves. So, the idea of a sidewalk dedicated to smartphone users exclusively seems like a good idea.

Some cities, like California, Idaho, Yamato in Japan, and all of Lithuania, already have legislation that fines pedestrians crossing the street while on their smartphones. Italian government is currently weighing in on a similar proposal. And a few Chinese cities, not only Warsaw, have tested out the sidewalks for smartphone users, Chongqing and Xi’an, for example.

Some locals think that separate lanes for smartphone users do more harm than good. They say people are even more distracted and might not even notice when a car or another pedestrian bumps into them. “Everybody walking along here thinks that it's very safe; at the side of the road, there are cars, and the vehicles also come onto here, and sometimes only just avoid you,” local Wei Xiaowei told the news website The Paper.

Croatia isn’t the only country to rock solar-powered benches in their cities. At least 37 cities have similar innovations, all from one Serbian start-up, Strawberry Energy. These benches provide smartphone charging, Wi-Fi, air quality monitoring, and local real-time information.