Popular Science Magazine named its top hundred gadgets and innovations of 2012 and the announcement on Wednesday came just in time for people thinking about what to buy friends and family in the lead up to Christmas.

The list is organised into 12 categories including Gadgets, Auto, Recreation, Entertainment, Home, Engineering, Green, Software, Health, Aerospace, Hardware and Security.

Smart-phone owners, who are worried about the damaging effects of water, can send their devices out to a California-based company called Liquipel.

For a small fee 59 US dollars, Liquipel will coat the device with a waterproof coating that will keep it dry, even if has been submerged.

In the recreation category, the award went to an ingenious power generator.

The BioLite Campstove not only will generate heat, warmth and light by burning leaves and sticks, but it has the ability to transfer that energy and charge smartphones and other USB-based devices, says Jacob Ward, Editor-in-Chief of the Popular Science Magazine.

In the Health category, the Sapien Transcatheter Heart Valve took top honours.

The Sapien Valve consists of flaps of tissue sewn into a metal frame. It can be fed through the femoral artery and then expand from the diameter of a pencil to about an inch (2.5 cms).

""People who receive this in clinical trials, they were 40 percent more likely to be alive a year after receiving this then they were without it and so, you don't typically see those kinds of gains in medical technology. It's a truly game changing device," said Ward/

In the software category, technology from Google called Google Now, took the Innovation of the Year award.

When installed on smart-phones running Google's android platform, Google Now delivers information based on things like location and habits.

"We gave it this award because what it ends up doing is making suggestions to you before you even know about it," says Ward