As participants of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Summit took stock of stalled progress on objectives set a decade ago to ease global poverty by 2015, the UN on Wednesday announced a $40 billion dollar push, pledged by numerous nations and organizations, to prevent the deaths of as many as 16 million mothers and children in the world’s poorest countries. [Reuters]
Earlier this summer, G8 nations pledged a smaller sum toward the goal of reducing mortality rates in young children and pregnant women, as Nature reported in June. However, success in meeting the target for child and maternal health, as with the other Millennium Development Goals, may depend on science even more so than money.
On a related note, in a hotel ballroom across the street from the UN, Rajiv Shah, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), stressed the relevance of science to international development at a fair, co-hosted by USAID and the New York Academy of Science. Over the next three years, he said, USAID intends to launch a series of Grand Challenges that it hopes will inspire innovators to come up with technological solutions to endemic poverty.
Participants at the fair displayed about 20 inventions, ranging from those in the early design phase to others already on the market. Here’s a look at some of the bright ideas that were on parade at the event:
1. Dirt Power (Lebone Solutions, Inc)
Access to electricity is a major hurdle to development. According to the World Bank, 95% of the world’s inhabitants have no access to electricity – a roadblock for entrepreneurs running a business, medical personnel operating a health clinic and students doing their homework. A group of Harvard students came up with the idea of creating a cheap microbial fuel cell by basically packing a plastic puck with dirt. As microbes in soil eat sugar, they give off electrons. The fuel cell the group has designed (right) harnesses that charge with a square of graphite cloth and a piece of chicken wire; the difference in electrical properties of the two metals pulls most of the electrons to the graphite. “They don’t produce a lot of power,” says Stephen Lwendo, one of the founders, “but you can power low-power devices” such as LED lights and cell phones. Lebone hopes to have a product ready for market in the next 6 months to a year.
2. mPedigree
In countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, a third or more of medicines for sale at the local pharmacy are counterfeit, often at great risk to patients. Ghanian start-up mPedigree decided to tackle this problem by creating a database of medicine codes — stored in the cloud – that’s accessible by SMS. People who subscribe to the service can simply take a picture of the code, text it to a given number, and within 3 or 4 seconds receive a reply stating whether the medicine in their hand is legit. The company aims to recruit pharma companies to support the service. “Pharma pays so that consumers can access the information for free,” says Bright Simons, one of the mPedigree’s founders. The incentive for them, of course, is to stamp out the loss in revenue counterfeiting produces. So far, mPedigree is working with Nigerian drug manufacturer May and Baker to set up the system for anti-malarial medicine, says Bright, but he hopes to expand to other kinds of drugs soon. The Nigerian government has said it would like to make the network a national scheme, and the company is seeking large-scale buy-in in other countries.
3. Dutyion Irrigation Technology (Design Technology and Irrigation)
This company’s root irrigation system (left) allows farmers to use water that would normally be too polluted or too salty for agriculture to water their crops. The system requires no infrastructure – tubing is buried along the roots of a farmer’s crops, and water is fed into the tubes from a supply tank. The trick is in the material from which the tubing is made – water diffuses through its walls, leaving salts and contaminants behind, irrigating with the released vapor. The company recently signed a deal with DuPont and plans to start selling the product shortly.
4. Floating Sensor Network (University of California, Berkeley)
In the wake of a toxic spill or flood, real-time water monitoring can be essential. This group’s GPS-enabled floating sensor robot (right) can be tossed into the water, measuring everything from temperature to contaminants, and delivering the readings to a mobile phone.
5. Solar Autoclave (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
More than three billion people worldwide receive their primary care at rural clinics, but these clinics often have no access to electricity. Researchers at MIT are designing an inexpensive device that runs a small autoclave with solar power (left). The device generates enough energy to boil water in a collector, using the steam to sterilize medical instruments.