IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SCAN THE HEADLINES these days without feeling curiosity, inspiration, frustration, or compassion. Yet until now there’s never been a way to immediately act on news that affects us. Public Good is an online social network and charity platform that brings awareness to causes currently in the news and lets readers take action on the spot through donations, volunteering, and statements of support. It was founded by a team that includes Jason Kunesh and Dan Ratner, veterans of former President Barack Obama’s technology leadership group during his 2012 reelection campaign. Public Good now has over one million online charities within its domain, with opportunities like helping the victims of the Las Vegas shooting, supporting groups that combat racial hatred, and offering assistance to those affected by Hurricane Maria. 

IT’S BEEN OVER A YEAR SINCE FACEBOOK GAVE users the ability to use their birthdays to raise money for charitable causes, and the results indicate a huge upswell in birthday benevolence. More than $300 million has been donated to nonprofits so far, with recipients ranging from well-known charities such as the American Cancer Society and the ASPCA to newer, lesser-known organizations like Charity Water. Buoyed by its success, Facebook is enhancing the feature by adding a function that matches charities to user interests, as well as providing background information—along with the number of likes—on each. And what if the charity is you? The company now lets users raise funds for personal causes, from baby supplies to college tuition. It’s welcome news for Facebook as it struggles to maintain goodwill amid recent concerns about privacy and data collection. Happy birthday indeed. Source: Mashable, mashable.com. 

DIGITAL COLLABORATION SOFTWARE PROVIDER Slack is embarking on a novel new program that could tap a motivated but underutilized workforce to fill coding jobs. Working with the Last Mile, which provides technology training to those in prison, Slack developed Next Chapter, which will place three former inmates inside the company as quality engineering apprentices. The program is divided into thirds, with the apprentices first spending four months at startup bootcamp Hack Reactor, four months in training, and four months on the job. When the year is up, Slack can either make a hire or refer the apprentice to another firm. Similar programs at other companies haven’t always been successful, but Slack is hoping that a proof of concept here could create enough momentum to open the doors to a talented pool of coders who have paid their debt to society and wish to rejoin it. Source: The Atlantic, theatlantic.com. 

ACCESS TO CLEAN, SAFE DRINKING WATER IS A problem for millions of people around the world, leading not only to dehydration, but a host of waterborne illnesses. Israel is exporting its homegrown technology to the biggest problem spots. In Ghana, NUFiltration is helping residents in areas with polluted water avoid cholera and other diseases by providing water purification with sterilized medical devices, using repurposed dialysis filters surprisingly well-suited to the task. Water-Gen, meanwhile, recently assisted in the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, bringing in specially designed dehumidifying machines to collect condensation in the air and turn it into drinking water. And an aptly named Israeli startup called Soapy is working in India, installing handwashing units that use similar technology, creating water from thin air to keep the population healthy. Source: From the Grapevine, fromthegrapevine.com. 

MOST PEOPLE MAINLY THINK OF BLOCKCHAIN AS the architecture of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but Santiago Siri has a vision for the technology that has it accomplishing nothing less than saving democracy itself. His nonprofit startup, Democracy Earth, is charging forward to a future in which Siri believes peple will not just vote on candidates for political office, but any collective decisions that need to be made. The idea is that since the transparent token-and-ledger system of blockchain is so secure, there’s no need for a centralized authority to count votes and declare a winner. Instead, each individual will possess a finite number of vote tokens to use in what Siri describes as a “liquid democracy.” Users are able to vote more than once for issues they feel strongly about, delegate their votes to trusted experts, or even withdraw a vote if the outcome isn’t satisfactory. Source: Wired, wired.com. 

AMONG THE LOOMING PROBLEMS FACING MEDICAL researchers today is the proliferation of “superbugs,” drug-resistant bacteria strains. More than 20,000 people die of such infections each year in America alone. One of the main factors behind their spread is the misuse of antibiotics, which can dramatically shorten the time period in which newly developed drugs are effective. To stay ahead of the bacteria, HP is using its Biohacker technology to 3D-print antibiotics with its D300e Digital Dispenser BioPrinter, which is capable of dispensing precise amounts of drug combinations—down to a trillionth of a liter. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control plan to give hospitals across the country access to this cutting-edge technology, which currently only creates drugs for testing purposes, via its Antibiotic Resistance Lab Network. Biopharmaceutical pioneer Gilead Sciences is among the first companies to embrace the printer, using it to test anti-Ebola drugs. Source: TechCrunch, techcrunch.com. 

DEFORESTATION IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM IN many parts of Africa, with Kenya bearing much of the pain. There, nearly six million trees and shrubs are cut down annually, causing erosion of topsoil and creating a dust bowl in much of the country. Seedballs Kenya is working to reverse that decline with an easy, cheap, and effective way to plant trees. Its seedballs consist of a single tree seed packed inside a ball of “biochar” charcoal dust—a byproduct of local charcoal production—that’s mixed with nutritious binders to help it grow. The charcoal dust protects the seeds from animals and insects until the rainy season, when they germinate, sprout, and take root. Seedballs can be scattered by hand or launched with slingshots, but aircraft offer the greatest potential for reforestation, with several helicopter charter companies even providing seedballs to passengers to toss out the windows during sightseeing flights. Source: BBC News, bbc.com. 

WHEN THE IDEA OF USING AUTONOMOUS DRONES to deliver small packages started getting serious at the start of this decade, the first headlines involved TacoCopters, Burrito Bombers, and other aerial solutions to hunger pangs. But healthcare providers were quick to declare a more pressing use: delivery of blood, medicine, and other supplies to remote hospitals in Africa and other developing areas. Among those taking on the challenge is California-based Zipline, which, on contract from the government of Rwanda, opened its first distribution center close to Kigali in October 2016. Today, it boasts a nearly all-Rwandan staff of about 20 and has delivered more than 7,000 units of blood to 21 hospitals over 4,000 flights—a third of which were emergency lifesaving situations. The company is at work on a second distribution center in Rwanda, along with further drone delivery programs in the U.S. and beyond. Source: Bloomberg, bloomberg.com. 

WHILE MOST OF THOSE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD take connectivity for granted, millions in emerging countries remain technologically isolated. Even where networks are available, their high cost makes them a luxury available only to the affluent. Enter Swarm Technologies, which has created a new satellite stabilization system and already put four satellites into low earth orbit. Its models are smaller, lighter, and more efficient than traditional designs, making them significantly cheaper to launch, which could potentially create enough savings to upend the economics of the industry. With plans for a constellation of 100 satellites, Swarm promises nothing less than the world’s lowest-cost satellite network, and has its eye on applications far beyond personal communication. A partnership with global development agency SweetSense, for example, will utilize the system to monitor the function of water pumps in East Africa, ensuring uninterrupted access to clean drinking water. 

A NEW TOOL IN THE FIGHT AGAINST BREAST cancer is showing promise in developing countries, with the potential to become a standard part of women’s healthcare worldwide. Developed by Mihir Shah and Matthew Campisi, iBreastExam is a wireless device that enables health workers to do breast exams in five minutes, without pain or radiation. The FDA-approved scanner uses a ceramic sensor to record variations in breast tissue, providing results and recording data via mobile app. So far iBreastExam has been used to screen more than 150,000 women in 12 countries, including Shah’s native India. There, a lack of access to mammograms—the gold standard in screening— gives breast cancer patients only a 66 percent chance of survival after five years, compared with 90 percent in the United States. Yet even in the U.S., iBreastExam could provide early detection to patients who aren’t eligible for mammograms, or who wish to avoid radiation. Source: The New York Times, nytimes.com. 

Jet airplanes consume massive amounts of fuel—750 gallons (2,800 liters) per hour of flight in some cases—and produce correspondingly huge amounts of greenhouse gases. For this reason, there’s high interest in bio-jet fuel, which in theory could power jets with a much smaller carbon footprint. A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has focused on genetically engineering a strain of sugarcane with a much higher oil content, allowing it to produce both oil and sugar products. This “lipidcane” could serve as a feedstock for biodiesel production, which in turn could eventually be refined into bio-jet fuel. To outperform soybeans—the current main feedstock for biodiesel in the United States—lipidcane needs to contain 20 percent oil. That’s a stretch from lipidcane’s current 12 percent oil content, but considering the researchers started from sugarcane’s natural 0.05 percent oil, it doesn’t seem impossible to achieve. The end result could be jets that pollute a lot less than those using fossil fuels, and might even cost less to operate. Source: The Conversation, theconversation.com. 

Owlstone Medical in Cambridge, England, has been testing a variety of technologies keyed to biological particles in human breath, investigating how these biomarkers may signal disease in the person breathing them out. Now its “Breath Biopsy” is undergoing trial as a noninvasive tool to help diagnose problems like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). If successful, the relative ease and speed of breath testing versus conventional blood work and other methods could rapidly accelerate getting the proper treatment to patients in the field. As with many cancers, early detection is key, so testing that involves easy collection and no invasive procedures would be very helpful. Owlstone believes breath testing could someday help diagnose lung cancer or even problems seemingly unrelated to the respiratory system itself. The company isn’t shy about setting lofty milestones: Their goal is to “save 100,000 lives and save health care providers $1.5 billion.” Source: Business Weekly, businessweekly.co.uk. 

Poaching continues to plague wildlife preserves around the world. It’s extremely difficult to adequately patrol vast, difficult-to-access wilderness areas, looking out for small, hidden animals and equally wily poachers. Several organizations use drones to help spot and track both animals and poachers, and researchers at Liverpool John Moores University are testing further upgrades. Adding infrared cameras to the drone patrol allows easier identification of hidden creatures and people, by watching out for the visible glow of their body heat. A combined team of ecologists and astrophysicists then process the footage, using algorithms derived from software designed to identify stars. Turns out the infrared heat signatures of different animals are just as distinctive and machine-trackable as those of certain celestial bodies. More field tests are underway, with the ultimate goal a largely automated system that lets conservationists better track, monitor, and protect their animal charges. Source: New Atlas, newatlas.com. 

Moving our bodies involves more than “command and control.” Our nervous system also grants us awareness of what our bodies are doing and where they are—your sense that the hand holding the coffee mug is your hand, that the mug is just this close to your lips, that it’s now time to drink, and so on. This subtle but vital sense is broadly termed kinesthesia, and until recently it was entirely absent from the otherwise rapidly advancing field of prosthetics. In other words, you could have the most cutting-edge prosthetic arm available, hooked to your nerves and operating robotically, but you’d still have to watch it visually to know that it was doing what you wanted. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic are working on a neural interface that uses a novel medical illusion—vibrating tendons to fool the body into thinking an associated (or missing) joint is moving—to provide kinesthetic feedback from the operation of prosthetic limbs. Early tests are very promising, with subjects responding to the feedback able to improve their prosthetic control within minutes. Source: Wired, wired.com. 

Chalk up another intriguing field application of machine intelligence. A team of biologists and entomologists at PlantVillage, a research and development unit founded by scientists at Penn State University, have focused their efforts on helping farmers with small plots of land grow more food. To that end, PlantVillage created a smartphone app called Nuru (Swahili for “light”) that helps farmers diagnose crop diseases. Taking a picture of an apparently sickly plant with Nuru can help farmers identify the disease and obtain treatment options. The app uses machine learning originally developed by Google to power its identification algorithm, and it’s already seeing use on smallholder farms in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa. In a release, Penn State’s lead scientist on the project, David Hughes, said, “With partners at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, we’re deploying our app to help African farmers, who typically don’t have access to the kind of resources—such as land-grant agricultural scientists and extension specialists—that American farmers have. But they do have smartphones in increasing numbers.” 

In March 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved Auris Health’s Monarch technology for use on patients. Though the platform has potentially wide applications, its first goal is to allow for easier and more accurate diagnosis of lung cancer. That disease is notoriously hard to diagnose, because cancerous tissue can lurk in the bronchioles or alveoli (among the tiniest parts of the lung) and often requires surgery to find. The Monarch platform is an advanced combination of existing components, starting with a flexible endoscopic camera that can probe extremely small areas of the body with minimal disturbance. Doctors control the camera’s movements with a familiar-looking gamepad-style controller, and they’re able to continuously monitor both the camera feed and the endoscope’s overall position via a 3D model of the patient’s actual lung. Eventually, more tools may be added to Monarch that would allow doctors to also treat the cancer after confirming diagnosis. 

The fishing industry navigates a challenging sea these days. Territorial disputes, complex regulations, and managing environmental impact all conspire to make fishing a very hard way to make a living. One of the most-charged issues is bycatch—all those fish and other creatures caught in large fishing nets that aren’t the intended quarry. Such animals, which may account for up to a quarter of a given catch, are often wasted or discarded, or might even have to be hauled back to port for inspection. And of course, it’s hardly environmentally sound to take fish you don’t want or need. Enter London’s SafetyNet Technologies, which has researched and developed ways for light to attract and repel different kinds of fish. Its small, simple Pisces light modules can be woven into industrial fishing equipment, inducing fish to avoid nets or move toward or away from certain parts of the gear. Early experiments look promising, with some configurations of light reducing bycatch by up to 90 percent. SafetyNet plans to keep improving its tech, and its work has already been recognized by numerous awards and fishing industry heavyweights. 

Brenda Katwesigye may be shortsighted, but she’s still a visionary. A new pair of eyeglasses can cost more than an average month’s salary in her native Uganda, and most optical centers don’t serve rural areas at all. So Katwesigye started Wazi Vision, a company dedicated to providing low-cost, accessible eyeglasses. For $1, the Wazi Vision app uses a simple VR interface to administer a basic visual acuity test. An optometrist produces an eyeglass prescription from the test data, and the user then picks out a design for her new frames. Then a team of Ugandan female artisans creates the frames from recycled plastic. The result? New prescription eyeglasses delivered right to the customer’s door, at a price that’s 80 percent less than buying in a physical store. Katwesigye hopes to expand Wazi Vision to reach all corners of Uganda. She spoke at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, as a way to connect with potential partners for international expansion. Source: Lionesses of Africa, lionessesofafrica.com. 

Forced labor is a big problem for large companies using global supply chains. Such companies may have little visibility into how workers are treated by suppliers in countries with lax labor laws. To combat this, the Coca-Cola Company committed to supporting studies in 28 countries, focusing on child labor, forced labor, and land rights. Coca-Cola is working with tech companies Bitfury Group and Emercoin, the nonprofit Blockchain Trust Accelerator, and the U.S. State Department to create a secure blockchain-powered registry to hold and verify worker contracts. The decentralized structure of a blockchain registry allows anyone to independently verify the terms and validity of labor contracts, which in turn will ideally encourage employers to abide by those terms in a more transparent way. Coca-Cola can ensure that its suppliers of sugar and other ingredients are treating their workers responsibly—good for workers and soda fans alike. Source: Reuters, reuters.com. 

Everyone from Amazon to your local pizza joint is thinking about delivery via airborne drone, and concerns about safety, reliability, and logistics have eclipsed those about environmental impact. But a recent study published in Nature Communications found that delivery using a fleet of smaller drones can have a smaller impact than conventional vehicles or even larger drones. The study considered everything from type of energy used in charging drone batteries to the manufacturing process and life cycle of the drones themselves. Notably, with current technology, large drones still use too many resources to manufacture and too much power to operate to give them an environmental advantage over standard delivery trucks. But as batteries get stronger, better, and cheaper, this equation is likely to tilt in the drones’ favor. More little drones in the sky means fewer cars on the road, which could make that sky just a little clearer. Source: The Conversation, theconversation.com.