The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor
To solve a social problem, you need more than a theory -- you need a randomized controlled trial.
View ArticleThe Human Element: Melinda Gates and Paul Farmer on Designing Global Health
Melinda Gates and Paul Farmer sat down with WIRED to discuss the best ways to improve health all over the world.
View ArticleHiding in Plain Sight: Finding New Targets for Old Drugs
In late 2011, mice with lung cancer had their tumors reduced by an antidepressant called imipramine. The basis of the study was the idea that the cancer switches certain genes on, while imipramine...
View Article5 Maps That Could Help Solve Some of the World’s Most Daunting Problems
Mapping projects can help the planet by revealing the geography of its intractable problems.
View ArticlePreventing Malaria by Protecting Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes suck. And malaria sucks even more. The disease—caused by the Plasmodium parasite, which is transmitted by mosquitoes—infects more than 300 million people and kills 1.2 million annually. One...
View ArticleWant to Save Lives? You Need a Map of What’s Doing Us In
If sorrow were a landscape, here’s how it would look from a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.
View ArticleStaring Down the Taliban in the Race to Eradicate Polio From Earth
Eradicating polio completely means spending billions of dollars, reaching the remotest places on the planet, and facing down the Taliban.
View ArticleKids Like to Learn Algebra, if It Comes in the Right App
You have an armadillo, a black-and-white trout, and a rainbow trout. Can the animals fit inside the box? No, this isn’t an intolerable riddle. For Zoran Popović, it’s how you teach math to kids.
View ArticleThis Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading
"There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," says Bill Gates. Here's why...
View ArticleChris Hadfield: We Should Treat Earth as Kindly as We Treat Spacecraft
Astronaut Chris Hadfield believes we should treat Earth as kindly as we treat spacecraft.
View ArticleThe Surfing Solution: How Seawater Can Help Treat Cystic Fybrosis
Cystic fibrosis, it turns out, doesn’t like salt water. Inhaling it rehydrates the airways, allowing mucus to flow more easily and be dislodged by coughing. Patients have used saline nebulizers to...
View ArticleHow to Treat Depression When Psychiatrists Are Scarce
Psychiatrist Vikram Patel has a radical idea to make mental health counseling available to people in developing countries: train ordinary people in the basics of psychotherapy.
View ArticleVolcano Alert: A System to Warn Us About the Next Major Iceland Eruption
Remember how Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano shut down air traffic over the continent in 2010? A team of 100 scientists is working on getting ahead of the next major eruption.
View ArticleProtecting Protected Species With High-Tech Barriers
The animals are back. The elephant count in Namibia has risen from under 10,000 around the turn of the millennium to 20,000 today. Lion and leopard populations have doubled since 2004. And cheetahs,...
View ArticleWhat’s It Like Opening Your Mail and Finding Dead Roaches?
It's a good day for Mark Stoeckle if he gets a roach in the mail. For the past year, Stoeckle, a DNA identification expert at Rockefeller University, and high school student Joyce Xia have run the...
View ArticleA Koi-Fueled Nursery in New Orleans Yields Tasty Profits
In New Orleans east, a collective of Vietnamese fishermen left jobless after the BP oil spill has found a new enterprise: growing upmarket produce in water laced with fish crud.
View ArticleWhat’s Inside: The Life-Saving Ingredients in F-100 Therapeutic Milk
What are the live-saving ingredients in the F-100 therapeutic milk fed to starving children?
View Article3 Smart Things About Zinc
You might know that zinc—element number 30 on the periodic table—is used for galvanizing iron and steel. Here’s some things you might not know. Getty Images 1. It saves lives. In developing...
View ArticleHow to Purify Water With Fruit Peels
Groundwater pollution is a big problem in developing countries. Ramakrishna Mallampati discovered an ingenious way to make tainted water potable: drop in some fruit peels.
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