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It is a Landfill and an Ecopark

June 2009, Singapore City A typical landfill isn’t the sort of place where residents have peaceful picnics and take nature walks or go to stargaze. But Singapore’s Semakau landfill is far from ordinary. Pulau Semakau – where Singapore’s only landfill is located – is a...

Ethan Zuckerman on how to engineer serendipity online

In a wired world, finding information about events in a distant part of the world – the score of a soccer game, the aftermath of a military coup, or a nascent hip-hop movement in a conservative country – is straightforward. Even if news sites overlooked...

An electric workout through pedal power

After classes, Sally Peach, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a long list of to-dos. She wants to hit the gym, tackle schoolwork, and, as captain of an intramural soccer team and member of a campus health advocacy program, she has plenty of e-mail...

A ‘miracle tree’ that could feed sub-Saharan Africa

As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as “drumsticks.” Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this...

Designs for a better world emerge from M.I.T. summit

For three weeks this summer, masons and mechanics, farmers and welders, scientists and a pastor threw themselves into creating low-tech solutions to big problems that persist across the globe. Converging here at the MIT, these 61 inventors from 20 countries divided into multilingual teams, each...

Low Tech Inventions With High Impact

Amy Smith is not an easy person to track down. Even during the school year, this inventor and instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hops over to remote African towns and Latin American villages. When she is on campus, the best bet for finding Ms. Smith...