Jodie Wu, an MIT senior in mechanical engineering, spent the summer traveling from village to village in Tanzania to introduce a new system for processing the corn: A simple attachment for a bicycle that makes it possible to remove the kernels quickly and efficiently using pedal power. The device makes processing up to 30 times faster and allows one person to complete the job alone in one day.

The basic concept for the maize-sheller was first developed in Guatemala by an NGO called MayaPedal, and then refined by Wu last semester as a class project in D-Lab: Design, a class taught by Department of Mechanical Engineering Senior Lecturer Amy Smith. Now, thanks to Wu’s efforts, the technology is beginning to make its way around the world.
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Thus, the owner of a bicycle, with a small extra investment, can travel from village to village to carry out a variety of useful tasks. A simple bike thereby becomes an ongoing source of income.

Wu refined the corn-sheller system, which was originally designed as a permanent installation that required a bicycle dedicated solely to that purpose, to make it an add-on, like Kiwia’s tools, that could be easily bolted onto an ordinary bike and removed easily.

On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then — somehow — the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water’s surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot — and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

How do they do it?

Well, there’s a rope. There’s a pulley. And the rope and the pulley work a contraption made out of a pipe. The whole gizmo is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan by the name of Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago; if he were alive, he’d call it cutting edge. And there’s the beauty of it: It’s sophisticated, yes, but only because it’s simple.
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Garrett Brown revolutionized the movie business 38 years ago when he invented the Steadicam, a mechanical arm for cameramen that smooths away the jerkiness of hand-held shots. Much later, he came up with the Skycam, which rides a web of wires above the heads of football players. In between, Mr. Brown, 66 years old, got his one-line brief from NBC: “They wanted a camera,” he says, “that stayed with divers, including going underwater with them.”
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The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe’s full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass. From the diving platform to the water line, the glass is smoky. Below the line, it’s clear, so the camera need not adjust its exposure as it streaks into underwater darkness.

The pipe is caulked. The camera drops through air. “It doesn’t splash into the water,” Mr. Brown said. “That would look horrible.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.
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The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog “human-readable” scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on. Some of the key indexing meta-data for each language section (such as the standard linguistic code number for that language) are displayed in a machine-readable font (OCRb) so that a smart microscope could guide you through this analog trove.

Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years. But even without reading, a person might guess there are small things to see in this disk.

The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith’s D-Lab, a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination; last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2 per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India and China. In Smith’s view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel have their benefits. “If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a waterborne disease,” she says, “you really understand what it means to have access to clean drinking water.”
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Despite their simplicity, Smith’s creations made her a minor celebrity at MIT, and in 2000 she became the first woman to win the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The same year, she began teaching full time at the university. It was nearly 30 years since German economist E.F. Schumacher had published Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the book credited with launching the appropriate technology movement. Schumacher argued that many of the infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank and other organizations hadn’t improved lives on the village level. “He rightly and aptly pointed out that big solutions don’t fit for villages. You have to make it small,”

You cannot look into the eyes of a child who is dying from a disease caused by drinking dirty water — something that rarely, if ever, happens in the United States — and not feel changed. You cannot stand before her parents without thinking, “I’m an engineer. There must be something I can do.”
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A year later, I returned with 10 engineering students from the University of Colorado. We devised a rudimentary pumping system, bringing water to the people of San Pablo. Today, the village’s young girls go to school and are healthier.

That trip was a transforming experience, not just for the villagers, but also for me. Intuitively, we engineers like things big — expansive bridges, colossal dams, massive tunnels. My experience taught me that small-scale engineering can have the most impact on people’s lives.

When I returned to Boulder, I began building something else: Engineers Without Borders — USA. The organization was formed out of the conviction that engineers have a leadership role to play in addressing some of the world’s most serious problems: contaminated water, poor sanitation systems, expensive or harmful energy sources.

In a world focused on bigger and newer, there is growing recognition that small-scale engineering can play a major role in helping end the cycle of poverty that persists among almost half the world’s population. Studies by the World Bank and United Nations suggest the most basic technology is critical to bringing more than 3 billion people out of poverty.

Today EWB-USA counts more than 11,000 student and professional engineers as members and works in 43 countries on 300 projects involving water, sanitation, energy and shelter. Whether it’s combining sustainable technologies with advanced construction techniques to bring affordable housing to pockets of the world, drilling drinking water wells in Kenya, constructing fog collectors in the Himalayas to harvest fresh water or installing solar panels to provide energy for a remote hospital in Rwanda, we are healing communities throughout the globe, giving people dignity and hope for better lives.

Ingenious technique that requires no external energy supply to preserve fruit, vegetables and other perishables in hot, arid climates. The pot-in-pot cooling system, a kind of “desert refrigerator”, helps subsistence farmers by reducing food spoilage and waste and thus increasing their income and limiting the health hazards of decaying foods. Abba says he developed the pot-in-pot “to help the rural poor in a cost-effective, participatory and sustainable way”.

The pot-in-pot consists of two earthenware pots of different diameters, one placed inside the other. The space between the two pots is filled with wet sand that is kept constantly moist, thereby keeping both pots damp. Fruit, vegetables and other items such as soft drinks are put in the smaller inner pot, which is covered with a damp cloth. The phenomenon that occurs is based on a simple principle of physics: the water contained in the sand between the two pots evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot where the drier outside air is circulating. By virtue of the laws of thermodynamics, the evaporation process automatically causes a drop in temperature of several degrees, cooling the inner container, destroying harmful micro-organisms and preserving the perishable foods inside.

Born in 1964 into a family of pot makers and raised in the rural north, Mohammed Bah Abba was familiar from an early age with the various practical and symbolic uses of traditional clay pots, and learned as a child the rudiments of pottery. Subsequently studying biology, chemistry and geology at school, he unravelled the technical puzzle that led him years later to develop the “pot-in-pot preservation/cooling system”.

A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water.

40 billion hours each year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa, equal to over 19 million full-time employees.

Every $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs. (UNDP)

In many areas of sub-Saharan Africa women and girls often walk an average of five miles to the nearest water source every day. If a woman only had to carry water for one hour a day, she could earn an additional US $100 a year.

Some well-wishers sent many children’s books that are written or take place in countries around Africa in addition to English and American classics such as Where the Wild Things Are. All the children in my neighborhood, most of whom are cousins or sisters share these new books.

I built my first windmill when I was 15. Over the next few years I kept refining the design. I made many modifications to the plans i found in the book. For example, I increased the blades from three to four to provide more power output. The windmill now powers lights for 3 rooms and a light over our porch outside. I also use it to power my family’s two radios. I also can charge mobile phones that the neighbors have.
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Two weeks ago I used a computer for the first time. I learned about Google and searched for “windmill” and “solar energy.” I was amazed to learn how many entries there were for both subjects. My friends showed me how to create an email address and now I am on Gmail. Now I am practicing sending and receiving emails when I have access to a computer.
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On Sunday, my friends from National Solar and I completed the next phase of work on my electrical system. You can see a compete set of (my first) digital photos at my new site on Flickr. I had the following goals:

1. Upgrade the power generation in the windmill
2. Upgrade the battery technology and capacity, to provide more even power for more hours at a time
3. Increase the brightness of the lighting (lumens) to make it easier for my family to accomplish tasks at night, especially to read…

Many humanitarian designers focus on helping the needy to enhance their earning potential by setting up new businesses, or running existing ones more efficiently. The Bamboo Treadle Pump enables poor farmers in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and India to pump up groundwater during the dry season. The Big Boda Load-Carrying Bicycle provides cheap transport in Kenya and Uganda to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo or two passengers using pedal-power. And thanks to the KickStart MoneyMaker Block Press, eight workers can produce up to 800 building blocks a day from soil and a small quantity of cement.

The Strawjet is a farm implement that processes straw (wheat, flax, sunflower, tobacco, hemp, etc.) in the field (after the plant has been harvested) into a mat, similar to a large bamboo window blind. This is used to construct composite building panels in much the same way as fiberglass or carbon fiber; however, the Strawjet uses a binder made from paper pulp, clay and cement rather than plastic resin.

The consumption of drinking water is still increasing, while the availability of drinking water decreases. About 1 billion people in the world have no access to enough clean drinking water, while 70% of the Earth is covered with water.
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Other techniques to convert seawater into drinking water, like RO, MSF, or MED, use a lot of energy to vaporize the water or push the water through a membrane under high pressure. Memstill uses cheap waste-energy, which cuts down the energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The cost of desalination of one cubic meter water with Memstill could be under $0.50, where other distillation techniques cost about 1 dollar for the same amount of water.

300 million families in the world’s poorest regions burn wood for cooking, and smoke and toxic emissions kill 1.6 million people per year.

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

To solve the problem, he’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

“Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”
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Kamen’s goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That’s a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.

Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.