Down on the Farm That Harvests Metal From Plants

Evidence continues to build that humans are contributing to a climate change issue that is nothing but bad news for the planet. Hopeful stories from seven countries, including India, Indonesia, and China, show that efforts to combat climate change might finally be working.

Israel has grappled with crippling drought for years. But people have learned to use Mediterranean sea water and recycled wastewater to provide the country with enough water for all its needs.

Wolves in western America were once hunted to near-extinction but have now been reintroduced into certain territories with notable success. More wolves often means more attacks on ranchers' livestock, however, so cowboys are working to track wolf packs by computer to reduce conflicts.

Although Nigeria "is arguably the worst-run of the world’s major countries," it's biggest city is providing a model for how to turn poor governance around. Lagos, a historically fragile city like the rest of Nigeria, has devolved more power to civilian rule, which has shown positive results for the health of the city.

Clean water and healthy ecosystems are becoming increasingly difficult to come by. With floating islands and other inventions, eco-entrepreneur Bruce Kania thinks that biomimicry - such as reconstructing wetlands and growing biofilms - can tackle the toughest of water problems.

Concerned with colony collapse syndrome in honey bees worldwide, scientists, farmers and tech companies teamed up in Australia to create a micro-sensor that collects data on the bee's environment.

As a state with robust populations of wildlife, Montana has had its share of roadkill. Its Department of Transportation developed animal shelving, a type of wildlife crossing, to enable safe passage for small animals who need to cross the road. The measure, combined with other types of crossings, has reduced animal-vehicle collisions by half.

Many different people are inventing health devices for resource-poor settings, but some organizations - like M.I.T.’s Little Devices group - are empowering developing communities and increasing access to healthcare by building medical devices that nurses and doctors in very poor settings can adapt themselves — or kits for making their own, often harvesting parts from toys to cleverly rig up medical equipment. It’s part of a major idea shift, one that’s transforming the design of foreign aid.

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.