Taking Out the Space Trash

Some communities are being forced to take steps—sometimes costly ones, like digging deeper wells—to both tap and protect their groundwater.

At UC Berkeley, the Blum Center for Developing Economies and the Center for Effective Global Action are working together to formalize development engineering as a field of research - a new generation of engineers committed to making a social impact.

In an idea borrowed from college athletics called redshirting, STARS enrolls promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — to give them an additional year of collegiate academic work before they’re ready for the big time. A similar program is in its second year at Washington State University.

SERVIR, a joint development initiative of the United States Agency for International Development and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, leverages data from space to improve environmental decision-making in 30 developing countries.

The U.S. federal government rarely requires manufacturers to list the chemicals in consumer goods outside of food. Various states are starting to enact legislation requiring greater transparency.

In Oakland, a non-profit created an industrial arts education school offering youth an alternative classroom for learning where failure is welcomed and everything is hands on, such as welding and forging. The non-profit, which is known as The Crucible, was founded in 1999, and serves more than 8,000 students per year, all managed by close to 100 faculty members.

Prescription drugs are greatly polluting the national water supply, causing researchers to begin looking for a method to better filter water and dispose of unused medicine.

CFCs, chemicals created in the early 20th century, were an industrial success but destroyed the atmosphere. How a group of environmentalists, scientists, and lawyers in the 70s/80s raised public awareness which ultimately led to the most successful treaty ever, banning CFCs.

The twenty-first century city is a complex organism, and simulating it to anticipate traffic and transportation congestions can be problematic for urban planning. Researchers around the world from Japan to England have used slime models to simulate traffic and transportation patterns, observing realistic growths, congestions, and re-routing opportunities. Biomimicry demonstrates an unconventional but useful process to understand the pulse of the urban environment.

Ecological toilets that use natural composting to break down waste are simple to construct, waterless and are easy to fix. But as philanthropists are finding, getting these to those that need it most is harder than anticipated.