by David Steven | Sep 5, 2007 | Conflict and security
While we’re talking about resilience, what could be more useful – when the worst happens – than a battery that can be recharged by peeing into it…
Dubbed NoPoPo, the battery has been developed by the Japanese company Aqua Power System and comes in standard AA and AAA formats…
The AA and AAA batteries can be recharged with a variety of liquids, inserted into the chamber via a pipette and the basic principle is that a mixture of magnesium and carbon reacts when mixed with a liquid to produce, in the case of the AA battery, up to 500 milliamp-hours (mAh) of life. This puts them on a par with existing zinc-carbon AA batteries.
Unfortunately, they’re currently only available in Japan.
by David Steven | Sep 5, 2007 | Conflict and security
First, the Economist on the role ‘amateur’ health care workers can play in building public health systems:
The idea is to harness people’s existing culture of self-help and get subsistence farmers to carry out simple medical tasks which are beyond the capacity of a pathetically inadequate health system…
In Congo alone, the [World Health Organisation] has recruited more than 35,000 community workers for its river-blindness project; they get nothing for their labours except the knowledge that they are protecting their families from disease.
Volunteers from each village are taught how to measure out the annual drug doses, fill in the obligatory record forms, and watch out for side-effects. WHO supplies the drugs and the villagers do the rest themselves. WHO was forced to devise the strategy after it received an offer from Merck, a pharmaceutical firm, of free supplies of a drug to people at risk of river blindness.
(more…)
