MIT's Amy Smith saves millions of lives and forests with better biofuels
Amy Smith designs cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries. In the following TED talk, the MIT engineer describes how fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. She details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm biomass waste into clean-burning biofuels. The improved biofuels not only potentially save millions of lives, they also reduce deforestation, by preventing the use of hard wood for energy.
Mechanical engineer Amy Smith's approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith, working with her students at MIT, has come up with several useful tools, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity, a simple grain mill, and the tool that converts farm waste into cleaner-burning charcoal.
Among her many accomplishments, the MIT engineer received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004 and was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Prize for turning her ideas into inventions. Her course, "Design for Developing Countries," is a pioneer in bringing humanitarian design into the curriculum of major institutions. Going forward, the former Peace Corps volunteer strives to do much more, bringing her inventiveness and boundless energy to bear on some of the world's most persistent problems.
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biobutanol :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: Africa ::
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