This Week In Social Entrepreneurship: Weh Yeoh Tells Us Who Sets The International Development Agenda

Texas teenager creates $20 water purifier to tackle toxic e-waste pollution

18-year-old Perry Alagappan recognised at World Water Week 2015 for his renewable heavy metal filter made from graphene that he’s keeping open source

Now a new filtering device, invented by a US teenager, could provide a cheap and easy way to purify water.

The renewable heavy metal filter, designed by 18-year-old Perry Alagappan, removes 99% of heavy metals from water that passes through it. The filter, built from graphene nanotubes, can be rinsed with a vinegar concentrate and reused. The highly concentrated waste can then be evaporated, leaving a deposit of pure metal that can be used in many different applications.

Alagappan, who was awarded the Stockholm Junior Water Prize at this year’sWorld Water Week, said the filter cost just $20 (£13) to make, up to five times less than existing reverse osmosis technology.

“I became interested in water purification when I visited my grandparents in India, and saw with my own eyes how electronic waste severely contaminated the environment,” said the recent high school graduate from Houston, Texas, on winning the prize.

The CDC has released a first-of-its-kind report detailing the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to our health and food supply. It is not pretty.

Within the report (you can read it here, it’s very layman-accessible) lies threat assessments for a whole range of disease-causing microbes, from famous foes like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to lesser-known dangers like Clostridium dificile and drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae (yes, that last one does exactly what you think it does).

Thousands of people are killed by such infections every year. They inflict billions of dollars of medical costs and lost wages. The drug-development pipeline for new antibiotics is almost empty. New tools like fecal transplants and phage therapy are hopeful but still experimental, and at least a decade away. So what do we do?

The CDC calls for safer use of antibiotics, both in hospitals and on farms, and increased screening and vaccination efforts. But CDC director Tom Frieden put it plainly:

"If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era."

Unless we do something to reverse this trend, and fast, it’s high time to tuck your head between your knees. We’re either on a plane that’s going down, or we’re about to get paddled. The choice of metaphors is yours.

For now, educate yourself, make sure your doctors are educated, call for action if you can vote … and if there’s any budding biologists out there, we’ve got plenty of new problems for you to solve. We’re gonna need your help.

How To Build More Resilient Cities

I always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.

Bill Gates

Mesmerized 😃

Earlier this year, BioDigital partnered with About.com to provide interactive visualizations for common health conditions. Patients searching for information about Type 2 diabetes, for instance, are presented with a 3D model of a cell’s response to insulin, in which they can explore the process from different angles while toggling between diabetic and normal cell function. 

What’s revolutionary about the API launch, though, is that now developers can personalize the BioDigital human by integrating their own imaging data, movement data collected by wearables, and health record data, among other sources. 

So essentially, instead of clicking around the standard human model on About.com, we could soon be exploring 3D models of our own bodies, constructed with our unique health data. 

For athletes especially, the immediate advantages of virtually replicating a moving body are obvious. If you can see exactly which movements inflict pain or stress on your body, it’s much easier to understand how to avoid them. 

For medical professionals, though, the ability to visualize vast amounts of health data in real time via the BioDigital human has the potential to change the way new information is analyzed and consumed. 

 “The human body is this incredible system of systems, and there’s an infinite amount of detail,” says Sculli. “So we can start mapping cellular mechanisms, and genomic and brain activity, and all of this information that’s being collected in masses from research and wearables, and make it consumable for people.”

(via 3D Modeling Startup BioDigital Launches An API For The Human Body | TechCrunch)

Welcome to a three part series of kitchen appliance design using unconventional and sustainable materials. 

Part one of the series is a toaster designed using steam-bent bamboo plywood, glass toasting trays, a 2″x1″ touchscreen and quick-cooling coils embedded within the glass toasting trays. Gone is the bizarre popup mechanisms of toaster’s past – the toaster features wide, easy access slots. The heating coils feature quick-cooling technology and the UI tells the user when its safe to grab their toasty treats. Bamboo and glass are both sustainable and renewable and the design uses no plastic and minimal metal.

(via Bamboo and Glass Toaster Design)

FBI chief: It’s ‘unacceptable’ that Guardian has better data on police violence | See full article

The head of the FBI has said it is “ridiculous [and] embarrassing” that the federal government has no better information on police shootings than databases compiled by the Guardian US and the Washington Post.

“It is unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the UK are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between [US] police and civilians,” said James Comey, the FBI director.

To see our updated count of police killings in the United States in 2015, visit the Counted database. You can also follow the project on Facebook and Twitter.

Our count as of this afternoon:

Of the 24 MacArthur genius grant recipients, 11 of them were women. Here’s a look at who they are, what they do and why you should pay attention to them. 

MacArthur’s genius women (The Daily Beast) 

The Scripps CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii have shown that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm). Because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, some scientists say for millennia, our global fever has reached the point that no one alive today, and those that follow us, will ever know a world below 400 ppm again.

This week will be the last time anyone alive experiences a CO2 level below 400 ppm. (Saturday Nov 21, 2015)