Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn -- and those of other food staples -- is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol's production inputs.

IBM's "Next Five in Five" list is a view on five innovations that will change how people around the world work, play and live over the next five years.

Because information is at the heart of what most nonprofit organizations do, information technology plays an increasingly essential role. Some nonprofits exist solely or primarily to gather, digest, and distribute information, while others gather, track, and provide information about what they do in order to engage and sustain sponsors and supporters. Most use technology to handle essential infrastructure – keeping membership lists, receiving and tracking donations, and so on. All nonprofits need some level of technology, and some wouldn't exist without it.

The UN is using a downloadable game to teach children to think about natural disasters like floods, wildfires and earthquakes.

The Stop Disaster Game asks players to save lives and livelihoods by preparing for an imminent hurricane, earthquake, flood, tsunami or wildfire within a fixed budget and time.

Players choose among five scenarios with three levels of difficulty; the winner is the person who saves the most.

To access the game please visit: www.stopdisastersgame.org

An MIT engineer working toward clean drinking water in Nepal describes in a recent issue of the Journal of International Development how people from developed and developing countries can work together to solve key humanitarian problems, ultimately meeting the basic human needs for security, broadly defined.

Printing flexible electronics on plastic provides a way to wirelessly power gadgets.

All around the world, governments are investing heavily in R&D in nanotechnology for a wide range of applications including ICT, health, energy, agrofood, water, aerospace, etc. Progress in Europe, the USA and Asia receives most attention in the media and from investors. The Latin American nanoscience and nanotechnology community is systematically overlooked in so-called global reviews. The European Union will help fill this gap by funding the new NANOFORUMEULA project.

In 2007 and 2008, the EU will foster lasting research relations between European and Latin American research organisations in nanotechnology in the framework of the Nanoforum EU Latin America project. The project partners will organise exchange visits for some twenty Latin American researchers to four European research organisations specialising in nanotechnology. Furthermore, they will organise two workshops and subsequent fact finding missions in Mexico and Brazil enabling European researchers and industrialists to identify opportunities for establishing working relations. The first event is a workshop and fact finding mission, to be scheduled in conjunction with the International Materials Research Conference in Mexico, August 2007. The project runs from 1 December 2006 until 31 May 2008.

At the end of another school day in Acornhoek – a rural community in the semi-arid eastern part of South Africa – children shriek with laughter as they whirl each other around on a colorful merry-go-round. Women carry home buckets of water. Boys chase a football.

But there is more to this scene than meets the eye. Forty meters under ground, each turn of the merry-go-round powers a pump. At 16 rotations per minute, it pumps water effortlessly to a 2,500-liter storage tank, supplying the needs of the entire community at the turn of a tap.

The storage tank above the children’s heads displays four billboards. These carry educational, public health and HIV/AIDS prevention messages, as well as commercial advertising, generating enough revenue to fund ten years’ maintenance of the system.

wipo.int

Recharging your laptop computer, your cell phone and a variety of other gadgets may one day be as convenient as surfing the web--wirelessly.

Marin Soljacic, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics, will describe his and his MIT colleagues' research on that wireless future on Tuesday, Nov. 14 at the American Institute of Physics Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco.

Like many of us, Soljacic (pronounced Soul-ya-CHEECH) often forgets to recharge his cell phone, and when it is about to die it emits an unpleasant noise. "Needless to say, this always happens in the middle of the night," he said. "So, one night, at 3 a.m., it occurred to me: Wouldn't it be great if this thing charged itself?" He began to wonder if any of the physics principles he knew of could turn into new ways of transmitting energy.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/wireless.html

CUWiN is pleased to announce that we have successfully ported our flagship software to the Meraki Mini. Documentation on the port can be found at http://cuwin.net/manual/howto/meraki.

Porting CUWiN software to the Meraki Mini makes using CUWiNware even cheaper by dropping the price point of nodes that can run CUWiNware from a few hundred dollars to around $50. The Meraki Mini is perfect for making apartment buildings and office spaces wireless, as the infrastructure costs are significantly cheaper than wired installations.