Bright ideas working in the real world: clean power, clever materials and tools that make it easier to live lightly.
Innovations
In the Fassifern Valley, two machines are picking weeds out of carrot and onion rows one plant at a time, one with a tiny targeted spray, the other with light alone. Growers designed the trials themselves.
Niue's ocean is about twelve hundred times the size of the island itself. Its people found a way for anyone in the world to look after one square kilometre of it for twenty years, and the reef has answered.
On 17 November in Mumbai, five ideas for repairing the planet will each win a million pounds. One of the fifteen finalists is the alliance behind the Indigenous rangers caring for Australia's deserts.
In August we met the Melbourne inventor retiring the shiny paper docket. This week his team made it even simpler: see a QR at the checkout, scan it, and the receipt is yours.
Nearly every fridge on Earth works by squeezing a gas. A startup in Darmstadt has built one that works by sliding a metal in and out of a magnet, with nothing but water in the pipes, and it is already cooling drinks in German supermarkets.
Palau's lagoons run hot enough to bleach the Great Barrier Reef, and the corals there are fine. In August the people who look after Australia's reef flew to Koror to see how, and came home with a model worth copying.
Norfolk Island's lagoon reef is honestly in trouble, rated High Concern this year. Yet the offshore coral is thriving, a fifth of the lagoon's pale corals turn out to be perfectly healthy, and the septics draining to the bay are being replaced. Here is what gives the scientists hope.
Nearly a million camera trap photographs a year, and someone has to look at every one. In West Arnhem Land the Warddeken rangers asked their Elders first, then put an open source AI to work on the sorting, and won back four months a year for the real job: looking after Country.
A young southern ground hornbill at ARTIS in Amsterdam broke both halves of his beak and was left with two stumps. Vets scanned his head, printed him a new one and screwed it on. He picked up his own food the next morning.
Four people, a fifteen metre sled, twenty kites and about eighty days of ice. On Sunday a Spanish team left for Antarctica to cross the emptiest part of the continent without burning a drop of fuel, with sixteen science projects riding along.
Acrylic glass is in car tail lights, window panes, furniture, signs and fish tanks, and most of it has nowhere good to go at the end of its life. A Zurich lab has found a cheap, simple way to take it apart and make it new again.
Regenerative farming has plenty of believers and not enough Australian evidence. A five year trial led by farmers' own groups, with CSIRO measuring, sets out to find what works in old soils and unpredictable rain.
