December 13, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Tech Museum of Innovation has presented its annual awards honoring the creative use of technology to promote economic development, education, the environment, equality, and health.
Each of the five winners — all nonprofit groups — received $50,000:
- Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, in Jaipur, India, and its founder, Devendra Raj Mehta, who developed a simple, low-cost artificial limb. Since the organization began in 1975, more than one million people worldwide have been fitted for the group’s limb.
- BlueEnergy, in San Francisco, which has built low-cost wind and solar-energy systems to provide energy in needy areas in rural Nicaragua. The organization seeks to bring jobs to the region by manufacturing wind turbines locally.
- Diagnostics Development Unit at the University of Cambridge, in England, which worked with a company called Diagnostics for the Real World to develop a line of easy-to-use, dipstick-style tests that can withstand heat and humidity to diagnose chlamydia, hepatitis B, and trachoma in developing countries.
- TakingITGlobal, in Toronto, which has created a multilingual online forum for young people to talk to one another about the issues they care about. The site allows users to create their own blogs, upload photographs and artwork, and create project pages.
- The Terram Foundation (Fundación Terram), in Santiago, Chile, was honored for a project that uses seaweed to help reduce the stress the country’s aquaculture industry puts on wild-fish populations. Attaching seaweed seedlings to the nets that surround salmon farms absorbs the large quantities of nitrogen waste the farms produce. The seaweed, in turn, provides food for abalone production, ensuring that natural plants are not overharvested.
The museum received more than 700 nominations from 68 countries. Nominations are now being accepted for the 2008 awards.
To get there: Go to http://www.techawards.org.
