This is Mohammed Bah Abba’s Pot-in-pot invention. In northern Nigeria, where Mohammed is from, over 90% of the villages have no electricity. His invention, which he won a Rolex Award for (and $100,000), is a refrigerator than runs without electricity.

Here’s how it works. You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot. Fill the space in between them with wet sand, and cover the top with a wet cloth. When the water evaporates, it pulls the heat out with it, making the inside cold. It’s a natural, cheap, easy-to-make refrigerator.

So, instead of perishable foods rotting after only three days, they can last up to three weeks. Obviously, this has the potential to change their lives. And it already has — there are more girls attending school, for example, as their families no longer need them to sell food in the market.

Arnold Williams from hathaby.net commented on this in his weblog. He said:

QUOTE
Brilliant ideas don’t need to be difficult to execute: here’s a case in point. The technology has been known for centuries, but WASN’T APPLIED TO THE PROBLEM. Notice that applying technology also has the effect of educating young people.

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This crisp image is part of a tapestry of star formation that varies from jets fired by stars still embedded in their dust and gas cocoons to disks of material encircling young stars that could be the building blocks of future solar systems, taken from a mosaic containing a billion pixels by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The resulting image uncovered thousands of stars never seen before in visible light. Some are merely one-hundredth the brightness of previously viewed Orion stars.

Among the stars Hubble spotted for the first time in visible light in Orion were young brown dwarfs and a small population of possible binary brown dwarfs (two brown dwarfs orbiting each other). Brown dwarfs are so-called “failed stars.” These cool objects are too small to be ordinary stars, because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our sun does. Comparing the characteristics of newborn stars and brown dwarfs in their natal environment provides unique information about how they form.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

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