Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Smith, a former Peace Corps worker in Botswana and current mechanical engineering PhD student, developed two pragmatic, decidedly low-tech solutions to problems she encountered during her time in Africa. Citing the hundreds of millions of Africans who would benefit from a cheap and dependable flour mill, and the estimated billion people around the globe who lack certain access to clean water, Smith opted for an open-source solution to her distribution problem.
Patents just get in the way.
I want as much infringement as possible. She noted that she'd be using her prize as seed money to start developing and distributing her water-testing device. Murphy compared the device, essentially a filter that can pick out a single signal from a fiber optic line crammed with signals, to the electric circuit on a cable TV set-top box that sifts out the channel you've selected from all the others. Stringing fiber optic lines the last few miles from the switching station to the home requires both lots of money and tiny, trusty devices that'll make the strands of glass useful to the rest of us who don't know a Bragg-grating from a hammermill. Send it .