humanitarian

Elastic Eyesight: For the 314 million people around the world with blurry vision, just put on a pair of Joshua Silver’s AdSpecs and inject light-bending silicon oil into the plastic lenses until the world comes back into focus. Since winning a POPULAR SCIENCE Best of What’s New Award in 2000, Silver has been perfecting his $20 adjustable-prescription specs and, with help from the U.S. military, has handed out 20,000 pairs around the world.

More than a billion people worldwide live in poverty—not a gadget hound's I-can't-afford-an-iPhone poverty, but devastating, living-on-a-dollar-a-day poverty. These folks have trouble paying for food, staying healthy, getting an education, and doing many of the other daily things you and I take for granted. In future postings of this column, we'll discuss new tech that tackles each of these specific problems. But to kick things off, lets look at a new program that aims at the most obvious problem of the poor: They need more money.