Poisonous haze: Why the air we breathe could kill us

Project ECHO - driven by a single doctor with a cause - pulled together a team of specialists to develop a model that combines technology with collaborative care and careful patient tracking to help cure for diseases spread to patients around the world through community healthcare agents, as opposed to only specialty centers. This kind of "disruptive innovation" is effectively working to demonopolize health care knowledge and access, and lends to a health system capable of meeting today’s soaring demands for care.

Evidence continues to build that humans are contributing to a climate change issue that is nothing but bad news for the planet. Hopeful stories from seven countries, including India, Indonesia, and China, show that efforts to combat climate change might finally be working.

A overview of 2014's Fixes columns - connecting the dots between 60 or so ways that people are trying to change the world.

The breakdown of the ozone layer is one of the most well-known effects of climate change. Citizens enact different ways to protect the atmosphere from a build up of methane gas.

A growing number of people in the famously crowded Tokyo metropolis are becoming ‘city farmers’, planting crops atop tall buildings or deep underground. In an age of detrimental climate change, urban cultivation and green roof agriculture will soon be necessary as food, water and energy resources become scarcer.

New York City black tar roofs cause a number of environmental problems, including air pollution, heat absorption that raises energy consumption, and storm water runoff in the sewer system. Efforts to turn these old roofs into green spaces cool the buildings, enable the containment of more rainfall, reduce sewer discharge, generate energy, and absorb carbon emissions. New York City has a pilot program offering financial help for green roofs.

In light of a study published in BMC Medicine, authors Nancy Fullman and Alexandra Wollum take a deeper dive into Nigeria’s gains against polio and what they could mean for the country’s routine vaccine systems.

PrePex, a new nonsurgical circumcision tool, could revolutionize the prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Cheap and easy to assemble, the device has proven successful in several randomized trials.

The Jaipur Limb organization based in India has developed prostheses at low cost, and services are free for the poor. The organization’s efforts have recently spread to other countries with impoverished people. Jaipur Limb reaches patients through branch clinics, traveling workshops, and limb camps in cities around the world.

A prosthetist from Texas visiting Jaipur Limb workshops in Honduras saw problems with their low-cost prosthetics - the issue wasn't the design of the leg, but the technicians at the Honduras workshops were people completely new to prosthetics who were given just eight weeks of training. Thanks to his research, Jaipur established a research and development unit to improve the limb.