As part of Popular Mechanics magazine’s annual conference on world-changing innovation, Amy B. Smith, MIT’s pied piper of Design-That-Makes-a-Difference, was named this year’s Breakthrough Leadership award-winner. It was an easy choice. Smith and her team of “D-Lab” students have helped set the bar for practical brilliance. Whether they are making charcoal from plant waste or engineering a better corn-shucker, it is thrilling to see the dramatic impact their simple yet deft solutions to grinding every day problems can have on people’s lives.

Even those of us best described as “mechanically-challenged” can grasp how these inventions work — which is a big part of the point. In fact, it is #4 on Smith’s list of“Seven Rules for Low-Tech Engineering”:

Mid-October and fall is in full swing here in Chicago. With the last 80 degree day behind us and first frost just ahead, it’s a speed up to a slow down. Leaves blush and blow away. Birds fly off. Even earthworms wriggle to cozy safe havens beneath the frost line. It’s migrate, hibernate or pull out the Polartec.

As perfectly seasonal as it all seems, 10,000 years ago – a blink in geologic time – my neck of woods was under a mile of ice. No leaves, or birds, and certainly no earthworms. The “seasons” were cold and colder. It took a warming world to melt the ice, which left behind the puddles of the Great Lakes and land that is still springing back from a glacial grip so many millennia later.

These sorts of changes are supposed to take thousands, or at least hundreds, of years. But according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest Arctic Report Card, they’re happening in Greenland at a breathtaking pace right now. In 2007, Greenland’s ice sheet “lost at least 100 cubic km (24 cubic miles) of ice, making it one of the largest single contributors to global sea level rise.” Autumn temperatures are up about 5 degrees Celsius (~9 degrees Fahrenheit). Greenland is turning…green.

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Like the TrackerNews aggregator, the Editor’s Blog focuses on health (human, animal, plant, and environmental), humanitarian work, and the technologies that support both. The website features links to news, research and resources, while the blog provides a little more depth and context.

Every humanitarian crisis has a health component. Every serious outbreak of disease has a humanitarian dimension. This now plays out against a backdrop of climate change. Altered weather patterns trigger floods and droughts that can affect food supplies, drive regional conflicts and expand the range of vector-borne diseases. In an ever-flattening world, regional disasters can quickly go global, while global events can have devastating local consequences. It is all of a piece.