Changing the DNA of Living Things to Fight Climate Change

Wolves in western America were once hunted to near-extinction but have now been reintroduced into certain territories with notable success. More wolves often means more attacks on ranchers' livestock, however, so cowboys are working to track wolf packs by computer to reduce conflicts.

Clean water and healthy ecosystems are becoming increasingly difficult to come by. With floating islands and other inventions, eco-entrepreneur Bruce Kania thinks that biomimicry - such as reconstructing wetlands and growing biofilms - can tackle the toughest of water problems.

Concerned with colony collapse syndrome in honey bees worldwide, scientists, farmers and tech companies teamed up in Australia to create a micro-sensor that collects data on the bee's environment.

In California some farms lose up to 10 percent of their crop due to coddling moths. Davis University is measuring the impact bats have on various walnut farms, such as potential savings from reduced insecticide use and crop loss to insects.

Many different people are inventing health devices for resource-poor settings, but some organizations - like M.I.T.’s Little Devices group - are empowering developing communities and increasing access to healthcare by building medical devices that nurses and doctors in very poor settings can adapt themselves — or kits for making their own, often harvesting parts from toys to cleverly rig up medical equipment. It’s part of a major idea shift, one that’s transforming the design of foreign aid.

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.

There are only five northern white rhinos left in existence - all in captivity and unable to breed. Researchers work to identify the most valuable solution to rhino poaching in order to prevent the animal from going extinct.

University research in Kansas and California is providing technical solutions for small farmers to help them compete against large scale farms.

The demand for food crops is increasing globally while the crop resilience is decreasing due to a warming climate and elevated CO2 levels. Scientists in Washington, DC are testing how to cross food crops with weeds, which have resilience against heat and many other environmental challenges.