Hardware Pioneers: Harnessing the Impact Potential of Technology Entrepreneurs

Billions of households across the world live without conveniences such as electric lighting, flush toilets, and sanitary sewerage systems. Products such as milk chilling machines and solar home systems can have a significant impact on lives and livelihoods of people living in poverty in developing countries. Hardware pioneers—inventors and entrepreneurs creating breakthrough products tailored to the needs of these populations—are pushing the frontiers of technology and business to create and scale innovative hardware technologies.Numerous case studies within the report illustrate how these pioneers face many of the same challenges of any entrepreneur but with the added complexity of developing hardware and scaling in remote areas with scarce resources. There is a significant opportunity for actors across sectors to strategically leverage their resources in order to support the journeys of these hardware pioneers, from initial inspiration to ultimate impact at scale.Top TakeawaysHardware pioneers lack the right supports in the critical Pioneer Gap stages when they are blueprinting, validating, and preparing their models. In the early stages, these needs range from patient capital to prototyping facilities. Later on, issues such as distribution, financing, servicing, and quality standards become more important.Critically, because the success of hardware pioneers depends on the successful blending of both business and technology skills, those working closely with pioneer teams also need to bring the right combination of these skills, and this unfortunately is rare in the impact enterprise ecosystem.There is need to not just support hardware pioneers directly but also to assemble the other needed parts of the ecosystem, from last-mile specialist companies that help pioneers reach and serve their target markets to the programs and institutions that are helping to spark the initial impulse that gets pioneers started on their journey in the right way.New ideas can have an ultimate impact that is much greater than that of the original pioneer alone through a transfer of the idea to a more scale-ready partner or just through adoption and adaptation of the idea by follower entrepreneurs. We believe that there is great impact potential in supporting these more networked pathways for scaling

Hardware Pioneers: Harnessing the Impact Potential of Technology Entrepreneurs, Executive Summary

Technology has been a powerful driver of humanity's development over the past few centuries. It continues to hold great potential to help us live longer and in better health, as well as raising our productivity and standards of living.Yet many of these benefits remain out of the reach of the global poor.While people living in the developed world have enjoyed the benefits of electric lighting since the late 1800s, nearly 1.3 billion poor households in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia still live in the dark today. Without electricity, many poor households are not able to make use of household appliances common in the richer world, like refrigerators, televisions,or computers.Modern sanitation technologies -- flush toilets and sewerage systems -- are another example. These technologies have existed for hundreds of years but are still not available to 2.4 billion people around the world. This lack of sanitation infrastructure leads to contamination of water sources across large stretches of South Asia and Africa. Water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery claim 3.4 million lives every year.Modern machinery and information technology have also changed the way we work. In advanced economies, large commercial farms enjoy the benefit of improved seed varieties, farm machinery, modern irrigation systems, and post-harvest storage systems. In stark contrast, many smallholder farmers in developing countries lack similar solutions and struggle to improve their crop yields and livelihoods.Against this challenging backdrop, inventors and entrepreneurs are developing new breakthrough products tailored to the needs of the global poor. These hardware pioneers are helping to improve lives and livelihoods by pushing the frontiers of technology and business. They are bringing reliable electricity to remote villages, safe drinking water to neglected slums, productivity gains to struggling smallholder farmers, and life-saving health services to sick children

Active emulsions in living cell membranes driven by contractile stresses and transbilayer coupling

The spatiotemporal organisation of proteins and lipids on the cell surface has direct functional consequences for signaling, sorting and endocytosis. Earlier studies have shown that multiple types of membrane proteins including transmembrane proteins that have cytoplasmic actin binding capacity and lipid-tethered GPI-anchored proteins (GPI-APs) form nanoscale clusters driven by active contractile flows generated by the actin cortex. To gain insight into the role of lipids in organizing membrane domains in living cells, we study the molecular interactions that promote the actively generated nanoclusters of GPI-APs and transmembrane proteins. This motivates a theoretical description, wherein a combination of active contractile stresses and transbilayer coupling drive the creation of active emulsions, mesoscale liquid ordered (lo) domains of the GPI-APs and lipids, at temperatures greater than equilibrium lipid-phase segregation. To test these ideas we use spatial imaging of homo-FRET combined with local membrane order and demonstrate that mesoscopic domains enriched in nanoclusters of GPI-APs are maintained by cortical actin activity and transbilayer interactions, and exhibit significant lipid order, consistent with predictions of the active composite model

Global gene expression profiling data analysis reveals key gene families and biological processes inhibited by Mithramycin in sarcoma cell lines

AbstractThe role of Mithramycin as an anticancer drug has been well studied. Sarcoma is a type of cancer arising from cells of mesenchymal origin. Though incidence of sarcoma is not of significant percentage, it becomes vital to understand the role of Mithramycin in controlling tumor progression of sarcoma. In this article, we have analyzed the global gene expression profile changes induced by Mithramycin in two different sarcoma lines from whole genome gene expression profiling microarray data. We have found that the primary mode of action of Mithramycin is by global repression of key cellular processes and gene families like phosphoproteins, kinases, alternative splicing, regulation of transcription, DNA binding, regulation of histone acetylation, negative regulation of gene expression, chromosome organization or chromatin assembly and cytoskeleton

Impact of IRS: Four-years of entomological surveillance of the Indian Visceral Leishmaniases elimination programme

BACKGROUND In 2005, Bangladesh, India and Nepal agreed to eliminate visceral leishmaniasis (VL) as a public health problem. The approach to this was through improved case detection and treatment, and controlling transmission by the sand fly vector Phlebotomus argentipes, with indoor residual spraying (IRS) of insecticide. Initially, India applied DDT with stirrup pumps for IRS, however, this did not reduce transmission. After 2015 onwards, the pyrethroid alpha-cypermethrin was applied with compression pumps, and entomological surveillance was initiated in 2016. METHODS Eight sentinel sites were established in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. IRS coverage was monitored by household survey, quality of insecticide application was measured by HPLC, presence and abundance of the VL vector was monitored by CDC light traps, insecticide resistance was measured with WHO diagnostic assays and case incidence was determined from the VL case register KAMIS. RESULTS Complete treatment of houses with IRS increased across all sites from 57% in 2016 to 70% of houses in 2019, rising to >80% if partial house IRS coverage is included (except West Bengal). The quality of insecticide application has improved compared to previous studies, average doses of insecticide on filters papers ranged from 1.52 times the target dose of 25mg/m2 alpha-cypermethrin in 2019 to 1.67 times in 2018. Resistance to DDT has continued to increase, but the vector was not resistant to carbamates, organophosphates or pyrethroids. The annual and seasonal abundance of P. argentipes declined between 2016 to 2019 with an overall infection rate of 0.03%. This was associated with a decline in VL incidence for the blocks represented by the sentinel sites from 1.16 per 10,000 population in 2016 to 0.51 per 10,000 in 2019. CONCLUSION Through effective case detection and management reducing the infection reservoirs for P. argentipes in the human population combined with IRS keeping P. argentipes abundance and infectivity low has reduced VL transmission. This combination of effective case management and vector control has now brought India within reach of the VL elimination targets

Impulsive Control on Seasonally Perturbed General Holling Type Two-Prey One-Predator Model

We investigate the dynamical behaviors of two-prey one-predator model with general Holling type functional responses. The effect of seasonal perturbation on the model has been discussed analytically as well as numerically. The periodic fluctuation is considered in prey growth rate and the predator mortality rate of the model. The impulsive effects involving biological and chemical control strategy, periodic releasing of natural enemies, and spraying pesticide at different fixed times are introduced in the model with seasonal perturbation. We derive the conditions of stability for impulsive system using Floquet theory, small amplitude perturbation skills. A local asymptotically stable prey (pest) eradicated periodic solution is obtained when the impulsive period is less than some critical value. Numerical simulations of the model with and without seasonal disturbances exhibit different dynamics. Also we simulate numerically the model involving seasonal perturbations without impulse and with impulse. Finally, concluding remarks are given

Extractive Spectrophotometric Determination of Cobalt with Thioglycolic Acid Anilide & Its Applications

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