Author: Erin Elizabeth

I’m nearly at a loss for words as I try and get this out. Really. It’s just, painful. Yesterday, GeneWatch explained that one of the major concerns about Oxitec’s GM Aedes aegypti mosquito is that if natural populations of A. aegypti are reduced, a competing mosquito species might rise up to take their place. In the Florida Keys, the biggest threat is Aedes albopictus, another invasive species that takes human blood meals. It’s also more difficult to control with pesticides than A aegypti which may make communities continuously dependent on Oxitec to produce new streams of GM animals. (Can you say vertical integration?) An absolute GEM...

At 16, Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad, a teenager from the Zahran Language School in Alexandria, won the European Fusion Development Agreement award for inventing a cost-effective way to turn a million tons of plastic trash that Egypt produces every year, into biofuel worth $78 million. Impressed with Faiad’s trash-to-fuel formula to address the country’s plastic woes, the Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute gave her access to a specialized laboratory and a highly technical research team. During her research, Faiad worked on a plastic conversion agent and found an inexpensive catalyst called aluminosilicate, which drastically reduces the cost of converting the plastic trash...