REUTERS/Mike Segar MS

Jiminy Cricket! Bugs Could Be Next Food Craze
A 2013 report by the FAO that extolled insects’ potential to help stabilize the global food supply helped propel the edible-insect industry forward. American entrepreneurs believe protein-rich insects, and crickets in particular, are poised to ignite a quinoa-like food craze that will attract people following a Paleo Diet and gluten-free eaters.

Tom Osborn, Inventor of 'Green' Charcoal, Proves You’re Never Too Young to Innovate
Tom Osborn is CEO and Founder of GreenChar, is a Kenya-based social enterprise that creates charcoal briquettes from revitalized agricultural waste and are smokeless, high energy, and long lasting. GreenChar also hopes to empower youth around the globe to think critically about the needs of their communities.

Scientists Develop a Tomato Plant that Can Grow all Night
Scientists discovered a gene that would allow commercial tomato plants to tolerate 24 hours of light a day. In theory, more light exposure means more energy production for the plant, so the discovery could lead to tomato plants that yield up to 26% more tomatoes compared with plants that are given 18 hours of light in a greenhouse setting.

Using Mobile Phones to Better Understand Refugees’ Food Needs
The benefits of using mobile technology to gather information for WFP are numerous: Calling those stranded in violent areas is far less dangerous than sending employees and could save on the cost of data collection. Phones can easily and inexpensively collect information about food prices and the availability of food over time in order to provide earlier warning of crises in the making.

Milking It: Dairy Farmers in East Africa Are Earning More By Learning More
Research into volunteer farmer trainers shows how lessons from community health worker schemes have informed the effectiveness of using farmers as agents of change. Given the importance of smallholder farming in the developing world, the potential of farmer trainers is something we cannot afford to ignore.

Solar Energy: Picking Up Steam
Solar energy has many other uses beyond electricity—some of which are extremely handy in parts of the world where the sun is the only readily available source of energy. These include running desalination plants, refrigeration, sterilization, chemical purification and numerous kinds of waste treatment. So there is a big incentive to make it more efficient.