STEM's Greatest Challenges

The population of the earth is expected to grow to 9.2 billion by 2050 according to some projections.  How are we going to feed, provide clean drinking water and create enough energy for this many people when we aren’t able to do it now? Can STEM play a part in meeting the physical needs of humanity? Of course, these challenges have already been with us for generations. According to the World Health Organization and The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health, it is a great risk to be a child living in the third world, especially if you are under the age of 5:

Key facts

  • Over 9 million children under the age of five die every year.
  • Around 70% of these early child deaths are due to conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions.
  • Leading causes of death in under-five children are pneumonia, diarrhea and health problems during the first month of life.
  • Over one third of all child deaths are linked to malnutrition.
  • Children in developing countries are ten times more likely to die before the age of five than children in developed countries.

STEM disciplines are not the only means of reducing the loss of 25,000 children every day under the age of 5, but the majority of these deaths are caused by lack of nutrition and clean drinking water. Solutions to the Big STEM Challenges are going to come from industrialized nations. How to transfer technology to third world nations may be a bigger challenge, but this should not stand in the way of your career choices. Let’s see how a career in STEM could help millions of children world wide.

Hunger

Japan is an industrialized nation with 127 million people, and a density of 336 people per square kilometer according to Wikipedia. Come and spend the next three minutes with Grant Imahara as he tours a vertical farming site in the busiest city in the world, where Mirai claims a yield increase of 50 to 100 times compared with a traditional farm.

You may be interested in pursuing one of the following disciplines. Or, check out our STEM kits to experiment with a small scale vertical farm and explore the science of photosynthesis.

  • Bio-Engineering
  • Chemical Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Computer Science

Clean Drinking Water

‘More people die of drought than all other calamities put together’, according to Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Whatever you believe about climate change, droughts take lives.

Partly out of desperation from decades of struggling with drought, Israel has become the world’s leader in water reuse and desalination. Check out this 8 minute video to see how a nation can thrive under adverse drought conditions. Here are STEM disciplines you can explore to be part of this amazing revolution:

  • Industrial Engineering
  • Chemical Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Computer Science
  • Structural Engineering

Energy

Nuclear fission reactors today are highly effective at generating electricity, but their waste products will be with us for tens of thousands of years. Nuclear fusion on the other hand is a game-changer for clean energy production, but only exists in research institutes today. 

Fusion is the stuff of stars where hydrogen fuses under intense pressure and temperature to form heavier atoms like helium. The massive energy release during a fusion reaction is far greater than that of fission.

All the energy we have on the earth today is derived from fusion. Spin a top on your dining room table: the energy that came from your hand and fingers to spin the top was first created in our sun by fusion. Light was a byproduct of fusion, which in turn left the sun and arrived at the earth where it was used by plants in photosynthesis, which you then consumed and used to spin the top through the breakdown of the chemical compound adenosine triphosphate, (ATP) in your muscles. 

The promise of fusion energy is extraordinary in that there is enough deuterium and tritium in a gallon of seawater that can be used to power a small city for a year. And, the radioactive byproducts have very short half-lives. The challenge is not in creating fusion, which we’ve been doing now for decades with big lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. (I made a small contribution in the laser amplifiers with both of these multi-Terawatt lasers.) The challenge is how to hold a plasma that is at the temperature of the interior of a star!  Do you hold it magnetically, (see ITER Tokamak), or do you use some other means of containment? You see, this is why we need young minds to pursue STEM in your education choices. Here are the disciplines that will help you make breakthroughs in fusion energy.  Finally, watch this video to see how fusion reactions are being conducted today at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA.

  • Physics
  • Mathematics
  • Material Science
  • Computer Science
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Structural Engineering