Water-based pesticides have helped increase the world’s food supply, but farmers use a lot of them. The National Institutes of Health estimates 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides are used worldwide each year, with 1 billion pounds used in the United States alone. The problem is that very little of the applied pesticide stays on the plant. Much of it runs off and leaches into groundwater or is blown away by the wind, polluting the environment.

A 27-year-old graduate student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found a solution to this problem: He’s invented a way of making pesticides stickier, so farmers can use far less.

“A lot of plants are what we call hydrophobic, or water-repelling,” Maher Damak, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, told Fast Company. “Pesticides are mostly water-based, so when it’s sprayed onto plants, droplets either bounce or roll off the surface. This is not visible to the naked eye—it happens in about 20 milliseconds.”

Damak’s organic and biodegradable technology uses electrically charged polymers to make the water droplets containing the chemicals more attractive.

After a simple retrofit of their tractor-mounted or handheld applicators, farmers could significantly reduce the amount of pesticide they use while retaining crop yields.

“Farmers use many pesticides, depending on what kind of pests or disease they have in a particular year, but it’s usually on the order of 50 to 100 gallons per acre,” Damak told the business magazine. “This solution could potentially take it down to 10 gallons per acre.”

With pesticides accounting for almost half of production costs, Damak believes there is a financial as well as environmental incentive for farmers to adopt the new technology. His invention has earned him recognition as one of the winners of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.

Growers across the country have expressed interest in the new pesticide additive, which is being tested on a citrus grove in Florida and a vineyard in Italy, according to Fast Company.

Crime in the air

Criminals are discovering elaborate uses for drones in the planning and execution of crimes. Last winter, a swarm of small drones descended on an FBI hostage rescue team’s observation post, causing the team to lose situational awareness.

“We were then blind,” said Joe Mazel, the agency’s head of operational technology law, during a panel discussion at the AUVSI Xponential conference several weeks ago in Denver. “It definitely presented some challenges.”

Mazel recounted how the suspects backpacked the drones into the area, anticipating the arrival of the FBI team, according to the website Defense One. The criminals not only used the drones to disrupt the hostage rescue operation but continuously observed the agents, uploading video to their accomplices via YouTube.

Mazel said some criminal organizations are even using drones to intimidate witnesses, surveilling police departments and precincts to see “who is going in and out of the facility and who might be cooperating with police.”

The most recent version of the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill could help the situation by making it illegal to “weaponize” consumer drones. The bill would also require drones that fly beyond their operator’s line of sight to broadcast an identity beacon allowing law enforcement to track them. —M.C.