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The determination of safe, accessible, and usable locations for refugee camps is paramount to the success of the camp. While viable locations can be investigated with field surveys by persons in the field or with the rather costly use of satellite technology, it is vital to have a precise understanding of the elevation of the terrain to ensure the camps will be free from natural dangers such as flooding.

Mis-identification of possible military targets is a major source of collateral damage and leaves no safe place for escapees to go. Hospitals and other humanitarian institutions could benefit vastly from being safely tagged as such by a certificate that can not be copied or mis-placed and therefore be safer from bombing if it can be trusted more.

Blindstore provides an online lookup service which returns the correct answer without ever knowing what the question was. The protocol guarantees that the server can’t know which record the client requested. The client still only receives the record they requested.

For many humanitarian and social projects, fridges are necessary – e.g. to cool medication or vaccinations. Locally organizing or transporting fridges to refugee camps is expensive due to their size and weight – loading them with other goods is not really practical and time-consuming. An inflatable fridge with a compact cooling unit using innovative insulation technology could improve the flexibility and availability of fridges in field operations.

One of the most sensitive methods to locate land mines uses special trained search dogs. A few molecules of the explosive itself can be detected by a trained dog’s nose, which makes this method independent of the mine housing many other measurements are based on. A tracking and steering systems can help to improve the efficiency and thoroughness of the search. The same concept can be also adapted to rescue searches.

We produced a cheap and simple detector for cosmic rays, based on the Raspberry Pi computer platform. The detector is based on a plastic scintillator and Silicon photomultiplier tube combination, connected to a custom PCB combining all the necessary electronics functions (power supply, input stage, amplification, pulse shaping, trigger and an analogue digital converter), with a software stack capable of storing and analysing the collected data. We came up with a detector design which makes the collection, measurement and analysis of cosmic rays accessible and affordable to students, educators and science enthusiasts worldwide.