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Meet the iShack, a modern take on an age-old design that is bringing new hope - and light - to the slums of South Africa. Millions of people are unable to afford to move out of slums and shanty towns in sub-Saharan Africa but the development of the iShack is intended to lift their living standards. People living in rickety and makeshift shacks in slum areas can wait for years before they can get connected to the electricity or water grids, and the United Nations estimates that 62 per cent of the urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa lives in slums. Meet the iShack, a modern take on an age-old design that is bringing new hope - and light - to the slums of South Africa. Millions of people are unable to afford to move out of slums and shanty towns in sub-Saharan Africa but the development of the iShack is intended to lift their living standards. People living in rickety and makeshift shacks in slum areas can wait for years before they can get connected to the electricity or water grids, and the United Nations estimates that 62 per cent of the urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa lives in slums. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2259075/Slum-dwellers-South-Africa-given-taste-mod-cons-introduction-environmentally-friendly-iShack.html#ixzz2HTI9EfYr  Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

"To meet the food needs of growing population, managing water resources used in rice farming has become a central focus"

"Given the crises facing the planet, with the population set to reach the 9 billion mark by 2050 and increasing strains being placed on water, energy and food supplies, it would be wrong to hope there could be a single solution to the storms that lie ahead. As the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, once put it in an Observer interview: "There will be no silver bullet.""

Its expansion was frighteningly fast. A handful of cases were first recognized in the U.S. at the beginning of the 1980s, but AIDS was soon seen around the world. By 1990, the world had a pandemic on its hands. In 1997, the peak of the epidemic, more than 3 million people became newly infected with HIV. Then science struck back. Drugs approved for HIV treatment in the mid-1990s proved profoundly effective, transforming AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic illness. Those treatments, combined with an international commitment to manage the disease by providing access to free drug therapy, led to a steep drop in new HIV infections. The United Nations has kept track of HIV worldwide for the past couple of decades. Below, we use that data to explore some of the trends in HIV prevalence. (The chart shows the percentage of the population, ages 15 to 49, living with HIV.)