1.In terms of invention, I’d like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects.
说到发明 我想跟你们说说我最得意的一个项目
2.I think it’s one of the most exciting that I’m working on, but I think it’s also the simplest.
我觉得它是我现在做的最令我兴奋的项目 同时也是最简单的一个
3.It’s a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world.
这个项目很可能极大地影响世界
4.It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet, the number one cause of death in children under five, which is … ? Water-borne diseases. Diarrhea. Malnutrition.
它能解决目前世界上最严重的健康问题之一 这个问题是5岁以下儿童死亡的头号杀手 是什么呢？ 水媒传染疾病？痢疾？营养不良？
5.No, it’s breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires — acute respiratory infections caused by this. Can you believe that?
都不对，是吸入厨房油烟 导致急性呼吸道感染，你相信吗？
6.I find this shocking and somewhat appalling.
我感到很震惊也很可怕
7.Can’t we make cleaner-burning cooking fuels?
我们能否发明更清洁的炊事燃料？
8.Can’t we make better stoves?
更好的炉灶？
9.How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year?
这个问题为何每年能杀死200多万人呢？
10.I know Bill Joy was talking to you about the wonders of carbon nanotubes.
我知道Bill Joy和大家讲过 碳纳管的奇妙之处
11.So I’m going to talk to you about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes, which is charcoal.
那今天我就和大家讲讲 大碳管也就是木炭的妙用
12.So this is a picture of rural Haiti. Haiti is now 98 percent deforested.
这是一张海地乡村的照片，海地国土面积的98%如今都没有森林覆盖了
13.You’ll see scenes like this all over the island.
整个海地岛屿都是这幅景象
14.It leads to all sorts of environmental problems and problems that affect people throughout the nation.
这造成了各种环境问题 以及一些影响海地人民的其他问题
15.A couple of years ago there was severe flooding that led to thousands of deaths, that’s directly attributable to the fact that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil.
几年前一场洪水肆虐 夺走了几千人的生命 这都是因为 山上没有树来巩固土壤
16.So the rains come, they go down the rivers, and the flooding happens.
所以一旦下雨，雨水混杂泥土直接冲入河流，造成洪灾
17.Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this: people need to cook, and they harvest wood and they make charcoal in order to do it.
这里没树主要是因为 人们烧饭需要燃料 于是人们把木材做成木炭
18.It’s not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage.
并不是海地人不重视环境保护
19.They know perfectly well, but they have no other choice.
他们明白环境重要，但是他们无可奈何
20.Fossil fuels are not available, and solar energy doesn’t cook the way that they like their food prepared.
这里没有化石燃料 太阳能也不是很好用
21.And so this is what they do.
所以这也算是无奈之举
22.You’ll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree, cut it down and make charcoal out of it.
你常能看到这样一家人一起去森林里 砍了树，再做成木炭
23.So not surprisingly, there’s a lot of effort that’s been done to look at alternative cooking fuels.
毫无疑问，人们已经很努力 找寻这种燃料的替代品了
24.About four years ago I took a team of students down to Haiti, and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there.
4年前，我和一群学生去海地 和当地的和平队志愿者一起工作
25.This is one such volunteer, and this is a device that he’d built in the village where he worked.
有一个志愿者 在他呆的村庄里发明了这个小玩意儿
26.And the idea was that you could take waste paper, you could compress it, and make briquettes that could be used for fuel.
就是把废纸 压缩成块状用来燃烧
27.But this device was very slow.
但是它烧得很慢
28.So our engineering students went to work on it, and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the throughput of this device.
我们工程系的学生就拿来改良了一下 做了一点小改动之后 它的效率提高了3倍
29.So you could imagine they were very excited about it.
他们当时非常激动
30.And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them.
后来他们还把这些纸砖块带回麻省大学做测试
31.And one of the things that they found was they didn’t burn.
结果却发现这些东西不能燃烧
32.So it was a little discouraging to the students.
学生们都挺失望的
33.And in fact if you look closely, right here, you can see it says, “U.S. Peace Corps.”
如果你仔细看，在这儿， 你就会发现“美国和平队”字样
34.As it turns out, there actually wasn’t any waste paper in this village.
因为在那个村庄里根本没废纸
35.And while it was a good use of government paperwork for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village, it was 800 kilometers away.
或许这仪器用来处理政府文书倒是挺好的 让那个志愿者把政府文书带回到那个村子 不过政府机关离那个村子有足足800公里之遥
36.And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way to come up with an alternative cooking fuel.
所以我们就想琢磨个更好的办法 来制造炊事燃料的替代品
37.What we wanted to do, is we wanted to make a fuel that used something that was readily available on the local level.
我们希望这种新燃料 能就地取材
38.You see these all over Haiti as well. They’re small-scale sugar mills.
海地到处都有小规模的制糖厂
39.And the waste product from them after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called bagasse.
这些厂的废料 也就是榨完甘蔗之后剩下的东西叫“甘蔗渣”
40.It has no other use. It has no nutritional value, so they don’t feed it to the animals.
这个没啥用，也没营养价值 当饲料都不够好
41.It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it.
人们就把成堆的甘蔗渣堆在制糖厂外，最后拿来烧掉
42.What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel that would be something that people could easily cook with,
而我们就想 变废为宝 把那些甘蔗渣做成人人都能方便使用的燃料
43.something like charcoal.
就像木炭一样
44.So over the next couple of years, students and I worked to develop a process.
接下来的几年时间里，我和我的学生就在开发合适的生产工艺
45.So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum.
首先我们把甘蔗渣放入一个窑炉 这种炉子很好做，拿一个废弃的55加仑容积的油桶就可以改装了
46.After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this carbonized material here.
然后我们点燃甘蔗渣，让它烧一小会儿以后就把炉封好 不要让空气进去 最后就制成了这种炭化材料
47.However, you can’t burn this. It’s too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking.
但是，这个不好用，因为颗粒太细了 用来烧饭的话一下就烧完了
48.So we had to try and find a way to form it into useful briquettes.
所以我们就设法把它压缩成块
49.And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana, and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called kokonte, which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root.
正好，我的一个学生是加纳人 记得他母亲给他做过一道菜叫“木薯糊” 就是用木薯的根烧成的很稠的粥
50.And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of manioc.
于是我们就四下寻找 发现海地也种植木薯，只不过叫法不同
51.And in fact, it’s grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it’s all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable.
其实世界上很多地方都有木薯 虽然名称各异，东西都是一样的 就是含淀粉的食用其块状根的植物
52.And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes.
你可以把它做成糊 再用这个糊把木炭块粘在一起
53.So we did this. We went down to Haiti.
我们就这么做了。 后来我们又去海地
54.These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Chabon, or Charcoal Institute. And these — (Laughter) — that’s right. So I’m actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT.
这些研究生就是第一所 木炭学院的学生 （笑） 没错，所以我既是麻省理工的导师也是木碳学院的导师
55.And these are the briquettes that we made.
这些就是我们做的炭砖
56.Now I’m going to take you to a different continent. This is India, and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India: its cow dung.
现在我们到亚洲再来看看印度 这是印度最常见的炊事燃料——牛粪
57.And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel.
这产生的油烟比海地的还厉害 你看，健康问题 就是因为燃烧牛粪或其他生物燃料造成的
58.Kids and women are especially affected by it, because they’re the ones who are around the cooking fires.
儿童和妇女尤受影响 因为他们经常在厨房里转悠
59.So we wanted to see if we could introduce this charcoal-making technology there.
我们想看看是否能引进 之前的制炭技术
60.Well unfortunately, they didn’t have sugarcane and they didn’t have cassava, but that didn’t stop us.
可惜，印度没甘蔗 也没木薯，但这些都难不倒我们
61.What we did was, we found what were the locally-available sources of biomass.
我们还是就地取材
62.And there was wheat straw, and there was rice straw in this area.
用这里的麦秆和稻秆加工成燃料
63.And what we could use as a binder was actually small amounts of cow manure, which they used ordinarily for their fuel.
至于粘合剂 就用少量的牛粪 而原本这些牛粪都是直接做燃料的
64.And we did side-by-side tests, and here you can see the charcoal briquettes, and here the cow dung.
我们做了些对比试验，大家可以看到 炭砖和牛粪做对比
65.And you can see that it’s a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel.
很明显炭砖清洁得多
66.And in fact, it heats the water a lot more quickly.
而且烧水速度也快很多
67.And so we were very happy, thus far.
所以我们都很开心
68.But one of the things that we found was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal, it didn’t burn as long. And the briquettes crumbled a little bit,
但是我们发现 和一般木炭比 炭砖不持久，一下就碎了
69.and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking.
于是热量就分散开来，导致烧饭的时候很费力
70.So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti.
我们就想办法把炭砖做得更紧实 这样就能和海地市场上的木炭竞争了
71.So we went back to MIT, we took out the Instron machine, and we figured out what sort of forces did you need in order to compress a briquette to the level
我们回到麻省，找出英斯特朗电子强力测试仪 分析出用多少压缩力度 压缩出的炭砖
72.that you actually are getting improved performance out of it?
会有一个质的飞跃
73.And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this, we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process,
一方面我的学生们在实验室里研究 一方面海地的社区伙伴也同我们合作
74.to improve it and to make it more accessible to people in the villages there.
努力改良炭砖，让人人都用得上
75.And after some time, we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal, which actually now burns longer, cleaner than wood charcoal.
一段时间之后 我们发明了低成本制木炭法，新的产品 比一般木炭燃烧更持久也更清洁
76.So now we’re in a situation where we have a product, which is actually better than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace, which is a very wonderful place to be.
所以我们现在就有一个 比海地市场上的木炭更好的产品 这是一个很好的状况
77.In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees are cut down every year.
仅海地一国，每年就有3000万棵树被砍伐
78.There’s a possibility of this being implemented and saving a good portion of those.
这个产品如果能得到应用 能救很多树
79.In addition, the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars.
另外，这种新木炭每年能创收2.6亿美元
80.That’s an awful lot for a country of Haiti — with a population of eight million and an average income of less than 400 dollars.
这可是一大笔钱 海地人口800万 人均收入不足400美元
81.So this is where we’re also moving ahead with our charcoal project.
因此我们想在海地继续这个木炭项目
82.And one of the things that I think is also interesting, is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who’s been doing risk analysis.
还有一件有意思的事情是 我有个朋友在伯克利大学是做风险研究的
83.And he’s looked at the problem of the health impacts of burning wood versus charcoal.
他研究了对健康 木材和木炭分别会造成什么影响
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