Next Up He Should Hijack The Private Jet To Davos And Take It To Malawi

This is actually a cool move by Bill Gates:

In what is probably the coolest conference-talk attention grab I've ever heard of, Bill Gates apparently just released a swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd at TED, the geniuses-only mind meld. Holy shit.

"Not only poor people should experience this," the Tweetosphere has Gates saying as he released the swarm into the audience. Malaria is a cause that Bill and Melinda have been hitting hard with their philanthropy, and this is certainly a way to drive that point home.

Take away their box lunch too. Turn TED into an episode of 30 Days!

The amount of money in that room could pay for mosquito netting for the entire continent of Africa. They should have it in their faces more.

The Hope Needle In The Depression Haystack

These are depressing times in the world. Super-rich investment bank CEOs won't get their multimillion-dollar bonus, Monaco doesn't have the scratch to build a giant artificial peninsula into the Mediterrenean Sea, and Jay Leno is moving to prime-time.

(That actually has a financial rationale too, it's going to save NBC about $13 million a week and cut hundreds of jobs on weekly dramas.)

I need to feel good about something. Come on, world, hit me!

OK, Larry Craig is still guilty. Fine, fun in a schadenfreude kind of way, but lacking in "the world is a better place" kind of depth. Surely something must be benefiting the world!

... Found it.

A vaccine against the parasitic disease malaria cut illnesses by more than half in field trials and could be safely given with other childhood inoculations, two studies have reported. The vaccine, which will begin a third and final phase of clinical trials early next year, could become the first to protect children from malaria, which kills nearly 1 million people worldwide every year.

The studies, published online Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, were reported at a New Orleans meeting of tropical medicine researchers and were hailed as a significant breakthroughin the fight against one of the most intractable and deadly infectious diseases.

If the phase three trials are successful, it would be "an extraordinary scientific triumph," said Dr. W. Ripley Ballou, deputy director for vaccines and infectious diseases for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped fund the research.

"But more importantly," Ballou added, "it could save millions of children's lives."

We're talking about 1 million people a year, largely children in sub-Saharan Africa, dying of a disease that has been all but eradicated throughout the rest of the world. A vaccine would not only relieve a monumental amount of death and suffering, but could finally bring some stability to Africa. If children can grow up without the threat of disease and death, the continent can focus on education and economic development, and those children can be an engine to growth.

OK, that's positive.