Gizmodo: bill & melinda gates foundation

Bill Gates Seeks To Cure Malaria With Candy

Rosa Golijan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Bill Gates is on another charitable streak through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a $100,000 investment to find a way to fight childhood malaria with chocolate and gum.

The gum would be used to test, painlessly, for malaria in children while the chocolate would serve as a way of getting some of the disease-feeding fat out of a patient's body. There's already some promise in these methods and the Gates contribution should certainly keep research going. [Telegraph]

Safe Sex Ringtone for India, Funded by Bill and Melinda Gates

Mark Wilson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:15:00 EDT

In order to thwart the spread of HIV in India, "condom a cappella" has been released by an organization that's funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A ringtone that's meant to promote safe sex, we thought that it might consist of a crying babies, nasty bodily functions or soliloquies from one's parents, but instead the ringer is a chant of "condom, condom!" And as everyone knows, if people chant a word on a cellphone ringer, its correlating concept is immediately embraced by the youth of the world. [breitbart]

Bill Gates Gives Away $306 Million, Goes Green Acres

Mark Wilson — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:13:20 EST

Apparently money has burned quite the hole in Bill Gates' philanthropic pocket, as during this week's World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Gates pledged $306 million in grants to fund farming in in poor/developing countries through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To the audience he said:

If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women...The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor.

I dunno, Apple. The way things have been going lately, maybe that giant head* on the big screen wasn't to be feared after all.

Yes, before our commenters flip out, we realize the 1984 spot was a shot at IBM, not Microsoft. [cnn]