Check the Back Seat! Alerts Remind Drivers About Children

Currently, the District of Columbia and 10 states, including Maryland, issue limited driving licenses to undocumented workers, with two more set to issue such licenses in the coming months.

Phone lines in Africa and South Asia would never have gotten to the poor - but these places have leapfrogged over last-century technology and gone straight to mobile phones. Now the same thing is happening with off-grid solar power: the fastest -- perhaps the only – way to power the poor.

The mobile phone is doing more than revolutionizing communication. It has the potential to improve many aspects of life in poor countries: commerce, health, agriculture, education - public health, especially, is being revolutionized by governments taking advantage of the mobile revolution by texting advice or sending voice messages to pregnant women, texting reminders to AIDS patients to take their meds, tracking the spread of diseases, allowing community health workers to keep records electronically and variations on all these themes.

The 2008 recession’s job losses spurred a development of a Do-It-Yourself economy. With the advent of Uber, Etsy, Airbnb, and others, the marketplace has become full of micro-entrepreneurs who thrive with independent web-assisted businesses.

As a state with robust populations of wildlife, Montana has had its share of roadkill. Its Department of Transportation developed animal shelving, a type of wildlife crossing, to enable safe passage for small animals who need to cross the road. The measure, combined with other types of crossings, has reduced animal-vehicle collisions by half.

In war zones, people have a difficult time finding clean water and safe areas to inhabit. Social media, smart phones, and technology applications are aiding in people’s survival. In Aleppo, Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross posted a map on Facebook to show alternative sources of clean drinking water that reached approximately 140,000 people.

Many wildlife are killed each year as they are hit by cars when crossing highways. Montana built crossing structures over high risk sections of highways, such as grass covered tunnels, for animals to cross safely and reduce car accidents.

An average of 28,000 children born in the U.S. each year die before their first birthday – and many more face disabilities and serious life-long health problems, often because they are born prematurely or at low birth weights. A free service, text4baby, delivers crucial health advice via text message to pregnant women and new mothers.

South Dakota’s “24/7 Sobriety” initiative breathalyzers tens of thousands of people every day in an effort to curb drunk driving. Rather than legislation that takes penalizes offenders by taking away their license, the state addresses the behavioral issue instead. In counties that use the “24/7 Sobriety,” they’ve seen a 12% decrease in repeat drunken-driving arrests.

Traffic fatality rates are slowly climbing in today's world of texting-while-driving. But highway agencies are increasingly using humor and wit to try to get people to drive safer.