Global environmental challenges Anyone who watched the women’s
World Cup final might have wondered if it’s possible to harness
that pure human energy. Turns out, it is. There’s enough power
in a soccer ball to light the night — or at least a part of it.
It’s done via sOccket, a soccer ball that kids kick around all
day, where its movement generates energy. When the sun sets,
plug an LED lamp into the ball and it turns into a light for
reading or other purposes. Play with the sOccket for 15 minutes
and use the light for up to three hours. Sustainable, non-
polluting, safe. SOccket was created to solve a pervasive
problem — the lack of reliable electricity — with a pervasive
game. More than one-fifth of the world’s population, about 1.4
billion people, lack electric power, but kids almost everywhere
play soccer. Conceived as a group project at Harvard University
by Jessica Matthews and Julia Silverman when they were
undergraduates, sOccket has been tested in South Africa,
Nigeria, Spain and Haiti. Now, Matthews