Meet The Technology Tackling Poverty From Space

Since 1990, extreme poverty has been cut in half worldwide. But there are still more than 700 million people living on less than two dollars a day around the globe. The United Nations has made the elimination of poverty number one on its list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, a challenge that may sound impossible but that a team of Stanford University researchers believe could actually be well within reach. That's because they've come up with a cost-effective method of getting over one of the most difficult, if not most obvious, hurdles toward reaching that goal on time. "Poverty is this big problem that everybody wants to solve, but you can't even begin to work on it if you don't know where the poor are," said Neal Jean, a doctoral student and lead author of the Stanford research.