Billions of tonnes of goods are moved by lorry every year – everything from food and clothes to building materials, electronic gadgets and toys.

Reporter: William Kremer

Video games are often blamed for time-wasting and violence, but there’s a group of people proving this stereotype wrong.

We meet the scientists behind a game designed to speed up finding a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and we speak to a teenager who plays it because “it’s something I can do to help people in my spare time”.

Citizen science projects like this have had some remarkable successes, and gamers have been credited with significant research such as figuring out the structure of a protein that shares similarities with HIV.

Fans of this model believe gaming has a huge part to play in the future of problem solving.

Produced by Kathleen Hawkins

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

The city of Vaasa in western Finland has built a reputation as a centre of innovation, where energy companies are working together to try to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.

Here, there’s a quiet conviction that climate change can be stopped and a belief that technology emerging from this area will help us make the shift to renewable forms of energy.

We also check out a company creating a new type of battery which it hopes will one day be able to store enough power to meet the needs of a whole city.

Reporter and producer: Erika Benke

(Photo credit: BBC)

Imagine a grocery shop selling all your basic goods at a discounted price… and if you buy enough you also get free health insurance. It might seem too good to be true, but stores like this have been introduced at some factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Social entrepreneur Saif Rashid is trying to get better health care to some of the millions of garment factory workers who are on low wages. For them, to lose a day’s pay by taking time off sick can be disastrous and affording decent health care is almost impossible.

Now, with this scheme, they can get health insurance at the same time as getting discounts on their shopping. We find out how it’s changed some workers’ lives and why some people don’t take up the opportunity.

Reporter: Chhavi Sachdev

(Photo Credit: BBC)

Where there are humans, there’s waste. About two billion tonnes of garbage was produced in 2016, and the amount we generate is increasing. A lot of it ends up in unmanaged dumps or landfill sites. Much of it can’t be reused or recycled, but instead of seeing it go to “waste” some cement factories are using it to create energy.

In this episode, People Fixing the World also looks at how tourists can help conservationists protect animals, such as lions, cheetahs and hyenas. All they have to do is share their holiday photos.

Reporters: Nick Holland and Jamie Ryan

(Photo Caption: Getty images)

If you have a cardiac arrest you need help immediately to have any chance of surviving.

It's estimated that a person dies from a snakebite every five minutes. Many more people face life-changing injuries, losing limbs and consequently their livelihoods.

Now a new research facility in Kenya is trying to develop better antivenoms from African snakes.

(Photo Credit: BBC)

For the past 20 years, police chiefs and policy makers around the world have been fascinated by an idea: that violence spreads through cities like a disease, with patterns of clustering and transmission, and opportunities to inoculate communities against it.

Violence-reduction programmes, influenced by epidemiology, have been implemented in Chicago, Glasgow and - most recently - London. But before these initiatives, a link between violence and disease was made by a Colombian doctor called Rodrigo Guerrero.

In this programme Dr Guerrero gives reporter William Kremer a tour of his city and explains his approach.

Reporter: William Kremer

(Photo Caption: Dr Rodrigo Guerrero / Photo Credit: BBC)

In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of wells were dug across Bangladesh to give people access to cholera-free water. But this led to what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history, worse than Chernobyl. That’s because the water in the wells wasn’t tested for arsenic. Decades on, it’s a major problem. The WHO says more than 35 million Bangladeshis have been chronically exposed to arsenic in their drinking water, and about 40,000 die of arsenicosis every year. The field test for it is inaccurate and prone to human error. Most Bangladeshis drink from wells in their back yards which haven’t been tested for years, if at all. But now a gadget is being developed which will allow anyone to test a well cheaply, instantly and accurately. The scientific key to it is a tiny enzyme, found inside a bacterium affectionately known as Mr Tickle, which was discovered in an Australian gold mine.

Reporters: Chhavi Sachdev and Jo Mathys

(Photo Credit: BBC)

Pollution, overfishing and oxygen depletion are damaging coastal waters across the world. Often fish and other marine life are the victims, but scientists are using one surprising creature to help solve the problem – the oyster.

Oysters eat some chemical pollutants and fight algae blooms, which can have a damaging effect on biodiversity.

A group of teachers and scientists in New York is trying to reintroduce a billion of them into the harbour to make it a healthier, cleaner environment and strengthen the shoreline.

Another team based in France is strapping wires to oysters’ shells around oil rigs to monitor how often they open and close. That gives them vital information about how pollution levels are changing.

Reporter/ producer Jamie Ryan

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)