The importance of the Flight challenge is debatable, I suppose but it is defined well. That's important. "If Flight wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude

The importance of the Flight challenge is debatable, I suppose but it is defined well. That's important. "If Flight wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to design and build a zero or close-to-zero-carbon aeroplane that is capable of flying from London to Edinburgh, at comparable speed to today’s aircraft." If you don't think its environmentally valuable, at least it's valuable as an engineering challenge. The definition of the Food challenge is much poorer: "If Food wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to invent the next big food innovation, helping ensure a future where everyone has enough nutritious, affordable and environmentally sustainable food that people want to eat. A successful solution will demonstrate benefit at a small scale now and show projections of the potential environmental and social impact of scaling up to provide for millions of people." If no one had seen a potato before, growing a field of them could presumably win this challenge. It would be easy to demonstrate on a small scale and make the case for scaling up. The whole problem is scaling up with all the political & economic hair that goes with it. We're pretty good at cheap calories. I disagree about Water: "creating a cheap, environmentally sustainable desalination technology." Clearly defined and would have many high value implementations including many humanitarian ones. The only knock on it is that I think there is sufficient economic incentive that a £10m prize won't make much difference. I could be wrong though.