US engineering student develops clean cooker using sun's rays

American engineering student Scot Frank's solar-powered SolSource cooker was an idea born from spare time.

About a decade ago, he had just completed a semester of Putonghua language courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was heading for a three-month teaching job at a university in Qinghai province, in northwestern China.

When he arrived, however, he found that the professor there had neglected to tell the students that Frank, then 19, was coming, so they had all gone home for the summer. With no students, and a three-month stipend, he decided to travel and ended up in the provincial capital Xining .

"My mother always taught me there's always something good in every situation," laughed Frank, in California this week for a retail conference where there's plenty of interest in the SolSource cooker that in a sense came out of that first trip.

In Xining, Frank met a professor, who saw the potential of this talented engineering student teaching his more impoverished students.

Frank went with them to their homes, travelling hours into the countryside, before arriving in an area of Qinghai known for violent sandstorms and cold temperatures, but also for 330 days of clear blue sky each year: a perfect environment for solar energy.