PopTech Audio: PopCasts

Alan Rabinowitz overcame a debilitating stutter to lend his voice on behalf of big cats. After creating the world’s first jaguar sanctuary and world’s largest tiger reserve, the wildlife biologist now calls for new models of conservation that rely on wildlife corridors to allow humans and animals to coexist more peacefully.

Imogen Heap plays a stripped-down version of what she says is her most popular song, “Hide and Seek.” It came together by accident one night when her computer died and she was forced to look at her instruments in a new way.

Deborah Kenny wants to scale the effective programs her organization, Harlem Village Academies, has produced. By avoiding previous, well-intentioned, failures and by providing teachers and students with empowering tools, she wants to get what’s working for her schools in every US school—and she encourages all of us to get involved.

Dutch bulb grower, Pieter Hoff has an idea about how to make deserts bloom: capture the humidity in the air, store it in a box, and use that condensation to water plants. He calls this box the Groasis waterboxx and he thinks it can change how we feed the world and reduce greenhouse gases.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s fascination with cancer is rooted not just in how to fight it, but in where it originated. Discovering almost nothing on the subject, the cancer physician and researcher wrote “Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” that explores the history of the disease that causes one-quarter of all American deaths.

Treehugger founder Graham Hill announced the launch of a new online design competition, Life Edited, and asked all interested parties to weigh in on how he can best design his new 420 square foot New York City apartment. Offering up to $70,000 in prizes, Life Edited is raising the stakes for low-impact designers.

Yasser Ansari’s Project Noah (Networked Organisms and Habitats), strives to be what he calls “a field guide for every organism.” Inspired by Darwin’s Field Guide, bio-instruments, and a little bit of steampunk, the platform encourages citizen scientists to step into the world, eyes open, and begin documenting what they find.

Sinan Aral’s two areas of interest are behavioral contagions and causality. He believes that if we can understand how behavior is spread in a population, there’s the potential to promote good behaviors such as condom use and tolerance and to deter behavior like smoking and violence.

Sean Gourley is a mathematician who has spent the last seven years using math to understand war and insurgency. He is now applying that understanding to develop ways to map technology companies – in search of the “technology genome.”

Why is tuberculosis so resistant to treatment? Sarah Fortune studies the bacterium that causes tuberculosis as well as how it responds to various eradication efforts, with a view to more effectively fighting this increasingly common global scourge.

Social Innovation Fellow Salinee Tavaranan and the Border Green Energy Team are helping to bring light to some of the world’s darkest places. She and her team work on the border of her homeland, Thailand, and Burma, a country that’s been embroiled in civil war for over sixty years, to bring solar power to clinics and medical facilities that desperately need it.

Ryan Smith is co-founder and chief technical officer of Micromidas, Inc., a biotech company that uses an innovative microbial process to convert raw sewage into high-quality plastics. A non-petroleum plastic made from organic waste that completely degrades in six months to a year? What’s not to love?

To combat the spread of AIDS, Kel Sheppey founded Wild4Life, an AIDS awareness and testing organization that collaborates with wildlife conservation groups, reaching remote communities and educating them about the importance of AIDS testing and education. The goal: to completely stop the spread of AIDS by leveraging influence within communities.

Injectable drugs are a huge part of modern life, and with 16 billion injections a year, delivery system innovation is a field ripe for breakthroughs. 2010 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow Rush Bartlett’s company LyoGo has developed a completely self-contained system with the potential to revolutionize the way people are immunized.

After surviving Liberia’s civil conflict, Raj Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health (known in Liberia as Tiyatien Health) to tackle the triple threat facing health care in post-war countries: a battered public sector, workforce shortages and rampant poverty. Pioneering a community-based health system, Last Mile Health serves as a scalable, public sector model for achieving equity in health.