PopTech Audio: PopCasts

Ecovative Design founder, 2009 PopTech Fellow Eben Bayer, on this initiative that transforms low-value agricultural byproducts into strong biological composites that can be used as biodegradable alternatives to conventional plastics, foams, and packaging materials.

2009 PopTech Fellow Jason Aramburu launched re:char in 2005 to develop low-cost technologies that fight climate change while improving the quality of degraded soils. re:char’s systems convert agricultural waste into renewable fuel and into biochar, sequestering atmospheric carbon and improving soil quality.

2009 PopTech Fellows Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo Van Vuuren co-founded Lebônê Solutions in 2007 to help meet the need for off-grid energy and lighting in the developing world. Fuel cells sold by local entrepreneurs generate electricity from soil microbes to power LED lights, cell phones, and other devices.

Champion of the Earth honoree and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has transformed the way we think about innovation and design. Benyus challenges us to study nature’s best ideas, then imitate its designs and processes to solve some of our greatest human challenges.

What makes us happy? Societies flourish and people are most content when they are faced with fewer choices and more constraints argues psychologist Barry Schwartz. We are tortured by the idea of having it all – “Impossible!”, he says.

Environmental journalist Mark Lynas reports from his global tour of climate change hotspots – documenting the dramatic effects that even one degree of global warming may have around the world.

Practicing “identity correction” – the Yes Men target large corporations that put profits ahead of everything else. Getting inside the system, and impersonating business leaders, they smuggle stories out to the world to expose big business wrong-doing.

Having spent two years living in squatter communities across four continents, urban ethnographer Robert Neuwirth finds people living lives of complexity, challenge, and surprising resiliency.

Writer Suketu Mehta glimpses our possible urban future through the lens of the vastly contrasting lifestyles in Mumbai, the biggest, fastest, richest city in India, and with a population of 21 million, larger and more crowded than many nation states.

Join polar scientist John Priscu – and his autonomous robots – as he takes us miles below the Antarctic ice to search for living organisms that may have been cut off from the rest of the planet’s ecosystem for millions of years.

Four years ago, Frank Warren walked the streets of DC at night, handing out self-addressed postcards to strangers, soliciting their secrets. Watch as the creator of the wildly popular blog PostSecret reveals some of the hundreds of thousands of secrets shared by people from around the world in those four years…including a few of his own.

Come along as the brilliantly acerbic David Rakoff takes the PopTech audience on a hilarious journey through our nation’s quest for culinary perfection and other cultural excesses.

K. David Harrison discusses how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. Watch as he details efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide.

Ecologist, author and lifelong fisherman Carl Safina is fighting to wake people up to the fact that fish are going the way of the buffalo. In this eye-opening Pop!Cast, Safina paints a grim portrait of the impact we’re having on the Earth’s oceans and what we need to do to turn the tide.

Filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson went to Rwanda with a chilling question: is it possible to forgive the person who killed your family? Hear the stories of reconciliation she found while making “As We Forgive,” which documents how confessed murderers and genocide survivors are partnering to rebuild Rwanda.