The Portable Light is a self sufficient and sustainable source of power that can be easily folded and transported. Designed by KVA MATx, each portable light unit generates about two watts of electricity and about one hundred lumens of white light, enough to read a book or do domestic tasks by. It can even be used as a power supply to charge a cell phone, or used in conjunction with other units to increase its power supply so it can charge medical equipment or laptops. This breakthrough technology is great news for the 2 billion people in the world who live without electricity.

The Portable Light is on display at MoMA Feb 24 – May 12 as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.

For additional images and video of Portable Light adapting to a variety of different uses, click here.

To hear Sheila Kennedy at Pop!Tech discussing the inspirations for Portable Light, click here.

Courtesy of KVA matx

Peggy Shea Andrews

Last year at Pop!Tech, Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, spoke of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. February 26 marks the official opening of the “Doomsday Vault,” as it has come to be called. It is intended to protect the Earth’s crop diversity against gradual or catastrophic losses. Sited deep inside a wild Arctic mountain in Norway, seeds from around the world will be mechanically cooled to -20 degrees, which will keep seeds alive for up to 19,000 years. To ensure that developing nations can participate in this important seed bank, The Global Crop Diversity Trust is providing funding so that a diversity of all crops will be secure forever – even in the event of an asteroid or nuclear disaster.

Link to a video about the Seed Vault on the National Geographic website.

To read about specific crop strategies, regional strategies, or to make a donation to this effort, visit http://www.croptrust.org.

Also, last week, the BBC World’s Earth Report aired a documentary about the vault. To read the transcript and watch the video, click here.

Entrance to Global Seed Vault- Credit Image Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust

Peggy Shea Andrews

It’s another first for Dr. Craig Venter, the world’s leading human genome research biologist. Released in the January 24th issue of Science, a team of 17 researchers at his J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has created the largest man-made DNA structure. By synthesizing the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium, JCVI has completed the second of three steps necessary to create the kinds of synthetic organisms that might one day recycle carbon using a modified photosynthesis process.

The third and final step will be for the JCVI team to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on this synthetically made genome. Speaking at Pop!Tech in 2006, Dr. Venter said this whole process would take two years, and the team seems well on their way. Whether genes move swiftly to become the design components of the future, as Venter suggests, or the field becomes logjammed by skeptics, he’s poised to be a leader for years to come.

You can read the press release here, and see pictures of the organism here.

Peggy Shea Andrews

While talk of AIDS has become nothing but white noise for many, Zinhle Thabethe, a counselor working on the frontlines of the South African HIV epidemic, is taking action. Through home visits, working with AIDS orphans, educating nurses and doctors, and singing in the internationally acclaimed HIV-positive Sinikithemba Choir, Zinny’s goal is to fight stigma by raising awareness, and to ensure that people with HIV get plugged into treatment and stay on treatment – all in one of the most resource-constrained environments in the world.

Now, National Geographic is recognizing Zinny’s extraordinary contributions by naming her one of the 2008 class of Emerging Explorers – individuals who represent the next generation of world-changing talent from many different fields.

We continue to work with Zinny and her colleague, Dr. Krista Dong of iTeach, on Project Masiluleke, a Pop!Tech Accelerator project focused on using mobile devices to improve HIV care in South Africa and beyond. And we join in congratulating Zinny on her National Geographic nomination.

There is so much content out there on the internet now, however, less than 1/3 of the material is available in any given language. So we partnered with an amazing company called dotSUB, to translate the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts in eight highly-relevant languages in the hopes of removing language as a barrier to globalization. The eight target languages (Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swahili, Farsi, Arabic, French and Spanish) were picked because they represent vital areas of the developing world.

We’ve released a preliminary batch of subtitled Pop!Casts including:

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and best-selling author; Bunker Roy, one of India’s most successful social entrepreneurs; Jesse Sullivan and Dr. Todd Kuiken, the world’s first bionic man and the doctor who helped him become so; Carolyn Porco, who leads the imaging team on the Cassini missions to Saturn; Zinhle Thabete, a front-line warrior in the battle against HIV in South Africa; and Richard Alley, the renowned paleoclimatologist and climate change expert.

Don’t worry — more is on the way!

dotSUB was founded by Michael Smolens, who has a lifetime of experience doing business in high risk emerging economies. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders went to work creating a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, ‘wiki’ type environment. This tool gives both professional and amateur viewers the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the video file. The same tool facilitates captioning video for the hearing-impaired. You should definitely check out dotsub.com to see the amazing array of videos that they have subtitled into more than 48 languages.

BusinessWeek has also written up an article about the Pop!Tech/dotSub Inititative which can be seen online.

To see the Pop!Casts, please visit www.poptech.org.