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

What’s the net impact of Pop!Tech?  I’ve been thinking about my time in Camden, Maine a lot lately - never more so than while I attended the 2007 Net Impact conference this past week in Nashville (see, pun very much intended.)  In all seriousness however, my trip to Tennessee prompted the following questions: what is the impact of Pop!Tech and what will it do next?

These questions are not accidental; the Net Impact conference’s theme this year was, in fact, What Will You Do Next?  With 1800 attendees and up to 16 sessions at a time (!) there is no one answer from Net Impact.  Despite the wide variety of experiences among attendees, the conference managed to communicate a clear theme: get it done. 

Part of that theme stems from the fact that Net Impact attracts mostly MBA students - they are all about starting a business or at least working with organizations that address social and environmental problems.  I saw MBAs eager to be the next Claire Broido Johnson (of SunEdison) or Paul Hudnut (of EnviroFit) - two perfect examples of people who are “doing it next” through their work. 

(Side note: check out Paul’s excellent blog, What’s a BOPreneur? and his report from Net Impact.)

Pop!Tech, on the other hand, is just beginning to dip into the “get it done” arena.  This year’s conference, The Human Impact, seemed to be a departure from previous events.  Quite a few attendees described previous Pop!Techs as gadget-fests, featuring the latest innovative products and concepts.  This year’s conference, on the other hand, gave a lot of stage-time to problems, mostly environmental degradation and persistent poverty.  I’m not sure the old-school Pop!Techies were happy with this shift, even though the conference did a marvelous job pointing out the innovative tools, models, and ideas that are indeed changing the world - and featured some great “get it done” types, like Jessica Flannery and Van Jones (among others.)

So, getting back to my original question, what is Pop!Tech’s net impact?  In many ways, it remains to be seen - it depends how the Pop!Tech Accelerator and the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative work, among other things.  These two initiatives are forays into the “get it done” space.  If they are successful, then Pop!Tech’s impact will grow.  If they hit some roadblocks, however, Pop!Tech may have jeopardized its hardcore audience in its effort to take its program to the next level.  (Side note: I’m confident that Andrew and co. can make it work.)

What will it do next?  For starters, Pop!Tech can continue its excellent programming.  I’d like to see invites to next year’s meeting go out to folks like Paul Hudnut and Claire Broido Johnson, for starters, as well as other get-it-done speakers at Net Impact - Cindy Cooper, Tim Prestero, Ben Powell, Cleve Justis, etc.

Ultimately, these are two vastly different conferences, but they can learn from one another.  Net Impact, in my opinion, can take a page from Pop!Tech’s book and sharply reduce the number of sessions and speakers - quality over quantity!  Not only that, but mandated, controlled networking - like Pop!Tech lunches - are the sorts of things that sets a conference apart from a series of lectures interspersed with a bag lunch.  Can you do Pop!Tech for 1800 MBAs in 2/3 of the time at 1/3 of the budget?  No - and I’m not asking Net Impact to.  But as Pop!Tech can learn from Net Impact, it goes the other way as well.

by Robert Katz, World Resources Institute

Excuse the delay in gathering the latest blog posts about Pop!Tech 2007. There has been so much wonderful traction on the web about the conference, so thank you to everyone who took the time to share your impressions, questions and even criticisms of the event. Pop!Tech in its purist form is about having a dialogs with people and your posts help us to do just that.

Here is just a sampling:

Christian Science Monitor, Sounds Iranian,TreeHugger, NPR, Conferenza, TrueTalk Blog, MobileActive, NextBillion.net, Wired, Down The Avenue, amGlobal, Boing Boing, Core77,Tiago Doria, MedeaMaterial , Paris Marishi, Emily’s Window, Boston Globe, and Fast Company
.

And you can also find more sites that have posted about Pop!Tech over at Technorati.

This weekend, Pop!Tech Balladeer Jonathan Coulton was featured in the New York Times Magazine article “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” . The article describes how the internet and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster) have changed the relationship between musician and fan. Rock stars need MySpace pages, blog entries, and they need to respond to fan-emails because–they need the fans. Today fans are expecting all these things. No wonder Jonathan has become a poster-boy for this New Music Paradigm. Besides being an extremely approachable human being, he is also a decidedly accessible rock star as well. In fact, his accessibility has become something of a vocation for him.

He says: “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” - he clicked his keyboard theatrically - “this is my job.”

Jonathan’s a kind of Internet Superstar. While standard means of sales and distribution such as retail CD sales, top 20 radio play or MTV appearances still prevail, the Internet has spurned a whole new channel for reaching audiences and has also created a new metric for determining popularity. Jonathan currently has 5,359 MySpace Friends alone - writing notes to him, emailing with him and, more often than not, getting a response back from him. Not too shabby!

Right now, “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” is the #2 most-emailed article on the newspaper’s site, which translates to a spike in traffic to
Coulton’s blog at www.jonathancoulton.com

The article is also chock full o’ links to videos of Coulton’s songs and a great NY Times exclusive “Decoding Code Monkey“.

Check out Jonathan’s Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his perfomance at the conference last year.

Thanks to Fast Company writer, Linda Tischler, who did a great little write up about the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts on their blog.

You can see it here.

Linda calls attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to score tickets to the conference and, rest assured, Pop!Tech will continue to make the content as widely available as possible to keep the conversation open to everyone. Our favorite quote from the Fast Company blog post:

“Can PopTech! scalpers be far behind?”

Imagining seedy scalpers prowling the charming streets of Camden whispering “you need two tickets?…I got two tickets…” — it tickles me.

Mathematics, finance and foresight guru, and Pop!Tech 2005 speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb is interviewed in this month’s Wired Magazine by James Surowiecki on the limits, biases and flaws in humanity’s ability to see the future. Nicholas’ latest book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (a follow-up to his also terrific 2005 cult hit, Fooled by Randomness) will be released on April 17th. Nicholas has an incredibly wide-reaching conceptual palette, and his insights are applicable to every human domain, from industry to homeland security, where human beings try to see what’s next. The Black Swan should be considered a 2007 must-read.

I flew up to Camden, ME this week to meet up with my fellow Pop!Techers. As I waited for my flight at New York’s JFK, I decided to ease myself into an outdoorsy frame of mind and bought the latest issue of Outside Magazine.

The banner across cover model, Governor Schwarzenegger’s chest, reads The Green Issue. In the magazine, they list some of the Green leaders and innovators from politics, health care, architecture and Hollywood.

Entrepreneur, explorer, eligible bachelor and Pop!Tech friend David de Rothschild is featured as one of these Enviro All-Stars. David is the founder of Adventure Ecology, a program that gets kids excited about adventure and fosters an appreciation for global responsibility.

“The environment is an area that requires a great deal of energy and optimism,” David says, “and, to my mind, kids have these features in abundance.”

Here is another feature from 2006 on David and how he started Adventure Ecology (also from Outside Magazine).

It was inevitable. After the extraordinary work done at the RIC with Dr. Todd Kuiken and patient Jessie Sullivan (featured in Alive From Pop!Tech) to create the world’s first bionic man, there had to be the world’s first bionic woman. That woman is Claudia Mitchell.

Back in 2004, former U.S. Marine Mitchell, severed her arm in a motorcycle accident. After reading about Kuiken’s work in a magazine, she was put in contact with the RIC and in 2005 underwent survey to fit her with a bionic limb. She is the fourth person–the first woman to undergo this kind of surgery.

“It is so rewarding for me as a physician and a scientist to lead research with the potential to positively impact the lives of amputees, including our U.S. service men and women,” said Dr. Kuiken. “On behalf of RIC, my team and I consider it a great honor to be able to serve our country and the individuals with disabilities around the world in this way.”

photo credit: Dayna Smith, Washington Post

These two images, separated by nearly half a century, represent the dreams of human exploration of space. Together they tell a story of lost opportunity and future promise.

Forty-five years ago today astronaut John Glenn completed an epoch space mission making him the first American to orbit the Earth. The Port Arthur News reported: “Glancing at the Earth at altitudes ranging from 100 to 160 miles, Glenn had a breathtaking panoramic view stretching 1,800 miles from horizon to horizon. He described the view as ‘tremendous’ and a ‘beautiful sight.’”

Just a few weeks ago the Cassini spacecraft snapped the above picture of Titan, the biggest of the 56 known moons orbiting Saturn and the second largest moon in our solar system. The Cassini spacecraft is the first to explore the Saturn system of rings and moons from orbit.

As planetary scientist (and 2005 Pop!Tech speaker) Carolyn Porco writes in a fabulous New York Times Op-Ed piece published today, in the 1960s the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating: plans were laid for the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars by the 1980s.

Instead, by abandoning the Apollo space program the country lost a capital investment of close to $160 billion and the collective knowledge of the tens of thousands of space engineers and scientists.

Yet Porco also paints an amazing vision: one of a revitalized NASA with plans to return to the Moon with a party of humans by 2020, a solar-powered human-tended research outpost by 2025 and preparations for a Mars trip soon after.

As she says: “Humanity’s future need not be confined to mere survival on our home planet. Other worlds beckon, we know how to reach them and we will once more be outward bound.”

It’s an ambitious and inspiring vision of the future–and one that maybe this time around, we can get right.

Bendable Concrete

In the vein of the Pop!Tech Sesson “Fabricating the Future“, Popular Mechanics has published some of the newest, coolest and most talked about tech concepts.

Some of the items listed include Bendable Concrete (pictured above) which are made of coated polymer fibers slide past each rather than cracking under pressure. The contrete has already been used to create expansion joints in a bridge in Michigan and has useful implicationf for structures in regions frequently hit by earthquakes.

See the full list here.