Innovators Videos

What could make a more flavorful wine? The answer might be in composting food waste. Bob Shaffer is an agronomist who consults for Napa and Sonoma county vineyards. Through scientific soil...

6 | November 4, 2009 8:42am

San Francisco, with a 72% recycling rate and a goal of zero waste to landfill by 2020, is being called one of the 'greenest cities' in the U.S. Jared Blumenfeld, director of the department of the...

1 | October 20, 2009 4:00pm

What if you no longer needed a screen, mouse, and keyboard to use a computer? Siftables creator, David Merrill, shows us how individual, cookie cutter-sized tiles that use motion sensing,...

6 | October 7, 2009 1:56pm

President Obama predicts there will be 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. But what will the infrastructure look like to run these vehicles? Coulomb Technologies CEO Richard Lowenthal...

15 | September 30, 2009 10:32am

What if we could forecast outbreaks the same way we do hurricanes? Epidemiologist Nathan Wolfe ventures to the far-flung reaches of Africa, China and Asia to track how devastating diseases take...

2 | September 23, 2009 11:00am

Architect Eric Corey Freed wants every building to be a 'green' building. Inspired by his childhood idol Frank Lloyd Wright, Freed's goal is to renovate existing homes and structures to be more...

September 14, 2009 8:09am

How does a woman in a remote village in India get the information she needs for her ailing child? Through the use of cheap and increasingly accessible mobile phones and voice based applications...

2 | August 28, 2009 4:14pm

NASA scientist Jonathan Trent is developing a smarter way to turn algae into oil. He's created plastic osmotic containers that will float below the surface of the ocean, grow algae, and then help...

23 | August 25, 2009 2:10pm

Will algae fuel the car of tomorrow? Harrison Dillon, CTO of Solazyme is growing strains of algae to produce various kinds of renewable oils. He hopes that over the next few years, people will...

5 | August 12, 2009 8:14am

Say goodbye to the utility man coming by your house and reading your meter to calculate your energy usage. Raj Vaswani, CTO of Silver Spring Networks and his team are developing new technologies...

2 | July 24, 2009 8:51am

Has the Star Trek Universal Translator arrived? Kristin Precoda, a speech translation researcher at SRI International demos a new translation system. Originally designed for the military to...

12 | July 20, 2009 10:06am

How will we find the cure for Swine Flu? Jon Mirsalis and biosciences team at SRI International are working on the development of drugs to fight infectious diseases like HIV, Malaria, Tuberculosis...

1 | June 25, 2009 9:20am

What will smart homes look like in the future? Venture capitalist Paul Holland and his wife Linda Yates are in the throes of construction on the greenest home in the United States. They're using...

2 | June 17, 2009 8:41am

Robotic wall climbers assigned to military surveillance? Harsha Prahlad has developed a smart technology called electro-adhesion. The way it works, mechanical robots are clamped to walls using...

3 | June 9, 2009 8:43am

A robot in every operating room? Tom Low leads a team of researchers and engineers working on the next generation of medical robots to be used in laparoscopic surgery. Pioneered in the 1980s by...

3 | June 4, 2009 8:31am