Episodes

  • Reinventing Mining to Power the World
    Sep 12 2024

    Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy will require huge amounts of copper, lithium, and other metals. Kurt House is the co-founder and CEO of KoBold Metals. The company recently made a huge copper discovery in Zambia, and is looking for other metals in other places. Kurt's problem is this: How do you use AI – machine learning, data science – to find the metals we'll need for the energy transition?

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    41 mins
  • Inventing a Vaccine for Bees
    Sep 5 2024

    Dalial Freitak and Annette Kleiser are the co-founders of Dalan Animal Health, a company that has brought to market the first vaccine for insects. Their problem is this: How do you turn a discovery about insect immune systems into a vaccine that can protect the bees we need to grow everything from almonds to blueberries?

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    35 mins
  • A Better Way to Make the Chemicals in Everything
    Aug 29 2024

    Sean Hunt is the co-founder and CTO of Solugen, a company that sells around $100 million a year of industrial chemicals. Sean's problem is this: How do you make the chemicals that go into everything around us -- our food, our clothes, our cars -- without using fossil fuels?

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    39 mins
  • How Refrigeration Changed the World
    Aug 8 2024

    Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day.

    Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.

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    44 mins
  • Detecting Deepfakes With AI
    Aug 1 2024

    As generative AI tools improve, it is becoming easier to digitally manipulate content and harder to tell when it has been tampered with. Today we are talking to someone on the front lines of this battle. Ali Shahriyari is the co-founder and CTO of Reality Defender. Ali's problem is this: How do you build a set of models to distinguish between reality and AI-generated deepfakes?

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    39 mins
  • Turning Old Cans Into Clean Energy
    Jul 25 2024

    Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and surprisingly energy dense. Peter Godart is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy. Peter's problem is this: How can you use aluminum as a source of clean, renewable energy?

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    37 mins
  • Moneyball, Soccer, and the Gap Between Analytics and the Real World
    Jul 18 2024

    Sarah Rudd is the co-founder and CEO of the soccer analytics company src | ftbl (It’s pronounced “Source Football.”) Sarah’s problem is this: How do you model a sport as fluid and complex as soccer and translate the analytical insights from the model into meaningful changes on the pitch?

    This is the third and final episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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    41 mins
  • Using Computer Vision to See What Coaches Can’t
    Jul 11 2024

    Jimmy Buffi is the CEO and co-founder of Reboot Motion, which uses biomechanics to help athletes in Major League Baseball and the NBA. Jimmy's problem is this: How do you turn data about how professional athletes move into knowledge that helps them perform better?

    This is the second episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.

    Music: Let's Have Some Fruit (The Fruit Song) by J Buffi

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    42 mins