This week in PopTech: Strong silk, moviemaking accolades, and cognitive toolkits
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Thursday, January 20, 2011 UTC
There’s always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week’s highlights follows.
- 2009 PopTech Fellow Nigel Waller launched Movirtu to provide virtual mobile phone services for people earning less than two dollars a day. This week, Movirtu announced ManyME TM, a revolutionary service which enables users to manage multiple phone numbers on a single mobile device.
- The network of prominent scientists and intellectuals known as the Edge Foundation posed its annual question for 2011: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? PopTech’s network is well-represented in the 156 published responses. Keep an eye out for the following PopTech alum: Architect Neri Oxman, musician Brian Eno, biologist J. Craig Venter, internet guru Clay Shirky, geneticist George Church, psychologist Steven Pinker, wrongologist Kathryn Schulz and scientist Richard Dawkins.
- What’s stronger than steel? Spider silk. PopTech Ecomaterials Lab participant and molecular biologist Randolph Lewis and his mighty spider silk was featured this week as part of a four-part PBS series on NOVA called Making Stuff: Stronger. Watch the broadcast online here.
- Congratulations to 2010 PopTech speaker Laura Poitras, who was named Outstanding Director for The Oath at the Cinema Eye Honors earlier this week. The Oath tells the story of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo facing war crime charges.
- Fast Company gets to know SyynLabs, the geek darlings behind the massive Rube Goldberg contraption in OKGo’s sensational video, “This Too Shall Pass”. Syyn Labs’ Heather Knight brought the Rube Goldberg magic to Camden to kick off PopTech 2010.
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Image: I’ll Never Grow Up
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