The invention of synthetic fertilizer was one of the key breakthroughs of the 20th century. It’s the reason we can grow enough food to feed billions of people. It’s also super energy intensive. Karsten Temme is the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Pivot Bio. Karsten's problem is this: How can you use the tools of gene editing to get microbes in soil to provide more nitrogen for crops?

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Jennifer Holmgren is the CEO of LanzaTech. Her problem is this: How do you capture pollution from factories, feed it to bacteria, and get the bacteria to produce ethanol, which can become everything from polyester to jet fuel?

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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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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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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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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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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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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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