Motherboard's Upgrade Series: the Internet Box Set

With Motherboard’s first season of Upgrade officially in the books, it seems high time to release all the episodes in one place. With Upgrade, we set out to find some of the most forward-thinking innovators who are solving our environmental problems. From schools of robotic fish to weather-altering lasers, these six episodes all highlight eco-solutions developed with an emphasis on clever tech. Enjoy the episodes below.

Two years ago, the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill reminded us all of what “disaster” really means. The prodigious amount of oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico was all but impossible to clean up effectively, a problem that caught the attention of a young engineer named Cesar Harada. Discovering that the current fleet of oil skimmers only sucked up about 3 percent of the oil spilled, Harada left MIT to develop Protei, an open source, autonomous robotic oil skimmer. In this first episode of Upgrade, Motherboard visited Harada in Rotterdam to check out his designs for robotic sailboats that, with the help of an open community of developers, could end up autonomously monitoring and cleaning our oceans.

Forget oil, the real resource we’ll be warring over in the future will be water. 2011 saw numerous locales worldwide suffer at the hands of drought. Unfortunately, traditional cloud-seeding techniques are costly, unreliable and environmentally dangerous. With this in mind, French physicist Jérôme Kasparian has studied the effects of blasting extremely high powered laser pulses into the atmosphere. With the help of a team of researchers, Kasparian has developed a laser system that can actually induce precipitation. Motherboard paid him a visit in Geneva to check out his progress and see if lasers will one day make it rain.

Have you ever sat back, given a long gaze at a city skyline or even your own house, and said “This all seems so unnatural”? Mitchell Joachim has. Joachim is an architect at Terreform ONE / Planetary ONE, a Brooklyn-based architecture firm and urban think tank that is the first of its kind to work in tandem with a biology lab. Joachim, a TED fellow whom Wired once called "one of the fifteen people the president should listen to," uses organic and synthetic materials to imagine cities that are designed in accordance with nature and all of our waste is put to use. By trying to put the suburb to bed, Joachim and his team are pushing us towards a future where our exploding population doesn’t feel like that much.

There once was a time when packaging materials were all nasty chemical concoctions like Styrofoam and mushrooms were just those wiggly things on a combo pizza. Ecovative Design cofounder and CEO Eben Bayer is happy to see those days go. Ecovative produces biodegradable and home-compostable materials from farm waste and mushrooms, which they literally grow into forms to make their concrete-like packaging. The company claims their materials outperform Styrofoam from both an environmental and performance perspective. In the fourth episode of Upgrade, Motherboard popped in to Ecovative’s Green Island, New York headquarters to talk ’shrooms and how to make a dent in the 1,400 tons of Styrofoam that end up in U.S. landfills daily.

The oceans are simply too vast to monitor with conventional, manned techniques. At the same time, without a good three-dimensional picture of water conditions, we’re often very slow to respond to environmental problems. Dr. Huosheng Hu of the University of Essex has a solution: He’s developed scads of robotic fish that can monitor the sea all on their own. His goal is to unleash fleets of autonomous fish — they can already dock, charge and even organize themselves — that endlessly patrol our waters to pick up on pollution as early as possible. Motherboard dropped in on Huosheng’s lab in Essex to talk about the value of biomimicry and a future where autonomous fish help keep our waters safe.

You might say Bertrand Piccard has quite a family history to live up to: In the 1930s, his grandfather Auguste Piccard attached a high-flying balloon to a pressurized aluminum gondola and set a record by climbing to more than 50,000 feet. Bertrand’s oceanographer and engineer father in 1960 made history as part of the only manned exploration of the Challenger Deep, the deepest place in the ocean. In fact, the Piccards are so famously adventurous that they inspired Gene Roddenberry's Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek fame. So what was Bertrand to do to keep up with his family’s heritage? Why, fly a solar plane around the world of course. Motherboard caught up with him to talk about Solar Impulse, his 4,000 pound plane with a 200 foot wingspan, and how he plans to change the future of aviation.