A flying jellyfish made by Festo, the German engineering firm that borrows designs from nature, took to the air over the Pop!Tech crowd in the Camden Opera House this morning. There’s video of the event here.

UPDATE: A few shots of the Festo engineers disassembling their contraption below.

The AirJelly whole

The wings (or fins) are taken off

A vacuum is used to deflate the AirJelly, air-mattress style

Deflating

If gun violence is a contagious disease, these “Interrupters” are the Purell, preventing transmission. They jump in during high-risk conflicts to defuse things and make sure no one gets shot. Brave work. And they’re the only ones who can do it; an outsider would have zero credibility and no sense of the context of a conflict.

More about the “Interrupters” here. Gary’s work was written up in the NYT in May.

Pop!Tech has cultivated one helpful effort called Project Masiluleke.

The first component of the “Project M” idea is to append little snippets of health information (like an AIDS info hotline number or a reminder about a clinic appointment) to short text messages that South Africans are already sending and recieving. In a test, these little text “footers” tripled the number of calls into an AIDS hotline.

The second part of Project M is to produce and distribute simple, user-friendly, home HIV tests (designed by frog). With nurses and doctors in such short supply, home testing is the only way to provide tests on a meaningful scale. A home kit also allows people to test themselves without facing the stubborn stigma that surrounds AIDS in South Africa. Here’s what the test kit looks like.

The text message component is being tested with the help of MTN, South Africa’s biggest mobile provider. The kits have been designed but it looks like production and distribution hasn’t been quite worked out yet. Nevertheless, Project M does seem to address a lot of the challenges that have made AIDS such an intractable problem in South Africa.

More about Project M here. There’s a video here.

Also, if anyone out there has a question for one of the Pop!Tech presenters, drop it in the comments and I’ll see if I can go get an answer in person.

The idea has been getting lots of attention. The New York Times picked it up, TreeHugger covers vertical farming regularly, and Scientific American did a story. A few architectural firms have produced concept designs for vertical farms, and the media coverage (like this post) invariably includes the exciting pictures. The NYT slideshow compiles some of the best images. All this hype obscures the hard part, though: building a vertical farm.

Despommier insists the technology is there. We can farm indoors with artificial soil or hydroponics or aeroponics already. And rooftop gardens are taking off, so the public may not regard the idea as completely crazy. But controlling the flow of air and nutrients, recycling the water, and controlling the energy costs of the whole operation (heating in winter is costly, for example) are big challenges.

Just now, at Pop!Tech, Despommier estimated that building a 5-story urban farm prototype would cost $20-30 million (and that’s on abandoned city land, not prime Manhattan real estate). So there’s another hurdle. But it’d be great to walk into an NYC deli and buy a BLT that was mostly grown in the stories above the storefront.

Dickson Despommier’s site is verticalfarm.com

In other words, easy access to Doritos, porn, or telecommunication isn’t necessarily a good thing, except for the profits of companies that sell them.

If this stuff sounds interesting, his 2005 book American Mania: When More Is Not Enough will probably be a great read. Similar themes are covered from a historian’s perspective in the later chapters of Daniel Lord Smail’s excellent book On Deep History and the Brain.

Saul Griffith just gave the first presentation at Pop!Tech. He’s an inventor, contributor to Make and Craft magazines, and a MacArthur “genius.”

Saul spent a few years meticulously tracking his own power footprint (he has technical reasons for keeping track of Watts rather than carbon). He factored in everything—home delivery of the NYT and electric toothbrush included.

That experience informed his latest project, a personal impact calculator called Wattzon.com. There are lots of mediocre personal “footprint” calculators out there; on first blush Wattzon looks like a really good one.

In the registration area, Yahoo is showing off their “Purple Pedals Project.” They’ve mounted a solar-powered camera on a bike (pictured). As you ride around, the camera takes a picture and uploads it to Flickr at 60-second intervals. You can then log in and see photos from your ride. I took the bike for a spin—what better way to check out the setting?

See the bike tour on Flickr here. Now you know what Camden looks like. More on the conference itself soon.