Verge Detours

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy destroyed homes, wasted businesses, flooded tunnels, and submerged subways. The storm brought tens of thousands of lives to a halt, and revealed New York City’s vulnerabilities to severe climate conditions and rising waters.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

New York City, with its dense population and endless skyscrapers, is notoriously difficult to fight fires in. Firefighters depend on nearly 100,000 hydrants to do their work, but many of these hydrants are in disrepair. Vulnerable to misuse and exposed to extreme weather, the city’s hydrants are decayed, leaking, and corroding.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways. Check in for new dispatches every Wednesday.

San Francisco is home to one of the densest concentrations of startup tycoons in the country. But not everyone here enjoys the fruits of the tech revolution — the city also hosts 7,350 people living in the street or in shelters, and thousands more in deep poverty. In neighborhoods like the Mission District and the Tenderloin, multimillion-dollar condos stand in jarring contrast to a sizeable population that sleeps on sidewalks and lives out of shopping carts.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

Ferries play a critical role in the San Francisco Bay Area: they serve 7 million commuters annually, and provide the region with a service plan in case of emergency.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

On a Tuesday last summer, Erin Mandeville was at a CVS buying medicine for her five-month-old baby, Gabriel. Close to 4PM, she noticed her infant’s eyes roll back in quick succession. It was the first of Gabriel’s many episodes of infantile spasms that would follow.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

At MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Caleb Harper’s CityFARM demonstrates the future of food production. He grows plants through aeroponics, a system that produces plants without soil. Plants are hooked up to servers and misting mechanisms. LEDs fill in for the sun and ladybugs (purchased on Amazon) occasionally make an appearance. Plants are periodically sprayed with a nutrient-rich mist that provides optimal pH balance. Light and temperatures are closely monitored. The environment nurtures plants that have twice the nutrient density of their conventional counterparts. Lettuce, bok choy, and tomatoes have already fed the scientists in the lab.

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways.

We’ve looked far and wide, in Portland, New York, Boston, and San Francisco to find who is driving the next generation of innovation. These are the best and brightest going beyond just apps and gadgets, and they’re using science, technology, and design to attack all sorts of big problems and tough issues. We examine how groups are rethinking New York City’s approach to fighting flooding in New York City in a post-Sandy world, a new “wind wing” that could revolutionize boating, how realtime bike data is being used in urban planning, and much more.

About three years ago, there was an armed robbery in Tom Vogel’s driveway. Three women were walking down one of the quaint, narrow streets in New Orleans’ Lower French Quarter around 1AM when a car crept up and a man jumped out with a gun. The robber grabbed one of the women, ripped off her purse, slipped back into the car, and sped away. Vogel, his wife, and their two dogs noticed nothing. It was the perfect crime.

Except the whole thing was caught on camera.

On a Wednesday morning in September, two doctors, a veterinarian, and a gaggle of externs gathered in an operating room in a science lab deep in the dark, green woods on the west bank of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana.

On the table lay Junebug, an ordinary brown-and-black house cat under anaesthesia. Her eggs were about to be harvested in order to be combined with cells from a rusty-spotted cat, the smallest member of the feline family and one of the rarest cat species in the world.

Everyone in the state of Louisiana knows about the Bayou Corne sinkhole. It even shows up on Google Maps. But it still took a year for the crisis to get national attention, by which time the pit of brackish water was 24 acres across. And when the nation finally turned its eye on Bayou Corne, it wasn’t because of the Mother Jones expose. It was because of a YouTube video.

The video, “8/21/13 Slough in,” opens on a copse of hulking cedars at the edge of what appears to be a calm lake. Suddenly, voices in the background shout, “They’re moving!” as a dozen trees glide downward in unison, their tops shaking and quivering as they’re sucked beneath the surface. Soon, the water is still again.

After more than a century, steel production in Pittsburgh is all but over, leaving in its wake industries based on higher education, health care, academic research, and robots. Lots of robots. And when it comes to robots, the goal is more focused on building a framework for the future than an infrastructure from the past. And for that reason, the city has become a place where far-flung ambitions are supported and encouraged, even if the end goal is a long way off. Sometimes it’s as “far off” as the moon.

That’s where John Thornton wants to go. And while the president of the Pittsburgh-based space-robotics company Astrobotic Technology knows it might take some time to get there, he’s convinced it’s possible. The first step is to build a robot that’s designed to do the most practical things one might imagine about moon exploration: first, deliver exploratory robots to and from the lunar surface. And next, find water there.

In 1995, the Monongahela River Valley’s air was among the most polluted in the United States. This collection of municipalities, about 10 miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh, sat downwind from the Clairton Coke Works, which is a giant factory engaged in one of the dirtiest industrial processes known to civilization. It had been established decades earlier that people who grew up close to dense air pollution could suffer from chronic bronchitis, heart disease, premature death, lung cancer, and other debilitating ailments. If nothing changed in the Mon Valley, people would continue to suffer.

One major barrier existed between Mon Valley’s residents and clean, breathable air, however: the US Steel Corporation, one of the largest steel companies in the world. It wasn’t going to change anything without a fight. But a fight is exactly what it got.

This summer we’re traveling around the United States to see what’s driving the next generation of American innovation. We’ll be bringing you stories from Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans that explore how communities and companies are changing in our own backyards. This is the road less traveled. This is Verge Detours. Check back for new dispatches each Wednesday.

Ivan says the plant’s sound can be changed “leetle bit, but not much.†He says this, giggling, in a Russian accent, excited to show off an invention that may not be new to him, but it’s definitely new to everyone else.

For eight long years, the firefighters of Highland Park, Michigan, worked out of a warehouse. There was no red-bricked facade, no lanky Dalmatian. No freshly washed engines gleaming in the sun. No second-floor fire pole to descend in the dead of night to wailing sirens. Whatever idealized vision you have of firefighting, Highland Park is not it. Instead, picture a hulking, boxy building on the edge of an industrial park about six miles north of downtown Detroit. A small metal sign points the way, light blue with “Fire Dept” stenciled in all-caps white, the previous tenant’s name erased with spray paint. There’s a parking lot strewn with detritus (including a vagabond shopping cart) and beyond that train tracks and Interstate 75, the eight-lane highway that cuts through the heart of Detroit.

The Highland Park fire department opened nearly a century ago, in 1917, to serve the booming city. It once employed 84 firefighters; today it’s less than half that. Yet they answer, on average, 1,000 runs a year, including 150-200 structure fires. They fight car fires, respond to accidents, and answer calls about hazardous materials. They have one working ladder truck.

“Wouldn’t it be really cool to have a mind-controlled flamethrower?” ponders Matt Oehrlein. He’s perched on a solid wooden desk, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, his sneakers crossed at the ankle and swinging in the air. He’s thin and tall, sporting thick-rimmed black glasses and a shock of bushy brown hair. Around him rises what to an outsider looks like functional chaos: a warehouse-like, fluorescent-lit workshop where a traffic light hangs from the ceiling, a forklift idles nearby, and the shrill grind of a table saw cuts through the air.

Naturally, he already does have a mind-controlled flamethrower. It’s a precarious-looking wooden frame about 3 feet tall, topped by a pair of propane tanks. After some required assembly, Oehrlein dons a Bluetooth-enabled headset, steps on a safety switch, and begins to concentrate. Soon enough, satisfyingly whooshing balls of flame illuminate the street.

Detroit stories come in two kinds. There’s “the collapse of the Motor City” — the story of a once-great city now abandoned and bankrupt, its people gone or dug in, its once-grand buildings now majestic ruins, its streets overrun with stray dogs. And then there’s the story of “Detroit resurgent” — a hope as much as a truth, found on ubiquitous T-shirts emblazoned with “Detroit Hustles Harder” and “Detroit vs. Everybody.” It’s a hope embedded in the city’s motto, adopted way back in 1827: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus. “We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.” It’s a comeback story felt deep in the city’s blood and bones, and glimpsed through the ashes.

Shinola wants to be part of that hopeful story. You might recognize the name: it’s a resurrection, too, a brand of shoe polish popular around World War II, best remembered now through the phrase, “You don’t know shit from Shinola.” That earthy authenticity beckoned to Bedrock Manufacturing Co., a Dallas, TX, investment firm that revived the brand for its newest venture: an American-based watch manufacturer. So Shinola came to Detroit.

Kansas City, a metropolitan area of about 2 million that straddles the border between Kansas state and Missouri, seems an unlikely place to see what the future of internet connectivity could look like. But nearly three years after Google announced that this midwestern metropolis best known for jazz and barbecue would become the first place in the world to get the company’s experimental, ultra-high-speed broadband internet service — Google Fiber — Kansas City is looking more futuristic. Just not in the way Google or Kansas Citians originally anticipated.

That’s because Kansas City is also home to another experimental broadband internet service effort that hasn’t received nearly as much international attention as Google Fiber. Just over a year ago, right around the same time Google actually began installing Fiber here, a ragtag alliance of affordable-internet advocates including a jazz club proprietor, a Pentecostal Christian minister and a former Occupy Wall Street protester began building their own nonprofit wireless internet service specifically designed for low-income households, a system they call the KC Freedom Network. Even though it can’t match Google Fiber in terms of raw speed, the KC Freedom Network offers something to users they say Google does not: truly affordable internet.

At some point before 2013 ends, you’ll have celebrated your birthday, numerous other holidays, and many life-changing experiences good and bad. But whoever you are, on all those days, the people at Hallmark Cards hope their products were there too. Yet as people have embraced mobile phones and the internet as the dominant ways to communicate, the popularity of the paper greeting card has eroded, especially among young adult consumers.

In the US, total greeting card industry revenue declined 5.4 percent in the past five years, slightly better than the tailspin in newspaper ad revenue. For Hallmark, the shift away from dead-tree media is a multibillion-dollar conundrum: how can it continue to squeeze profits out of its dwindling paper card sales, while expanding its brand into lucrative digital products?

This summer we’re traveling around the United States to see what’s driving the next generation of American innovation. We’ll be bringing you stories from Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans that explore how communities and companies are changing in our own backyards. This is the road less traveled. This is Verge Detours. Check back for new dispatches each Wednesday.

There’s never been a better time to dine out, especially if you’re a picky eater. Besides Google, there’s no shortage of websites and apps to help a person find the best restaurants based on location, price, reviews, cuisine, and basically any other consideration imaginable. But now there’s an app for the people who are getting the food — or at least the meat — to the table.