Most people see urban centers as the antithesis of nature, but nature always seems to find a way. That’s why we have many thriving ecosystems in the heart of our cities. You may not notice them at first, but they’re there if you look–and with a little help they’ll become truly special places. Natural Areas Conservancy is a New York, NY based non-profit that “works with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to protect, restore, and manage expansive natural areas already within the city’s urban park system.” Whether it’s forests, wetlands, rivers, streams, or meadows, they’re aiming to create a better “home to more than 2000 species of plants, and host to 350 species of birds.”
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This morning I got to do something pretty cool. A friend who is doing research on trout in the Au Sable River invited me to go electrofishing with him. What does that mean? We put electrified probes in the water, stun fish, and then net them. What’s the point? To surgically implant telemetry devices that allow the fish to be tracked so that my friend can write a thesis on their behavior. All of the tracking gear that he uses is produced by Advanced Telemetry Systems. They are an Isanti, MN based company that aims “to provide researchers and managers in ecology and biology with animal tracking and monitoring products of the highest quality and reliability.”
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Over the past year I’ve started to get really interested in upland bird hunting. It’s a sport with amazing tradition, but it’s an old man’s sport. It’s hard for a young guy to get started. That’s why I’m heading to Pheasant Fest in Milwaukee today. It’s the national convention of Pheasants Forever, a St. Paul, MN based non-profit that is “dedicated to the conservation of pheasants, quail and other wildlife through habitat improvements, public awareness, education and land management policies and programs.”
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I’ve been on vacation in Aruba for the past 10 days or so, and I’ve gone fishing every day. The fishing has been decent, but I’ve also see all kinds of wildlife from pelicans and sea turtles to eels and frigate birds. It’s amazing how much life a marine environment can support and what you can learn just from experiencing the ecosystem. This need not be formal education, but it can be. The Chincoteague Bay Field Station is a Wallops Island, VA based non-profit that makes a marine environment academic by providing “outstanding multi-disciplinary, educational and research opportunities that celebrate the rich natural, cultural, economic, and technological resources of the mid-Atlantic Coastal region through field-based and hands-on learning, often in affiliation with multiple public and private partners.”
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Garçon went on his first hunt yesterday (he still needs to grow into his tracking collar). A friend of mine took us along with his well-experienced dog to try to find some grouse and woodcock. The search was unsuccessful, but Garçon loved running through the woods and learning to use his nose. He’s more of an upland dog, but I hope at some point we’ll be able to hunt ducks together too–because I love ducks. Many of you are probably asking, “If you love ducks so much, why would you want to shoot them?” The simple answer is because they’re delicious, but the more complicated answer is that the people who utilize a resource are often the ones who care for it the most. Without an organization like Ducks Unlimited, our waterfowl population wouldn’t be close to what they are today. The Memphis, TN based non-profit has become “the world’s leader in wetlands and waterfowl conservation” because a small group of hunters were worried about the loss of wetlands habitat and what it would do to the ducks.
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My knowledge of anatomy is a mashup of what I learned in my college Meat Science class (it’s amazing how similar animals are to humans when it comes musculature) and what I’ve picked up from reading about professional athlete’s injuries. Luckily, I’m not a doctor and don’t have any intention of being one. Otherwise I’d have to hit the books hard. Firecracker would probably be my best bet. They are a Cambridge, MA based company that has built the “most advanced learning platform for the next generation of Physicians.” If you guessed that it’s not made with dead trees, you would be right. Firecracker is also the name of their app that can help you prep for both Pre-Med and Med School.
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I may be a dog person (this is my puppy Garçon), but I love big cats. They are the ultimate land-based predators, which is why I hope to one day see a mountain lion in the wild (from the safety of a car though). The problem with big cats is that there is one predator higher up in the food chain: us. Whether it’s protecting livestock, killing them for their fur, or infringing on their habitat, humans have had a severely negative impact on populations of big cats across the world. It’s time to make up for an ugly past, and that’s why Panthera exists. They are a New York, NY based non-profit that “is the world’s leading conservation organization devoted exclusively to the protection of wild cats.” Panthera got its started in 2006, and since then has been working to protect 37 species of wild cats.
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Last year I was lucky enough to spend a day in Yellowstone National Park. It was a short trip, but I saw all kinds of wildlife including elk, bison, and a fox. One thing that becomes obvious almost instantly once you’re in the park is that there are a lot of people coming into close contact with wild animals. This is kind of the point, but it can have bad consequences for the wildlife. Many animals can become injured or orphaned, and that’s when the Yellowstone Wildlife Sanctuary steps in. They’re a Red Lodge, MT based non-profit that is “the only public refuge in Montana to house native animals that cannot be returned to the wild due to injury or habituation to humans.”
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My goal is to help you with career exploration–to introduce you to career opportunities that you didn’t know existed. We’re nearly 2,000 employers in, and we’ve already helped a lot of people land amazing jobs and internships. But in the grand scheme of exploration, finding cool companies to work for just isn’t that impressive. There’s no danger, and there’s almost no chance of finding something truly new. Real explorers are in The Explorers Club, a New York, NY based “international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.” It’s a non-profit that was founded in 1904 and exists to promote “the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space by supporting research and education in the physical, natural and biological sciences.”
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I was lucky enough to spend a week in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks this summer. Our national park system is truly one of our country’s treasures–it’s one thing that the federal government actually seems to do really well. However, our national parks also benefit significantly from the help of volunteers. One organization that has done a lot of great work is American Conservation Experience. They’re based in Flagstaff, AZ, and they offer “opportunities for both American and International volunteers to take part in challenging outdoor projects in many of the most beautiful National Parks, National Forests and wilderness areas in the Western United States.”
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Last week in my write up on the U.S. Association Of Former Members Of Congress, I touched on the idea that our politicians might be more effective after they retire from public service. I think this is especially true for members of Congress who have no term limits and constantly need to worry about being reelected, but I think that presidents face similar pressures to follow the polls. Once they’re out of office, former politicians are free to work on the problems that they think are important. For President Clinton this work manifests itself through the William J. Clinton Foundation, which is Little Rock, AR and New York, NY based non-profit organization that aims to “improve global health, strengthen economies worldwide, promote healthier childhoods, and protect the environment by fostering partnerships among governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and private citizens.”
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I’ve always had an amazing appreciation for wildlife, but after a week in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, it’s definitely grown. I’m completely amazed by how many species I was able to experience that were at one point on the brink of extinction. While the federal government has done a fantastic job in that particular situation, they’re not able to act in the same way across the world. That’s where organizations like World Wildlife Fund come in. WWF is a Washington, DC non-profit that “has been protecting the future of nature” for the last 50 years. They work in 100 countries and have more than 5 million members across the world. The organization’s vision is “to build a future in which people live in harmony with nature.” That’s a tall task considering our history, but there are certainly signs of hope.
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Last weekend we took a look at International Rivers and how they are ““at the heart of the global struggle to protect rivers and the rights of communities that depend on them.” While rivers are my favorite body of water, they aren’t by any means the only ones that that are essential to the livelihood of nearby communities (and it’s not just communities in the developing world that are so dependent on bodies of water). That’s why we’re going to take today to look at a non-profit organization that aims to protect a single watershed. Heal the Bay is devoted to protecting and reviving Santa Monica Bay, “the centerpiece of Los Angeles’ beach culture, and the geographic center of the LA region.” They’re based in Santa Monica, CA, and they’re focused on both the aesthetic and economic reasons for healing the bay.
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When my fiancée and I were invited to a wedding in Jackson Hole, I insisted that we go and stay for at least a week. I had been once before when I was about 12, and I’ve been dying to get back. I’m here, and I love it. There’s nothing like waking up and looking out the window to see huge mountains. Since I’m in Jackson, WY, I decided to see if there are any interesting non-profits here with internship opportunities. My search immediately led me to the Teton Science Schools, which is an organization that has “been educating, training, and inspiring students about the natural world” since 1967. They serve people of all ages, and their focus is quite obviously on using the amazing natural surroundings to teach science.
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Have you ever had a nasty cut, scrape, or blister that didn’t quite need stitches but needed more than a band-aid? I’ve had plenty, and my go-to remedy is New-Skin. It’s super painful to put on, and it smells terrible, but it does the job. While New-Skin is a great at home solution, it’s not meant for surgical situations (at least as far as I know). There’s a whole class of surgical sealants, and Neomend is an Irvine, CA based company that is innovating in the space with their Progel technology platform. It’s “a resorbable hydrogel with a unique, accessible molecular structure that makes it ideal for development of novel medical devices like surgical sealants and adhesion barriers.” Hopefully you know what that means, because I don’t.
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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to spend as much time as possible enjoying nature. Along the way I’ve learned a lot of stuff without realizing it. For instance, I can tell you about the the entire lifecycle of mayflies or the spawning behavior of salmon. Yes, I’ve read about those things to supplement my knowledge, but you can’t really understand how it all works until you see it in action. That’s the premise that NatureBridge is based on. They’re a San Francisco, CA based non-profit that has spent the last 40 years introducing “1 million young people to the wonder and science of nature in the world’s best classrooms—our national parks.”
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Neuroscience is a word that is about as intimidating as astrophysics. Most people have no idea what it means, but they’re pretty sure that its definition is over their head. The truth is that neuroscience is simply the study of the brain and nervous system. That’s not to say it’s a simple science, but it’s a science that covers equipment that we all have. With that said, neuroscience gets a bit complex as it draws from “other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, medicine and allied disciplines, philosophy, physics, and psychology.” (Here’s the Wikipedia article on Neuroscience.) The Society for Neuroscience is a Washington, DC based non-profit member organization for the scientists and physicians who study the brain and nervous system.
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I don’t think that I’ve had a frozen dinner since I forced my mom to buy me Kid Cuisine in the early 90s. If I’m going to eat something unhealthy, it should at least taste good, right? Clearly I’m biased against frozen meals (maybe because I consider myself a pretty good cook), but I shouldn’t write them all off as unhealthy and unpalatable. That’s especially true because one the nation’s leading frozen food brands is all vegetarian and mostly organic. Amy’s Kitchen was founded in 1987 by a couple looking for a way to provide for a new baby. They started in their home with a vegetable pot pie, and since then the Petaluma, CA based business has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
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“Yo I’m a Raptor doin’ what I can gonna eat everything till the appearance of man. Yo yo yo, see me, I’m living below the soil, I’ll be back but I’m comin’ as oil!” That has to be one of my favorite lines from Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie that I saw dozens of time as a kid. I thought it was funny even though I had no idea what it meant (probably because Robin Williams saying anything is funny). Mrs. Doubtfire was on tv recently, and I saw the scene for the first time in a long time and finally got it. Disappointingly, petroleum doesn’t actually come from dinosaurs, but from decomposed single-celled organisms that existed 10s or 100s of millions of years ago. That means that oil is a non-renewable resource… or at least it used to be. Solazyme is a San Francisco, CA based company that has “pioneered an industrial biotechnology platform that harnesses the prolific oil-producing ability of micro algae.” Yes, they are actually synthesizing real oil that can be refined and used to power things. They feed the algae sugar, so as long you can keep growing sugar (from a variety of sources), you can keep producing oil.
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For the most part illness is an individual problem. You get sick, you go to a doctor if it’s serious enough, and it eventually gets better with or without treatment. But sometimes your illness can be a public health issue. If you get something like influenza or food poisoning, there’s a good chance that information about your illness could help lots of other people stay healthy. At times like these “when new health risks emerge or well-known problems re-emerge, it is public health laboratories that analyze the threat and provide the answers needed to mount an effective response.” The Association of Public Health Laboratories is a non-profit organization based in Silver Spring, MD that “works to strengthen laboratories serving the public’s health in the US and globally.” The organization’s membership spans across all kinds of laboratories ranging from the public health labs mentioned in their name to environmental and agricultural labs. Many are government labs, but there are also corporate and non-profit labs included.
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Last night I started watching Planet Earth and ended up staying awake later than I intended. This morning the same channel was on, and I ended up watching documentaries on Yellowstone. There aren’t many things that I find more fascinating than nature, so it’s easy for me to get caught up in these kinds of shows. It’s also why I think the work of The Nature Conservancy is so important. They’re an international non-profit organization based in Arlington, VA that is “the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.” The Nature Conservancy was founded in 1951, and since then they have grown their membership to more than 1 million people. The organization’s huge size gives it a ton of power and has enabled it to do some really amazing work.
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When I was a kid, there were two kinds of visits to the doctor’s office: ones where I had to get a shot and ones where I didn’t. Children will never be able to understand how lucky they are to have the opportunity to get poked in the arm with a needle so that they can be vaccinated. Tomorrow’s kids will be even luckier to get poked if Liquidia Technologies keeps innovating. They’re a Research Triangle Park, NC based company that is “developing engineered particle-based vaccines and therapeutics that have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of human life.” Liquidia Technologies was founded in 2004 based on discoveries made by a Professor Joseph DeSimone of UNC, and since then they’ve raised a ton of financing.
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When I think of the energy industry, I think of big machines like oil drills, windmills, and coal elevators. Microbes and genetics just don’t come to mind. Synthetic Genomics is a company that is aiming to change that. Energy is just one of the industries that they are working to disrupt as they develop “breakthrough genomic-driven solutions for major global issues.” Right now Synthetic Genomics, which is based in La Jolla, CA, has put a heavy emphasis on working with the energy and chemical industries because there is so much potential for gain–especially in terms of the environment; however, they’re also working on things like food production, human health, and water availability. It’s all about “turning novel science into life-changing solutions.”
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I used to wake up every day, look out the window, and see the Chicago skyline. In my new place, I wake up and see a whole bunch of trees. Though I know I’ll miss being able to watch the city from a few hundred feet up, it’s a nice change. Who doesn’t love trees? Well, the people at the Sacramento Tree Foundation probably love trees even more than the average person. The Sacramento Tree Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, CA that is “working to grow healthy, livable communities in the Sacramento region by empowering people to plant, protect, and learn about trees.” They have a goal of planting 5 million trees in the area by 2025. Though they have a long way to go, they’ve already gotten off to a great start.
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The idea of having my genome sequenced kind of freaks me out. I’m certainly warming to it, but I don’t like the idea of finding out about a deep, dark family secret or the fact that I’m predisposed to some kind of cancer from a DNA test. I know it’s irrational, and I know that I’ll overcome it eventually. I fully expect that within 20 years every child born in the U.S. will have his or her genome sequenced at birth. So maybe I should just the bite the bullet and get my genome sequenced. But if I’m going to do that, I need your help. The other day I came across a post about Palo Alto, CA based DNAnexus on Hacker News (an awesome site for programmers and people interested in startups). The post was focused on the company’s referral program that offers $20,000 and a full genome sequencing to anyone who refers a software engineer that they hire. That clearly caught my attention (I am trying to run a business here), but, more importantly, it introduced me to what DNAnexus is doing. A single genome contains over 100 gigabytes of data. Storing and analyzing this data requires some serious hardware, especially if you want to do it on a large scale. DNAnexus is an “early-stage software technology company that aims to become the data platform of the genome era.”
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Everything that I learned about DNA I learned from the O.J. Simpson trial and Jurassic Park. That’s not entirely true, but it’s scarily close. DNA analysis seemed so futuristic back then, but now it’s an everyday type thing. Still, there continues to be a ton of innovation in the world of molecular DNA diagnostics, and one of the leaders is OpGen, which used to be headquartered in Madison, WI, but is now located in Gaithersburg, MD. OpGen’s business is based on “a unique and powerful Optical Mapping Technology that rapidly generates high-resolution, ordered, whole genome restriction maps from single DNA molecules.” I’d explain that to you if I could, but I think you’re better off reading OpGen’s explanation of Optical Mapping.
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I’m in St. Louis for the weekend, mostly to watch my girlfriend’s little sister’s volleyball tournament, but I’m looking for other cool things to do since it’s my first time here. Yesterday I got to visit the Saint Louis Zoo, which is fantastic. (And I promise I didn’t act like this kid.) I got to see monkeys, giraffes, zebras, lions, penguins, gorillas, elephants, somali wild asses, and a whole range of other animals that I’d never even heard of before. I even got to see the mountain nyala that makes an appearance in the zoo’s logo. I was really impressed with the Saint Louis Zoo—it has a wonderful layout and an amazing collection of animals. The best part, though, was that we got to see feeding time for the grizzly bears. It may sound barbaric, but it was nothing of the sort. We watched as two of the laziest bears that I’ve ever seen would catch oranges in their mouths and then suck out the meat while leaving behind the rind. What made the experience even better was that it was free. Saint Louis Zoo is a “free zoo,” so all you have to pay for is parking.
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It used to be that if you wanted to build something, the hard part would be actually building it. These days the biggest hold up in construction and development is often environmental compliance. There are a multitude of regulations that limit what you can build, where you can build it, and how you can build it. The rules are often complex and they can vary greatly between jurisdictions. Sapphos Environmental is a Pasadena, CA based company that helps its clients resolve “planning, resource management, and environmental compliance issues through the development of pragmatic solutions and exemplary client service.” In other words they offer a range of services that ensure that development projects are done in an environmentally sensitive and compliant way.
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Today marks the end of vacation for a lot of people. Tomorrow morning’s blaring alarm will mean back to work or back to school, and the great feeling of the New Year will start to wear off. I have a couple of days left, but I’m not too excited to go back to Chicago’s predicted 19-degree weather on Tuesday night. But what if going back to work or school meant returning to an island in the Bahamas? That would change some attitudes, which is why you should envy the teachers and students at The Island School on Cape Eleuthra. The Island School calls itself “a mind, body, and spirit journey that takes students away from traditional high school curriculum and invites them to confront authentic challenges” where “classes are designed to allow first-hand engagement with the people and environment of The Bahamas.” It’s most definitely not a vacation, but it’s education in a far more welcoming environment.
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Ten days ago we took a look at Rodale Institute, a non-profit that is “dedicated to pioneering organic farming through research and outreach.” We talked about how industrial farming has led to amazing boosts in productivity, but it’s also created a lot of problems. Marrone Bio Innovations is a Davis, CA based company that is taking a natural approach to one specific area of agriculture: pest control. They’re aiming to be “the world leader in natural product innovation” by making “natural, effective, safe, environmentally friendly products the mainstream future of pest management.” Usually you don’t hear organic and pesticide in the same sentence, but Marrone Bio Innovations’ business is predicated on bringing the two together.
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