Happy Thanksgiving! Excited (and thankful for the emerging awesomeness): The Boston Awesome Foundation has just got word from Lee Altman, our November Fellow, that she’s made an initial experimental pilot launch of the pollution-cleaning phytoremediation pod in Brooklyn Bridge Park. As with most experiments, still some details to be worked out, but things are coming along. The tentative date (they’re still waiting on approval from the city parks dept) for the next prototype launch, if you’re interested in attending and meeting Lee, will be on Sunday, December 6th. For updates and details on this Sunday, Lee’s set up a Facebook invite so you can keep posted on what’s going on. If you’re in town, definitely drop by! You can follow the continuing updates on the Eco-Pod Armada project (and check out more images as the project comes together) on the handy dandy website that Lee has set up here.

Sorry for the delay, this month’s granting process ended up taking slightly longer than originally expected, but, for reasons that will become obvious in a few weeks, we’ve been swamped, cooking up some upcoming things that will hopefully do well by forwarding the interest of Awesome in the universe. It’s gonna be great. Stay tuned. Today, Awesome Foundation Boston is tremendously excited today to announce that they are awarding their November Awesome Fellowship to Lee Altman, an architect and urban designer working out of New York City. With a team of scientists, Lee has plans to assemble a complete armada of remote-controlled pods, and set them loose with a series of pilots into the notoriously polluted East River of New York City. The pods will carry a net of plants to trail behind them in the water, specially selected to perform phytoremediation — naturally filtering water through the root mass and the absorbing the toxins from the water. Her hope is to build these launches into a regular community event with plans available online that will allow anyone to build one themselves (the designs are great and lightweight: initial calculation suggests that each ship can be made for $110) Our funding will go… read more →