Your regular host Molly Wood has a new podcast, “How We Survive,” exploring solutions to the climate crisis. In the latest episode, “The Resource,” Molly visits the Salton Sea region of California, its mud volcanoes, moving geyser, and lithium-rich brine — lithium, as in the lithium needed for batteries. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talks with Molly about how getting that brine out of the ground is really challenging.

Some major retailers are pulling some Chinese-made surveillance cameras and equipment off their shelves. That’s due to concerns the companies that make the equipment, Lorex and Ezviz, have ties to human rights abuses in China. They’re believed to be part of the vast surveillance network targeting Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group of over 12 million people in the country. This was brought to Home Depot’s attention by the publication TechCrunch, which also reported that Lowe’s and Best Buy stopped selling these products. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the nonprofit New America think tank and a research scholar at Yale.  

As we often say on this show, the internet is everything. But for many people, the only place to get access to the internet is the library. That’s a problem on some tribal lands, where many of the libraries are excluded from federal broadband subsidies because they don’t technically fit the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of a library. The FCC has proposed expanding its definition and will hear from tribal librarians and other stakeholders at a roundtable coming up on Wednesday. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talks to fellow Marketplace reporter Savannah Maher, who has been covering this story.

A lot of NASA’s work has to do with what happens here on Earth, especially as we work to track and respond to the climate crisis. And at NASA’s earth sciences division, much of of the data collected by future missions will be stored in the cloud, hosted by Amazon. That’s partly because the agency needs more, well, space. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Kevin Murphy, the chief science data officer for NASA.

For years, cryptocurrency has been simmering at the edges of the financial system, viewed by many as kind of a fad. Lately, though, it seems like crypto is having a moment. This week, an exchange-traded fund that tracks Bitcoin futures debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. Bitcoin, a pretty volatile asset, has now been accepted, to some degree, by one of the oldest and most traditional marketplaces in the world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Gil Luria, a technology strategist at D.A. Davidson, who says there several reasons 2021 is becoming a turning point for crypto.