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Camden, Maine in October is full of vibrantly-colored fall leaves, a perfect fishing village harbor and quaint shops accented by white church steeples. Yet this charming New England town has become a hotspot for solving seemingly impossible tasks, thanks to the annual Pop!Tech Conference, which has pretty serious ambitions as to what can be accomplished in just a few days.

"Pop!Tech is a network of scientists, technologists, engineers, designers, artists and humanitarians who come together to collaborate, share ideas and work on new approaches to solving the world's big problems," says Andrew Zolli of Pop!Tech.

The theme of this year's conference is "Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures, And Impossible Breakthroughs," and organizers say they want to show how mistakes are often necessary steps for moving forward.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico would no doubt qualify as a serious mistake, but out of it comes some ideas to help deal with similar catastrophes in the future.

One new invention is the Seaswarm, a prototype swarm of autonomous robots with conveyor belts coated with a nano-particle material that can pick up 20 times its weight in oil while repelling water.

"During the summer in the Gulf, up to 800 skimmers were deployed in the water to try to recover some of the oil from the surface. Only 3 percent of the oil actually was collected," says Carlo Ratti of MIT.

Developers say each solar-powered robot requires just about the power of a 100-watt light bulb, allowing them to potentially be set off to clean on their own for weeks at a time.

Meanwhile, some architects say the way buildings generally shut nature out is one giant mistake.

In response, one company has developed ArchiLace, which creators say combines science, geometry and physics to create structures that fit in better with their environments by acting like a kind of skin.

"It's based on circles and we link circles together to make larger structures. A building's skin could open and close, depending on the amount of sunlight or water or air in the environment," says Mattias Gmachl of Loop.Ph.

Until then, the wiry structures are being used as a way to grow foliage and even food in tight-quartered urban environments.