Here's an Idea

Fabrics haven’t changed all that much. For years, a shirt has quite simply been a shirt. But a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to add function to the fibers. What if your shirt, for example, contained electronics that could track your heartbeat or the heartbeat of your unborn child? A team from MIT and the Rhode Island School of Design created a fabric microphone, quite literally turning your clothing into a detector of sound. And the integration of electronics is subtle. The technology blends in with the material visually and it’s comfortable to the wearer, according to Dr. Yoel Fink, a professor at MIT and a lead researcher on the microphone project, who discusses the future for smart fabrics in this episode.

Pharma industries, transportation services, the energy sector, and mining companies are looking for a new place to do business, and it’s more than 200,000 miles from Earth.

The private sector is heading to the Moon – a world of potential resources like metal, water, and solar power, according to our guest on this week’s Here’s an Idea: Blair DeWitt, CEO and Co-founder of the Massachusetts-based Lunar Station Corporation.

“When you look at how private enterprise globally is starting to see the Moon the way we’ve seen it for years, they’re seeing it as our eighth continent,” said DeWitt in our Here’s an Idea podcast.

With his company’s data intelligence, DeWitt wants to answer two critical questions for this next generation of explorers: Where to look for resources, and how to get there.

For some people, a critical link – the one sending signals from brain to body, the one connecting thought to action – does not work properly, or in some cases, has been severed entirely.

Marcus Gerhardt, CEO and co-founder of the Salt Lake City, UT-based company Blackrock Neurotech, is creating a technology called a brain-computer interface. The tiny implant aims at restoring the connection between mind and motion.

On this episode of Here’s an Idea, Gerhardt explains how a millimeter-sized device, when placed on the brain, offers quadriplegic patients (those with paralysis of all four limbs) and tetraplegic patients (those who cannot move the upper and lower parts of their body) the chance to move a cursor, eat a chocolate bar, and even fist-bump the President.

See how a brain-computer interface works.

Over 145 million electric vehicles are set to take the road by 2030 and a major component of the new class of electric vehicles – lithium-ion batteries – is rarely recycled. 

Canadian battery recycling company Li-Cycle is aiming to change that through its sustainable process to provide an end-of-life solution for lithium-ion batteries, while creating a secondary supply of critical battery materials.

On this episode of Here's an Idea™, Kunal Phalpher, Chief Strategy Officer at Li-Cycle, discusses why we haven’t been able to recycle batteries effectively in the past and how that’s changing. Phalpher also talks about the company’s “spoke and hub” model.

Luge is one of the three sliding sports on the program at the 2022 Winter Olympics being held in Beijing this month. The sport requires athletes to barrel down an ice track on small sleds accelerating to speeds of nearly 90 mph.

Traditionally, lugers design and build their own sleds, often through trial and error. Now, Clarkson Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Professors Doug Bohl and Brian Helenbrook, in collaboration with Colby Mazzuca of Aeroworks, are using advanced computational and experimental methods to optimize sled geometries for developing faster, more aerodynamic sleds.

On this episode of Here's an Idea™, Professor Bohl discusses the new approach to help shave off those extra 1/1000ths of a second that can be the difference between silver and gold at the Olympics.

Dr. Frits Bliek and his team at Ocean Grazer are building an "Ocean Battery" that brings hydrodam technology to the sea. On this episode of Here's an Idea, Bliek, CEO of the Netherlands-based energy company, talks about an innovative idea for power that involves plastic bags, underground reservoirs, and a big drill.

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