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Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
The hologram is a picture of the world as recorded by Wi-Fi," says Philip Holl, explaining the bachelor's thesis he completed at the Technical University of Munich. By recording all Wi-Fi signals that pass through a certain plane, Holl was able to create a 3D picture--or a hologram--of every object through which those signals passed. While it was done primarily for academic purposes, the use cases for this technology include indoor and outdoor tracking.
As a Ph.D. student, Holl has shifted his focus into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning and is currently working on using artificial intelligence to solve fluid optimization problems. For example, in order for a robot to pick up a glass of water without spilling it, the robot must understand how the water will behave within that glass.
Holl also discusses a recent project in which he developed AI-based algorithms for determining whether rare events in physics can be classified as real, or are merely background events from other sources. Tune in for an in-depth explanation of all of Holl's work, and feel free to reach out with questions.
Kenneth Wu, CEO of Milk and Eggs (milkandeggs.com), a local farms food delivery business, provides a detailed overview of the current state of farm fresh foods, delivery, freshness, and environmental impact. As founder and chief executive officer of Milk and Eggs, Wu manages the company's overall vision and planned growth strategies. As he explains, Milk and Eggs is an online farmers market with a delivery arm. Wu oversees the company's investor relations as well as the general business development. Wu is a seasoned entrepreneur with over twenty years of business experience with a specialty in startups and new business ventures.
Wu was the founder of AirSplat, the largest retailer of shooting sports equipment, tactical accessories, and gear where he oversaw the company's development, growth, and management. And Wu served as president of 2WheelBikes, a popular cycling equipment and accessories retailer. Other notable entrepreneurial successes in Wu's long history of business expansion include his founding of Battle Arena, a virtual sports entertainment center and Cast Gear, a prominent tactical clothing and gear retailer.
Wu explains the process that makes Milk and Eggs work so successfully. He details how their produce and foods originate fresh from farms and foodmakers and are delivered to the consumer. He gives an overview of the methods they utilize to deliver the freshest goods in an efficient manner that is better for the environment as well. And as Wu explains, Milk and Eggs can keep prices low because there is no waste, inventory, middlemen, or large inefficient distribution centers and stores that require massive, costly real estate. He outlines the company's focus on real foods, produce, etc. and discusses why they stay away from what he refers to as "center aisle" products such as chips, sodas, toilet paper, etc.
The farm fresh entrepreneur discusses their product lines and some of the specialty offerings they provide—curated boxes of items such as farm box, seasonal box, and office meeting box—each delivering different items for niche markets or desires. Additionally, he discusses their unique meal kits that are developed in coordination with local nutritional authorities, for those who really want to maximize their health benefits.
Wu details their focus on local artisanal products and the immense positive feedback they receive from consumers on these specialty products, from the access to foods that would normally require extensive travel, to the freshness of the ingredients and foods. He enthusiastically states that many of their customers truly praise the quality of their foods and have stated that the level of freshness is much higher than what they can find at their local grocery stores and markets. Wu describes the time frames that typical foods sit around before being purchased or consumed, and how Milk and Eggs has dramatically reduced the 'sit time' on foods, which is instantly obvious when consumers taste the freshness.
The food freshness expert talks about the problem of waste in the food industry and how it is a huge drain on our ecosystem. He talks about the percentage of food that is classified as 'imperfect' and what his company and others are doing to cut down on waste. Wu's goal is to ensure that all food is used by donating to local food banks that support the community and those in need. And Milk and Eggs uses
minimal packaging and reusable insulated delivery bags to further cut waste, and any plastic bags they use are specially designed to be biodegradable to decrease pollution and cause no harm to wildlife.
Pamela Silver is the principal investigator of the Silver Lab (silver.med.harvard.edu) and an Elliot T and Onie H Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Silver delivers an incredibly interesting and important overview of the biological advances that can help to reduce climate change and improve other pressing global issues through science.
Silver is a member of the Harvard Wyss Institute and the Harvard University Graduate Program in Systems Biology, as well as the Harvard Medical School BBS Graduate Program and the Harvard Biophysics and Chemical Biology Graduate Programs. Her passionate interest and curiosity with systems to synthetic biology drive her team's research at Silver Lab.
Silver's team works in the arena of systems and synthetic biology to develop, design, and build biological systems in mammalian and prokaryotic cells. Working in a vast and diverse swath of methods and approaches from the computational to experimental, Silver states her team's overarching mission is to address complex scientific questions that may impact the world and its population on a grand scale. Silver Lab works on many projects annually, from the reconstruction of entire new genomes to the hopeful development of principles for building synthetic cells that act as sensors, bio-computers, and memory devices, as well as the building of novel subsystems such as proteins with designed properties for general therapeutic use.
Silver discusses her diverse work that tackles health-related issues, sustainability issues, climate change, and beyond, solutions to improve the way we live and interact with our world. She states her philosophy that biology is the best chemistry and talks about her work to replace many chemical industry processes with biological solutions in an effort to decrease stress on the environment overall. She details her "bionic leaf" project, which is a system that uses solar energy to essentially split water molecules and hydrogen-eating bacteria to generate and produce liquid fuels. The system can convert solar energy to biomass and the possibilities for this scientific advance are truly revolutionary. And she notes the particular importance of science-based solutions and the landmark Paris Accord (Paris Agreement), which is a multinational agreement on global warming and greenhouse-gas emissions, as climate change is truly accelerating.
The biology innovator discusses the future probability of seeing more hydrogen-fueled automobiles and the current pushback against them, from the issues regarding the centralized production of traditional fuel sources, shipping concerns, and politics. And she explains how the push to move electric cars forward has perhaps stymied the hydrogen-fueled industry.
Silver describes how some of the bacteria that exist within the bionic leaf can be engineered such that they can utilize all the tools for gene editing and gene engineering, and thus place genes into them that program the cells to make things, from molecules that look like biofuels, plastic precursors, and even feedstock for other elements.
Commanding the knowledge regarding how to program cells in a completely rational way can be extremely valuable for many advanced scientific areas from stem cell design, to drug therapy, and the environment. Silver's lab strives to utilize a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches to further develop and improve what biology can offer us, in a myriad of ways.
It's been about 150 years since the largest known coronal mass ejection (CME)--the ejection of millions of tons of plasma from the sun into space at a speed of 300 kilometers per second. On average, CMEs occur every 100 to 200 years, which means the next big event is inevitable. While it won't threaten life on earth, it will put every satellite system at risk and threaten the safety of astronauts in space.
As the head of space weather at the European Space Agency, Jussi Luntama discusses the 2018 Lagrange mission that aims to monitor solar activity and more accurately predict the presence and direction of a coming CME. The team working on the ESA Lagrange mission will park a spacecraft at Lagrange points, which are points where the gravitational pull of the sun and earth balance each other out. This will cause the spacecraft to trail the earth's orbit at a distance of 150 million kilometers for eternity or until intentionally moved, and will allow them to view solar activity from a perspective that's different from the one they have when looking at the sun from the earth.
Tune in to hear Jussi Luntama discuss a variety of interesting topics, including the relationship between CMEs and periods of high and low solar activity, the effects of CMEs on power grids, and the launch of the Lagrange spacecraft planned to happen between 2023 and early 2025. To learn more, simply type "Where no mission has gone before" into a Google search engine.
Ann Louise Gittleman is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of over 30 books on a variety of topics, including weight loss, diet, and detoxification. Her most recent book, Radical Metabolism: A Powerful New Plan to Blast Fat and Reignite Your Energy in Just 21 Days, relies on the premise that the gallbladder is not a throw-away organ; it is an essential one that's connected to the health of the thyroid gland and metabolism.
Dizziness, radiating leg pain, and insomnia is just a few of the seemingly unrelated symptoms that can occur after gallbladder removal, but how do we compensate for this loss, and how can we prevent removal, to begin with? Gittleman offers answers to these questions and many more. Her theory that there is a critically important connection between the gallbladder, the thyroid and metabolism are backed by Harvard researchers who found that people who improved their gallbladder health saw a 53 percent increase in metabolism. An additional study out of Finland showed that people who have reduced bile flow are seven times more likely to suffer from hypothyroidism.
Gittleman discusses a range of topics, including the right and wrong types of high-fat diets, why some people might want to stop drinking kombucha, green, and white tea, and the effect of electromagnetic radiation on cortisol levels--something she refers to as "electropollution."
Tune in for a compelling and eye-opening discussion, and visit radicalmetabolism.com for more information and free downloads.
Whether you're planning a business event, festival, or wedding party, Splash can help by providing sophisticated event marketing software that allows for more predictability, personalization, and greater returns on investment. As the CEO and founder of Splash, Ben Hindman has learned that the most important aspect of any event is not about getting more people in the room, but about getting the right people in the room.
In order to ensure that, Splash offers invitation software, a beautifully designed landing page and registration experience, reminders and automated emails, promotions, check-in apps, and post-event follow-up apps. Hindman discusses a range of topics, including the importance of design in event planning and recommendations on how to start planning your next event. "I'm really passionate about the in-person experience, I think it creates more focus, people pick their heads up and really look and listen...it brings them into the now," says Hindman. Tune in for the full conversation, and learn more at splashthat.com.
Looking to deepen your understanding of the human microbiome or understand how it could be affecting your overall health? Dealing with a chronic gut issue such as IBD or ulcerative colitis? Trying to manage a gluten or lactose sensitivity? uBiome is a biotech company that was established in 2012 with the mission of advancing the science of the microbiome and making products that will allow individuals to understand how the microbiome contributes to their health and wellness, as well as a variety of illnesses and conditions.
Since 2012, uBiome has amassed the world's largest data set on the human microbiome, having collected over 250,000 samples; that number only continues to grow. They currently offer three kits: Explorer, SmartGut, and SmartJane. Based on a user's goals and conditions, they will order one or more kits, submit a sample of their microbiome from one or more sites on their body, and complete a detailed survey that addresses their fitness routine, diet, sleep patterns, stress patterns, and daily activity. The team at uBiome will use this information in conjunction with the sequencing data from their sample in order to provide an assessment of how their microbiome changes over time and contributes to their health.
As the Vice President of Product Technology at uBiome, Sara Bird provides an informative and interesting discussion about the ins and outs of everything offered by uBiome, the ways in which the microbiome plays a role in myriad conditions, the increasing use of microbiome data by physicians, and how to get started with your own uBiome kit today. Visit ubiome.com to learn more about each product offered.
There are a wide variety of medical tests and samples that are time, temperature, and handling sensitive; if either one of these factors isn't properly maintained, then inaccurate results will be delivered, putting the health and lives of patients at risk. With an error rate of 35-40 percent, blood samples taken for the purposes of monitoring chemotherapy are the most vulnerable to becoming compromised by environmental variants encountered before they even reach the machine for analysis, and a variety of other medical samples have an average error rate of between five and eight percent.
Lab Sensor Solutions is a company that's developed a system to address this by closely tracking the temperature and location of sensitive medical samples with less than a five-minute delay. How do they do it? Since such sensitive samples should be kept in close proximity to the courier who's transporting them, Lab Sensor Solutions places Bluetooth-enabled, low-energy temperature sensors inside the containers holding samples, and connects those sensors to the courier's own mobile device. If a sample has been sitting too long, has reached too high or low of a temperature, or is on a route that will take longer than the sample will stay viable, then an alert will automatically be sent to the courier, the dispatcher, and the supervisor on shift.
Prior to the implementation of this system, there was no way to identify when a sample was at risk of spoiling, but now the team at Lab Sensor Solutions is seeing on average three to five corrections a day and a significant increase in overall compliance. They already have 12 customers all around the country and are continuing to expand. Tune in and visit Lsstracks.com to learn more.
You might already be familiar with it--the quarterly or annual struggle to gather your company's data and retroactively determine whether or not you've met your goals, only to forget which metrics you were really trying to improve or find yourself asking, "What went wrong, and how do we fix it?" But did you know that setting and tracking your company's progress toward goals during the time period within which they should be met makes it 90% more likely for you to actually achieve those goals? Yaguara is a company in the business of helping companies do just that.
As the CEO and founder of Yaguara, Jonathan Smalley calls his company a "fitness tracker" for businesses, one that helps tie real-time data into the process of accomplishing company goals by measuring progress in real time and predicting based on historical performance and current progress how long it will take to accomplish those goals. The team at Yaguara also provides insight and recommendations based on the data collected, such as which media sites a company can reach the most customers, and what each individual within the company can do to to further the overall progress of the company.
There's a lot on the horizon for Yaguara, including new content-based templates, new modules, improved algorithms for improved recommendations, and paid pilots in markets outside of e-commerce beginning in 2019. Tune in and visit yaguara.co for more!
Jonah Myerberg, co-founder and CTO of Desktop Metal (desktopmetal.com), discusses the current state of technology in 3D printing and how it is revolutionizing engineering and manufacturing. Myerberg oversees the technical direction of Desktop Metal's 3D printing solutions. He founded Boston Impact, an engineering consulting firm, in 2013, and has worked at the top level of many successful businesses focused on high-performance battery development, including Renovo Auto and A123Systems.
During his tenure with A123Systems, Myerberg helmed the motorsports business unit that focused primarily on the development of high-performance batteries that were later adopted by many leading Formula One teams such as McLaren, Force India, Mercedes Benz, and Red Bull. Additionally, he was a race engineer for Porsche on their 919 teams and also for Mahindra Racing on the Formula E team. Myerberg has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University, as well as a master's degree in mechanical engineering and manufacturing from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University.
Myerberg states that his primary goal is to make metal 3D printing more accessible to manufacturers and engineers. Myerberg's company, Desktop Metal, specializes in bringing new capabilities to the world's first office-friendly, metal 3D printing solution. They provide high-resolution printing that can be in-house and built to exact specifications and scale. Desktop Metal's Studio System abandons the traditional lasers and loose powders typically associated with metal 3D printing, which allows for higher safety standards. And businesses appreciate that power and an internet connection can get them going, simply and efficiently, without third-party equipment.
Myerberg compares and contrasts plastics 3D printing and metal 3D printing and details the variables with both, outlining polymer printing techniques for plastics versus the solid-state techniques needed for metal printing. He explains how his company has taken advantage of polymer techniques to bring that technology to the office environment for metal 3D printing.
The 3D printing and engineering specialist expounds upon the technical manufacturing knowledge that is needed in the mechanical engineering world. He discusses the new tools that are being utilized specifically for 3D printing, such as Desktop Metal's Live Parts, which is proprietary software they developed that allows engineers to input their specifications and constraints in order to allow the software to actually grow the part between the holding points, establishing the geometry via the software. This saves time and creates a very efficient process as engineers can spend more of their day on engineering tasks, and less time on solving parts problems.
Myerberg lists some of the many advantages of 3D metal printing, such as reduction of total number of parts by streamlining the geometry, and significant decreases in the weight of parts overall by utilizing layer construction and other methods. And Myerberg provides his insight into the future of 3D metal printing. He gives examples of some of the companies they work with who are helping to drive the technology forward as they collaborate.
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