Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World – Details, episodes & analysis

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Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World

MaRS Discovery District

Technology

Science

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/36d. Total Eps: 43

Solve for X uncovers what’s next. Join journalist Manjula Selvarajah as she dives into the latest tech innovations shaping our world. How are satellites revolutionizing the fight against climate change? Could music be the medicine we need? What will it take for Canada to lead the global tech scene and achieve a zero-emission future? Discover the answers to these questions and more in the next season of Solve for X.

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - technology
31/07/2026
#87
🇨🇦 Canada - technology
27/05/2026
#79
🇨🇦 Canada - technology
24/05/2026
#45
🇨🇦 Canada - technology
23/05/2026
#71

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http://marsdd.com/
42 shares
http://www.missionfrommars.ca
12 shares
https://solveforx.simplecast.com/
12 shares

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RSS feed quality

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Score global : 68%

Publication history

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Beast mode: Can technology help protect some of the world’s most endangered animals?

Season 2 · Episode 7

Thursday, January 4, 2024 • Duration 25:16

We’re facing a global ecosystem crisis. Within the last 50 years alone, wildlife populations across the world have declined by a shocking 69 percent. But technology, with help from citizen science, is emerging as one of wildlife’s greatest allies. In this episode of Solve for X, we explore how remote sensing, robot boats and DNA analysis could revolutionize wildlife preservation, offering hope for everything from insects to whales.

Featured in this episode:

James Snider is the vice president of science, knowledge and innovation at World Wildlife Fund Canada.
Elizabeth Clare is an associate professor of biology at York University in Canada. Her research studies biodiversity at all levels, developing novel genetic methods that address some of the biggest challenges in biodiversity science.
Peter Fretwell is a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. He’s the principal investigator of the Wildlife From Space Program, studying wildlife using satellite imagery.
Madeleine Bouvier-Brown is a marine project scientist at Open Ocean Robotics. She handles the deployment of robot boats, retrieving data and analyzing it to deepen our understanding of the oceans.

Further Reading:

Protein shakeup: Are crickets and lab-grown meat the future of food?

Confronting waste: Getting to a circular economy

Season 1 · Episode 7

Thursday, October 13, 2022 • Duration 23:57

Humans generate an incredible amount of trash. In Canada alone, 35 million tonnes of food is wasted every year. That’s a lot of energy spent growing, processing, packaging and delivering food that ultimately goes uneaten — and all that waste creates a lot of greenhouse gases. To fix the climate, we have to redefine our relationship with waste; that means doing more with what we already produce. In this episode, we head up into space to see how astronauts deal with their waste, travel to a facility to learn how food scraps are being transformed into biogas and explore how the concept of circularity could help us manage our resources better. It’s time to face the waste.

Featured in this episode:

Marc Garneau is a former astronaut and current Member of Parliament. During his space career, he logged nearly 700 hours in orbit, learning firsthand the value of maximizing resources and repurposing waste.
Annie Meier, a chemical engineer and principal investigator at NASA, is the team lead on a trash-to-gas project called OSCAR (Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor), a technology that provides a new way of managing waste in space.
Tammara Soma is an assistant professor at SFU and research director at The Food Systems Lab. As a food systems and waste expert, she researches the impact food waste has on the climate as well as solutions that could help bring greater circularity to the food system.
Brandon Moffatt is the co-founder and vice president of StormFisher Hydrogen, a company focused on utilizing waste streams to create better uses for waste products. One of those areas: food-waste diversion. He walks us through the process of transforming organic waste to sources of energy.

Can AI help build a more liveable city?

Season 1 · Episode 6

Thursday, September 29, 2022 • Duration 24:49

As we start to feel the effects of climate change, it’s clear we need to find ways to adapt our communities and lighten the impact on the planet. It can be tempting to just start over somewhere fresh — to build a fully optimized city that’s decked out with the latest technology to be sustainable and efficient. But as we’ve seen in one smart city development after another, these projects often fail to live up to the hype. It might be time to rethink what a smart solution actually looks like. In this episode, we learn about two companies that are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to retrofit what already exists. By optimizing heating and cooling systems and re-tooling public transit, these two ventures are already helping shrink the carbon footprint of cities. It’s a good reminder of the power of incremental change.

Featured in this episode:

Sarah Moser is a professor of urban geography at McGill University. She heads up the New Cities Labs and researches these new developments — what they promise and what actually gets built. She speaks to the need of digital literacy to evaluate technology and make sure it serves the needs of the community.
David Rolnick is an assistant professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and at Mila. He also is a co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, and scientific co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. Specializing in machine learning and climate change, he talks us through how machine learning can be used to help us mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.
Sam Ramadori is the CEO of BrainBox AI. We learn about his smart platform, why reducing energy emissions of buildings are so important and why we need to scale this kind of technology.
Remi Desa is the co-founder and CEO of Pantonium — a on-demand ride-share app designed for buses. Pantonium’s platform brings real-time insights to public transportation and helps address the challenges faced in fixed-route systems.

The grid: Is it time to rethink our power systems?

Season 1 · Episode 5

Thursday, September 15, 2022 • Duration 27:43

Our energy grid is something most of us only think about when it isn’t working. But growing demand for electricity is placing an even greater strain on a system that’s already facing increased pressure from extreme weather events. Can we build a more sustainable and dependable grid? In this episode, we explore how when it comes to climate change, the challenge of greening the grid is as much an issue of complex engineering as it is about policy and equity.

Featured in this episode:

Josh Wong is the CEO of Opus One Solutions, a company that is working to optimize the grid and make it easier for utilities to integrate renewable sources of energy with its data analysis software. Josh is working to address the energy trilemma (reliability, resiliency, decarbonization) by offering greater transparency on the supply and demand of electricity.
Destenie Nock is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in public policy, civil and environmental engineering. She’s an expert on how our changing climate is impacting the grid, and what that means for the future. Focusing on energy equity, Destenie explains what’s important to consider in our transition to clean energy.
Dana Tizya-Tramm is the chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow, Yukon. Dana helped establish the Old Crow Solar Project — shifting the northern remote community off diesel to renewables. Through his efforts, Old Crow is making inroads toward energy sovereignty.

Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

LinkedIn45

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

LinkedIn45

Apple Podcasts

New York Times11

Spotify