We explore the wildest research coming out of world-leading labs and the founders bold enough to try to scale it in the real world. From professors tackling the toughest climate questions to student builders wrestling with the hardest implementation challenges, we tell the unfiltered stories of ideas still in the oven.
Two-thirds of the global population will face water stress by 2050. Prof. Yaghi's metal-organic frameworks can pull drinking water from desert air at 7% humidity using only sunlight. The question is whether it can scale to the billions who need it — and at what cost. That gap between the lab and the real world is exactly what this episode is about.
A third of American households have no home EV charging. Voltpost retrofits streetlights into Level 2 chargers. Scott Fisher has spent 15 years building the EV charging industry and teaching it at Columbia.
We're looking for work on wildfire, water, EVs, mining, data centers, cryosphere, energy storage, animal ag, and the gritty unglamorous work of climate adaptation.