Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World

Eleni Myrivili is the United Nation’s first-ever global chief heat officer. An anthropologist by training, Myrivili understands how heat waves discriminate against older, less-wealthy and under-served demographics. Before being named to her UN post in 2022, Myrivili was Athens’ heat officer, where she coordinated the capital’s response to heat waves and helped renovate an ancient Roman aqueduct to bring water into the city.

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Martina Albert is a technician with the National Tree Seed Centre, based in Fredericton, N. B. The NTSC’s library holds more than 13,000 seed collections, with the purpose of protecting them from invasive pests, disease and climate change. Albert works on the Centre’s Indigenous Seed Collection Program, working with First Nations communities to collect and preserve tree seeds for generations to come. 

Blain...

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Dr. Scott Weese is a veterinary internal medicine specialist, chief of infection control and director of the Centre for Public Health and Zoonoses at the University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College. Weese is a member of the Global Leaders Group on antimicrobial resistance and has helped craft antimicrobial use guidelines for veterinarians in Canada. 

Further reading: 

• The global threat of antibioti...

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• Journalist Susan Freinkel is the author of Plastics: Toxic A Love Story, a book that traces the history of plastics through eight different objects, from the Frisbee to the IV bag, and examines how plastic negatively affects our lives. 
• Dr. Ted Schettler is a physician and expert on the health risks of plastics and phthalates. He’s the scientific advisor at Health Care Without Harm, an organization that...

The wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray in 2016 burned more than 579,000 hectares of land, drove 88,000 people from their homes and caused nearly $10 billion in damages. It’s often seen as an outlier, a freak natural disaster. But extreme wildfires, like those that tore through Los Angeles earlier this year, are becoming more intense and harder to control. “We all saw the smoke, and too many of us have seen the fire,” says John ...

Can AI unravel the mysteries of human biology? Could it help design specialty treatments and cures for disease? Geoffrey von Maltzahn and his team at Generate:Biomedicines are bullish on both counts. AI has greatly accelerated progress in genome engineering, bioengineering and nanotechnology and they are getting closer to developing tailored therapeutics. “Six years ago, this was a crazy idea,” he says. “We’re now convinced that 10...

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Alison Nankivell has spent more than 25 years moving Canada’s economic needle forward. Before being named CEO of MaRS in early 2024, Alison held pivotal roles at the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Export Development Canada (EDC). At MaRS, she brings an experienced playbook to support startups working in climate, health and emerging technology. 

Kris Bennatt...

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Kongjian Yu is a Beijing-based landscape architect and founder of Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape. His concept of sponge cities — designing cities to absorb water — is being applied in urban areas across the globe.  

Further reading:

• Landscape architect Kongjian Yu, pioneer of the “sponge city" concept, wins the 2023 Oberlander Prize
• How letting water be water can lead to better ...

Music makes us feel better — for most of us, this is an intuitive truth. But scientists are only now beginning to understand the remarkable ways that music affects our brains. With the help of innovation, researchers are working to assess and codify the whats, whys and hows that could help us harness this power as a therapeutic tool to treat people grappling with everything from mood disorders to Parkinson’s disease. Their data is ...

With more than 80 times the short-term warming power of carbon dioxide, methane is a significant climate threat. But finding and fixing methane leaks is no small feat and ground-based detection methods struggle to pinpoint this colourless, odourless gas. In this episode of Solve for X, host Manjula Selvarajah sits down with Stéphane Germain to discuss how his company’s fleet of microsatellites is transforming methane detection. By ...

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.

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Climate change is putting many of the foods we love at risk. Add in rapid population growth — the planet will be home to 9.7 billion people by 2050 — and it’s clear we need to reimagine how we feed ourselves. As food security expert Leonore Newman says, “we are running short on planet.” But is society ready for replacement proteins and lab-grown meats? Whether it’s cell-grown salmon or chili lime crickets, the plate of the future i...

From Wi-Fi to power stations, roads to pipelines, our infrastructure is stressed. Built for a climate that no longer exists, our systems are failing at an increasing pace. But to fix what’s broken goes beyond structural repair — we also need to address the inequities baked into our infrastructural systems and injustices from past developments. Amid these challenges, we have the chance to reimagine the future of infrastructure for a...

The future of the automobile is electric. Yet the surge in electric vehicles raises critical concerns regarding battery creation, disposal and recycling. What will happen once all those cars reach the end of the road? In this episode of Solve for X, we address the environmental footprint of EV batteries, confront the challenges posed by the existing regulatory landscape and highlight opportunities for second-life applications. It t...

Wastewater, the world’s dirty (not so little) secret, consumes nearly 3 percent of the global electricity demand. It’s a staggering statistic, and yet much of what actually happens with wastewater remains a mystery. Treatment plants typically purify water by infusing it with oxygen, creating an environment where bacteria can break down waste. But without proper sensors or data, the method is incredibly energy-intensive. Plus with a...

The next pandemic — it’s a question of when not if. Climate change is shifting the patterns of how and where diseases spread, and our insatiable love of travel means that viruses are now showing up in places they’ve never been before. Forecasting future outbreaks is becoming increasingly complex. But as infectious disease specialist Kamran Khan explains, this is where AI can help. Machine learning algorithms can detect patterns in ...

Scientists are finding that ocean alkalinity enhancement is one of the more promising solutions for permanently storing carbon from the atmosphere. And not only could this emerging technology help with the climate crisis, it could also address another key problem: acidity in the ocean, which is endangering ecosystems. In this premiere episode of the second season of Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World, host Manjula Selvara...

Solve for X is your window on the future. Each episode, journalist Manjula Selvarajah goes behind the hype and headlines to make sense of how new technologies are reshaping our world. Can we predict the next pandemic? What if we geoengineer the oceans to stop climate change? Could robots help preserve wildlife? Find answers to these questions and more in the new series of Solve for X.

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