At World Maker Faire in NYC this past weekend, MIT’s Little Devices Lab and Pioneer unveiled MakerNurse, a nationwide initiative to find nurses who are fabricating new devices and improvising workarounds to fix problems in the way health care is delivered.

Pioneer’s Lori Melichar and Jose Gomez-Marquez, who is spearheading MakerNurse, discussed the new initiative from Maker Faire’s Innovation Stage.

Many retired adults are extremely active, playing golf, volunteering for local civic groups, participating in book clubs and participating in other social activities. But as the years go by, your life changes and your social interactions change too. You grow frailer, which can create barriers to your participation in family and community events. You rely more on the help of caregivers including neighbors and family, for routine activities. To live independently, you pay someone to help you bathe, drive you to appointments, clean your house, and prepare your meals.

But could these social interactions be opportunities to facilitate healthy aging?

It’s easy to laugh off conspiracy theories. But what if studying them could tell us something new and important about what drives people’s health behavior?

Eric Oliver hopes to do just that. A professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Oliver has studied the origins and impact of political conspiracy theories. Now, with Pioneer’s support, he’s turning his attention to the realm of health, investigating medical conspiracy theories and how they influence people’s habits and decisions.

The Pioneer web team recently interviewed Oliver about his research; here’s an edited transcript of that exchange. You can also learn more about Oliver’s research here.

Pioneer: You've heard the old expression, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn't mean they aren’t out to get you.” Are conspiracy theories by definition always wrong?

Eric Oliver: They are not wrong per se. Conspiracies do sometimes occur (think of Nixon and Watergate). But as a researcher, I try to remain decidedly agnostic about the truth claims of conspiracy theories. Lily Tomlin once quipped, “What is reality but a collective hunch?”, and I generally agree that knowledge is socially constructed.

If you’re going to get ambitious about your next task, don’t go and talk to normal people about it. You’ll only get normal answers. Get out of your comfortable little world and step into a completely alien one. As we say round here, when worlds collide, transformation happens.

Love that passage from Brian Millar’s 2012 Fast Company piece. (Plus, it gives me the awesome chance to nod to the eccentrics and outliers—like Millar’s dominatrix and tattooed hipster set—and their unlikely importance to pioneering, breakthrough ideas).

This week RWJF extended another grant to the Khan Academy; this one for $1.25 million.  I say another as we started this health education journey with Sal, Rishi and the Khan team—right after Sal’s outstanding 2011 TED/Long Beach talk. That discussion resulted in a preliminary 2012 $350,000 bet on this great team. We were intrigued by their big idea—and we thought the world might be too.

What’s that big idea again? Just this: an entirely free, utterly fantastic health education for anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection.

Each month, What’s Next Health talks with leading thinkers about the future of health and health care. Recently, we talked with Jessica Green, founding director of the BioBE (Biology and the Built Environment Center), to explore how a better understanding of the microbiome in our built environment might lead to healthier buildings and healthier lives.

By Jessica Green

We’ve known for some time about the invisible microbes in us and around us—small organisms including viruses, bacteria and fungi. There was a time when most believed that these microbes were all bad for us. After all, they were the ones responsible for getting us sick. But now, we know that many microbes are either benign or actually beneficial to us.

As a nuclear engineer, I had experience modeling things I couldn’t see. When I learned people were modeling biological systems showing how microbes interact with each other—systems we know as microbiomes—and using big data to understand them and how they affect us, I was immediately intrigued. When I thought about microbes in the context of my interest in conservation and biodiversity, I became hooked. And I am not alone. This is a rapidly growing field and through our collective work, we have been learning more and more about the potential of microbiomes to be agents of health, especially in their work to support vital functions in and on the body. Now we are also starting to examine and rethink how microbes move among us and our surroundings and what this means for how we design our built environments.