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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the first episode of the Pioneering Ideas podcast. Get insight into the Pioneer funding strategy in a Q&A with Team Director Brian Quinn. Next, in a conversation about our recent Behavioral Economics Call for Problems (time stamp: 4:35), Senior Program Officer Lori Melichar and Drs. Kevin Volpp and David Asch, co-directors of the Foundation's Behavioral Economics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, talk about the pros and cons of making proposals public so ideas can spread. Then Harvard's Ted Kaptchuk, a Pioneer grantee, talks about the developing science of placebo studies (9:25). And Senior Program Officer Paul Tarini talks with Pioneer grantee Ben Heywood about how PatientsLikeMe could change medical practice and research (13:10). It's a stimulating mix of conversations, all of which offer a window into what, exactly, constitutes a pioneering idea. Listen now or download the episode:

Khan Academy recently held a national MCAT Video Competition, a collaboration between Khan Academy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Of 67 submissions, 15 were selected for an all-expenses-paid weeklong training program facilitated by Khan Academy staff and scholars to create educational tutorials for concepts that will be tested by the new MCAT2015 exam, including human behavior, social sciences, inequality, and diversity. In this post, Khan Academy medical fellow and Pioneer grantee, Rishi Desai, MD, MPH, reflects on the training camp.

By Rishi Desai

The training camp ended, and I feel incredibly mixed. The only feeling of sadness comes from seeing folks head home after having gotten to know them quite well. But having this group, each focused exclusively on figuring out how to share the beauty of the biological, physical, and social sciences through videos, is a truly unique experience. To have us all hanging out together in one hotel for a week is about as intimate and organic as it gets. We started out the week as strangers, and we emerged as brothers and sisters.