Episodes

  • The growing market for cool wearables to help beat the heat

    The growing market for cool wearables to help beat the heat
    Jul 28 2025
    Temperatures this summer have been hotter than usual, a trend we have come to expect with climate change as records are continually surpassed. While many of us can ride out extreme heat in the comfort of air conditioned interior spaces, outdoor workers don’t have that option and must contend with the risks of serious injury which can be acute and long lasting. A fast growing market for wearable cooling products, both in high tech and low tech varieties, is attempting to meet the challenge. Among those products is the CülCan, made by the Tennessee based small business Black Ice. “If you can pull heat away from your hand, it'll cool your whole body down. And so that's what we've done with the CülCan. It's basically a five inch cylinder that contains our special coolant,” said Mike Beavers, co-founder of Black Ice. A key selling point of the product, according to Beavers, is that the coolant inside, which is a chemical composition Beavers designed, doesn’t get as cold as ice, so it is easier to use on a person’s skin. “You put it in ice water or a freezer… and then you just hold it in the palm of your hand,” he said. “That is now our most popular product. We sell tons of those things.”Beavers said his business has been growing by about 30 percent a year over the last three years, an acceleration from its previous pace. The company has been around for about 20 years. Across the Atlantic, the Swiss company GreenTeg is also reporting growing demand for its continuous body temperature monitors, which are worn with a patch or a strap. The monitors are often employed by athletes who have to perform outdoors, said CEO and founder Wulf Glatz. “So this device can communicate then with your smartphone,” he said, “and it will estimate your core temperature and broadcast that value to that device.”Being able to monitor core temperature can help with prevention. Unlike a simple thermometer which, if put against the skin, would only tell you the temperature on your skin, GreenTeg claims its monitors can measure the temperature inside the body. It is that core temperature that is key to whether someone is developing heat-related illness. Glatz says there’s growing interest in his company’s technology. They’ve been approached by organizations representing firefighters, the military, miners and airfield workers. “If there's an airplane landing, you need to unload the baggage. You can't wait for three hours for it to get cooler, but what you can do is to measure the individuals and really have them safe,” he said, “maybe you need to exchange teams in higher frequency, maybe you need to equip them with cooling gear.”Brett Perkison, an environmental and occupational medicine specialist at UTHealth Houston, tested one of GreenTeg’s monitors in combination with cooling vests. In a small study, he found the combination approach helpful in limiting heat related illnesses among outdoor laborers. The problem with the personal cooling industry is that not all of the gadgets being sold to the public are proven to work. For example, ones that use fans to cool the body, such as ventilated helmets, are unlikely to do much in humid environments, said Fabiano Amorim of the University of New Mexico, who has studied heat stress on outdoor workers in Brazil and the U.S. “[Helmets with fans] can increase the comfort or let's say your perception to heat, but it's not reducing your temperature,” he said. Not reducing core body temperature on hot days can have serious consequences. The number of heat-related emergency room visits in the summer of 2023 totaled 120,000, according to the CDC. Heat stress can cause someone to get lightheaded and fatigued. More serious symptoms include seizures. Repeat exposure to heat stress can permanently damage people’s kidneys, Amorim said. The condition can be fatal. “We have seen people 40, 50 years old, [who are] dying from chronic kidney disease. And, they don't have any factor that's related to the traditional chronic kidney disease. That's hypertension, obesity and diabetes. And, the only history these people have is working under hot environments,” Amorim said. Many people do not develop serious symptoms until it’s too late. That means employers must be proactive in employing cooling gadgets and strategies such as rest breaks in shaded areas, access to cool water, and access to bathrooms so workers feel confident in drinking plenty of liquids. But while more tools to avoid heat illness are coming to market, companies are not racing to adopt them. Many do not have adequate heat stress prevention programs at all. “There needs to be an acceptance by the business community, the public community, about the ramifications of heat stress. So I would hope that if we continue, instead of having 20% of businesses having an adequate heat stress prevention program, in 10 years, we'll have 80%,” Perkison said. Adopting cooling gadgets...
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    6 mins
  • Bytes: Week in Review — Trump's new AI executive orders, Google seeks licensing deals with news publishers, and NASA employees dissent against budget cuts

    Bytes: Week in Review — Trump's new AI executive orders, Google seeks licensing deals with news publishers, and NASA employees dissent against budget cuts
    Jul 25 2025

    NASA employees protest budget cuts, Google reportedly eyes licensing deals with 20 national news organizations, and President Donald Trump signed three executive orders on AI this week. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at venture firm Collab Capital, to break down these stories.
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    12 mins
  • Defense billions flow into drone tech

    Defense billions flow into drone tech
    Jul 24 2025

    This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.


    High-flying and high-tech, the very latest in drone technology took to the skies over an airfield near the Danish city of Odense.


    At the International Drone Show, 50 exhibitors showed off their wares. And because more money is flowing into military budgets, the emphasis was on defense.


    Danish company Quadsat makes drones with satellite reading software. Besides civilian uses, the devices can also identify enemy radar.


    "Over the years, we have seen an increasing interest from the defense side, no doubt about that, and that's also where we have a lot of work currently being carried out," said Klaus Aude, Quadsat’s chief commercial officer.


    Leaders of the NATO military alliance have agreed to ramp up defense spending to 5% of their countries' economic output by 2035, following months of pressure from President Donald Trump.


    Nordic countries have already committed to bigger budgets. Among them, NATO’s newest members Finland and Sweden, as well as long time members Norway and Denmark.


    As Europe races to re-arm, drones are a sought-after technology. One estimate suggests the global market for defense drones is already worth over $24 billion, and could double by 2032.


    "The Nordics have always been very strong in drone adoption, drone development," said Kay Wackwitz, chief executive of Drone Industry Insights.


    "You can definitely see that those countries that have borders with Russia are really stocking up on those technologies. The commercial market is now struggling for its fourth year in a row with declining venture capital,” added Wackwitz. “And on the other side, we see a huge demand on the military end of things, which means a lot of companies are refocusing from the commercial space to the military space."


    In June, low-cost Ukrainian drones carried out an audacious mission, destroying dozens of prized Russian fighter jets in a conflict that’s reshaped modern warfare.


    North of Copenhagen in a hangar, Danish firm Nordic Wing makes drones used for battlefield surveillance and combat. Its customers are NATO countries, but they are largely destined for Ukraine, where “there was a huge need and a calling to have these systems helping on the front lines,” said Jonas Münster, CEO of Nordic Wing. “And therefore, the production went into overdrive. Now we have a European Union that is looking into what we've learned in Ukraine and realizing that we don't have a drone capability in Europe."


    With a 2,000-square-kilometer flying zone, the drone port in Odense has grown into a hub for tech startups. Next year, military personnel will also be training there at a new $110 million army facility.


    "Some militaries have actually made a shift from saying ‘every soldier is a rifleman,’ to ‘everyone is going to be a drone operator at some level,’” said Major Rasmus Ros, who’s part of Denmark’s Defense Command. “We're going to have drone operators in the whole joint military of Denmark. They can come here, get their basic training, share ideas and technology development, and then go back to their units and further develop that."


    But not everyone is so positive about this. Outside the trade fair, protestors chanted "drones for peace, not war." New geopolitical realities are reshaping this fast-paced industry. And as this technology advances, ethical and regulatory concerns over the use of AI to pilot drones are also being raised.
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    4 mins
  • IRS data deal with ICE raises privacy alarms

    IRS data deal with ICE raises privacy alarms
    Jul 23 2025

    ProPublica has recently discovered blueprints for an automated computer program that could potentially share millions of IRS taxpayer records with ICE, as the Trump administration continues to step up deportations and criminal investigations. When Marketplace asked for comment about the system uncovered by ProPublica, a senior DHS official cited a recent memorandum of understanding that allowed for the sharing of specific taxpayer info with appropriate safeguards and said descriptions of this system as "surveillance" were "absurd."


    Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with William Turton, one of the reporters on the ProPublica investigation, about how exactly this program would work.
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    7 mins
  • The AI talent wars have begun

    The AI talent wars have begun
    Jul 22 2025

    You might have heard Meta has been on a bit of a hiring spree recently as it tries to build out its new AI Superintelligence team. The company has reportedly been offering hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to attract leading AI researchers from rivals like OpenAI, Google and Apple.


    And it's not just Meta doing the poaching. Tech companies big and small are jumping into the AI Wars.


    Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, a reporter at The Information, about the AI talent wars happening behind the scenes of Silicon Valley.


    More on this

    “Meta hires two Apple AI researchers for Superintelligence push, Bloomberg News reports” - from Reuters


    “Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies” - from The Information
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    10 mins
  • What the "Big Beautiful Bill" means for U.S. energy

    What the "Big Beautiful Bill" means for U.S. energy
    Jul 21 2025

    With the passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, numerous Biden-era clean energy incentives will begin to phase out. Many of those incentives were aimed at onshoring energy and battery manufacturing.


    Energy demand is only expected to rise as more data centers are built to service AI and electric and autonomous vehicles become more widespread. And storage for that energy has to come from somewhere.


    Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Jeremy Michalek, a professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, about the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill clean energy rollbacks.

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    8 mins
  • Bytes: Week in Review - Crypto Week

    Bytes: Week in Review - Crypto Week
    Jul 18 2025

    This week on Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, leaders of tech, energy and private equity promised to invest more than $90 billion to build an AI hub Pennsylvania. Plus, the Trump Administration says chipmaker Nvidia can sell its semiconductors to China again, following a brief ban. But first, Crypto Week wraps up on Capitol Hill. Congress advanced a trio of cryptocurrency bills that could pave the way for more adoption and regulation of digital currencies like bitcoin.


    Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at the Information, about the details of those three bills.
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    8 mins
  • ICE uses insurance fraud database to search for deportation targets

    ICE uses insurance fraud database to search for deportation targets
    Jul 17 2025

    Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Joseph Cox, a reporter at the tech news site 404 Media, about his recent reporting on how ICE is uses ISO ClaimSearch, among other databases, to find deportation targets.
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    7 mins