The article didn't seem to include much technical detail on how this works but I was hoping it would be closer to the Stanford research on effective body cooling[1] that was around 10 years ago and less just a vest holding frozen packs.<p>From what I remember most traditional body cooling gel based vests have the problem of causing blood capillaries in the skin to close down. That stops the body from transporting warm blood from the core to the surface where sweat is used to cool it.<p>To put it another way, they are too cold to really help with cooling.<p>They idea behind the vacuum glove was that there are certain areas of the body with more capillaries and if you can keep blood flowing to them by not going too cold (say constant 12C) and by using a mild vacuum to draw blood to them you have a much better way to cool the body.<p>I'm guessing that's much harder to work with than a simple vest holding gel packs. Seems a shame though that we don't have anything more effective right now.<p>My own personal usecase would be better cooling than "loads of fans" when riding indoors on Zwift. The cooling vests I've tried so far weirdly just make you feel cold and hot at the same time.<p>1. <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-cooling-glove-research-082912.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-cooling-glove-research-...</a>
This i think is the primary reason why the very cliché phrase:<p>"diversity is our strength", does have some validity.<p>It gives us the most optimal way to find new ways of solving/improving certain aspects of a problem/product because said problem/product is put in a new unique environment to be tested.
The article must have drawn out the a-holes, twitter-links are all gone or restricted.<p>And the article linked to the dudes Twitter despite him asking to be anonymous due to online threats. muppets...
Zooming way out, it’s an interesting case study in innovation. The military must be the largest and longest tightly-controlled organization of humans in the US. They certainly have spent time thinking about this issue. But the marketplace (both “of ideas” and literal profit-driven) is even bigger, and found the better solution.<p>I wonder if the military, and other large innovation-seeking organizations, could give members a “Desk Budget” which is carefully tracked as “voting with your dollars” and eventually bring some of the popular items into standard issue through central procurement. Basically crowdsourcing the constant scan for market innovation.
Makes me wonder if there is any possibility we could build a portable vest-mounted air conditioner that circulates cooled air around/within clothing, while venting hot air through a rear exhaust.
Companies and even the US military are starting to wake up to the fact that they miss out on a lot of high quality talent by rejecting employees based on traits like their appearance, sexuality or even their lifestyle in this case.<p>At the end of the day companies just want to know whether you can perform the job they are asking for. If yes, then there shouldn’t be any issue.