It really is remarkable how, for those basic research ideas that seem very esoteric, like “We're looking for neutrinos in a giant water tank in Japan”, we can take that detector technology that we use to keep the water clean in those giant tanks and turn our attention to, “Could we make a clean water monitoring system that would ensure remote communities and first nation communities have clean water?” That's a new idea that's come from a very basic research project.
The COVID ventilators came from a lot of the equipment that has to be designed and built to do research into dark matter, which involves creating vacuums, valves and all these sorts of technologies. When the Italians literally were dying because they didn't have enough ventilators, they asked us for help and to work with them on creating a COVID-design ventilator. All of our experts in gas movement and valves got together. They worked with the Italians and the Americans and very quickly designed and built one, and then found a manufacturing partner and also a funding partner in the Government of Canada. I think we started in March 2020 and by the fall of 2020 had delivered hundreds of ventilators to the government. That was really when the lightbulb came on as to how we can take these very brilliant people who have these fundamental research technologies and we can deploy them in new ways.
An example is neutron detection. Apparently, neutron detection is something that is very important as a proof of concept for fusion energy. We have a collaboration with a fusion energy company to help them determine whether their fusion energy technology is actually really working. We also do proton and neutron radiation testing so that companies like Cisco can ensure their components will withstand radiation in the upper atmosphere or in space.
There are all of these things that we can use these fundamental technologies for, and I think the really exciting part is that, when we give our researchers funding and a bit of bandwidth to focus on more applied technologies, really exciting ideas can come. That's something we're going to be focusing on in the future: How do we get funding to allow these brilliant researchers some time, focused bandwidth and some personnel to turn their minds to more applied problems?