Indonesia mailed Raskin beneficiaries their entitlements and lifted rice deliveries 26%
Economists fixed Indonesia's leaky $1.5B rice program with postcards telling recipients exactly what they were owed — information as bargaining power.
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500 VERÖFFENTLICHTE FÄLLE · REGELMÄSSIG AKTUALISIERTA Nigerian engineer's bot exposed Twitter's hidden quote tweets — Twitter built it in
Dara Oladosu's Quoted Replies bot surfaced every quote of a tweet on demand; 25.9M impressions later Twitter shipped the feature and credited him.
Fall lesenProject Harmless borrowed a 1920s pill-coating trick to make poo bags dissolve in water
An Edinburgh designer flipped water-resistance into water-reactivity — a dog-waste bag that dissolves when wet, because poo bags can never be recycled.
Fall lesenProgressive's leaderboards cut drivers' handheld phone use by 27.6% in a trial
In a 10-week trial on 1,653 Snapshot customers, anonymized peer leaderboards with points lost for backsliding cut handheld use 27.6% - and the effect persisted.
Fall lesenA choir bookmark problem found the use for 3M's failed adhesive — the Post-it Note
Spencer Silver's weak microsphere adhesive sat unused until Art Fry's falling hymnal bookmarks gave it a job: stick, peel, restick, no residue.
Fall lesenKen Pillonel's $38 board makes unrepairable AirPods Pro cases fixable with USB-C
A roboticist reverse-engineered Apple's glue-sealed AirPods Pro case, open-sourced the housing and sells a CHF34.90 PCB that swaps Lightning for USB-C.
Fall lesenPfizer restarted its shelved 2003 SARS program to build the Paxlovid pill in a year
Dusting off SARS-era protease work gave Pfizer a target with no human analogue, and oral dosing set the pill apart from IV antivirals.
Fall lesenMind Candy sold 256 puzzle cards to fund a £100K treasure hunt across two worlds
Perplex City sold ranked puzzle-card packs in shops to bankroll an alternate-reality hunt; 50,000 players chased a £100,000 cube buried in an English wood.
Fall lesenPegasus runs 20 single-LP funds so corporations can outsource their VC arms
'Venture capital as a service': Pegasus manages about $600M across 23 funds, 20 of them owned by single corporate LPs, at arm's length from startups.
Fall lesenParsely and MS Paint Adventures replaced the game engine with a human parser
Parsely games and MS Paint Adventures solved text-adventure parsing by putting a human in the engine; Homestuck reached 4,100 pages.
Fall lesenPalau's Ol'au program rewards respectful travelers with locals-only experiences
Points earned for sustainable choices unlock experiences normally reserved for Palauans and their close friends — access money cannot buy.
Fall lesenPact Health moved the insurance deductible up and down with gym attendance
Employees earned $5 off their deductible per workout and paid $5 more per miss, turning a flat deductible into an incentive that moves with behavior.
Fall lesenOscar paid members $1 a day to beat step goals — the insurer as behavior coach
Free Misfit bands, algorithmic daily step goals, $1 per hit day cashing out at $20 — after a $20 flu-shot offer made members 2.5x likelier to get vaccinated.
Fall lesenNYC ranked 900,000 lots against fire data — inspection hit rates jumped fivefold
NYC's first analytics director ranked illegal-conversion complaints by fire risk; vacate orders jumped from 13% of inspections to over 70%.
Fall lesenNHTSA's GPS experiment docked speeding drivers cents from a $25 prize — it worked
In a NHTSA-funded proof of concept, drivers lost 3–6 cents of a weekly $25 prize for speeding — and the worst violations were almost eliminated.
Fall lesenNASA's AREE rover swapped electronics for clockwork to survive Venus's 850°F surface
A wind-turbine-charged mechanical rover that flashes data home with a radar reflector — trading bandwidth for weeks of life where electronics die in minutes.
Fall lesenMIT used a small-data AI loop to make mRNA vaccines survive room temperature for a year
Months of hand-screening excipients hit a wall; an algorithm built for tiny datasets found FDA-approved ratios that keep LNP vaccines stable without freezing.
Fall lesenMIT's InstructMesh lets novices fix AI-generated 3D models before printing them
MIT CSAIL, Google and Northeastern paired a 3D generator with an LLM so edits happen in latent space — novices caught and fixed flawed prints 90% of the time.
Fall lesenMel placed each instruction to meet the drum's read head — and beat the assembler
At Royal McBee, programmer Mel hand-placed drum instructions against read-head timing, used opcodes as constants, and out-ran the optimizing assembler.
Fall lesenMedAccess underwrote malaria-net demand so BASF could cut prices 40%
A donor-backed guarantor promised BASF a minimum order of next-generation mosquito nets for four years; in exchange prices fell by two-fifths.
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