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01tech2024–2025
Patrick Schlott buys secondhand payphones, retrofits them to call anywhere in the US or Canada over one internet line, and covers the cost — 'Netflix money'.
Lire le cas ↗02product2009–2014
Designed in Malawi: a compressor makes oxygen from room air, a hand pump and 10-hour battery cover blackouts, and parts come from any auto shop.
Lire le cas ↗03finance1991–2020
Hans-Josef Fell's law let anyone sell renewable power at a fixed high price funded by a bill surcharge — demand boomed, China mass-produced, prices collapsed.
Lire le cas ↗04strategy2017
Joe Furness chained two discount flight legs and a £7.50 hire car he slept in, exploiting hub-and-spoke pricing to undercut Britain's rail fares.
Lire le cas ↗05tech2024
Holden Karau's tool turns a denial letter into a drafted appeal — auto-stripping personal data and inferring the diagnosis — in about eight minutes.
Lire le cas ↗06finance2024–2026
A 25-year rooftop lease where the rent is a replacement roof: the landlord's worst cost becomes a community-solar site that cuts renters' bills.
Lire le cas ↗07engineering2026
Topology optimization plus metal laser sintering fuses the brake's three parts into one aluminum node — up to 30% less unsprung mass, easier to service.
Lire le cas ↗08product2018–2019
Six student nurses swapped blue jug lids for yellow on at-risk patients; Sheffield's ward saw a threefold drop in patients at risk of infection and dehydration.
Lire le cas ↗09product2026
An inflatable pillow from University of Bath and RUH Bath cut staff per repositioning from five to three and saved an hour per procedure in a 30-patient trial.
Lire le cas ↗10engineering2002–2022
A pointless 2002 read op meant to help old chipsets sleep was quietly throttling modern Zen CPUs — patching it out lifted minimum throughput 1,390%.
Lire le cas ↗11tech2015
United's bug bounty rewards researchers only in air miles — 50,000 for XSS, 250,000 for authentication bypass, and a million miles for remote code execution.
Lire le cas ↗12engineering2022
Lay's Factory Home Heating: vapor from frying up to 20 tons of potatoes an hour warms a water circuit that heats Veurne's homes instead of natural gas.
Lire le cas ↗13product2022
Sensors cut flow to 15% when you step away to soap up and restore full pressure the moment you step back in — and the water itself powers the device.
Lire le cas ↗14engineering2023
Sound and vision sensors spot a deer walking toward the East Coast Main Line, alarms turn it away, and an AI camera watches until it is safely clear.
Lire le cas ↗15sales2016
In a Planet Money interview, Kid Rock describes adding shows to flood the market, ID-locked platinum seating and a lottery for the best rows.
Lire le cas ↗16strategy2020
Tier-three rules said pubs close unless they serve paid food — so Preston's Ships and Giggles charged one penny and let customers pay what they wanted.
Lire le cas ↗17tech2026
Looks normal to humans, garbage to LLMs: a typography feature quietly rewrites words in the source code to poison unauthorized AI scraping.
Lire le cas ↗18strategy2026
Sanford's new nine-story orthopedic hospital puts 56 hotel rooms above 12 operating rooms, so rural patients sleep under the same roof before surgery.
Lire le cas ↗19engineering2026
PlusAI ballasts its autonomous-test trailers with 20,000 pounds of sand to simulate real cargo — thieves who broke one open found silica, not silicon.
Lire le cas ↗20tech2023
Immunizing images with imperceptible signals makes Stable Diffusion edits render as gray mush — a shield against nonconsensual deepfakes.
Lire le cas ↗