Basilisk puts dormant bacteria in concrete that seal cracks from the inside
Bacterial spores in concrete wake when water seeps in and deposit limestone to close cracks, cutting costly repairs.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDWing's drones land on a giant QR code, then lower the parcel to the ground
A big ground QR code tells the drone exactly where it is; a winch settles the package without an aircraft landing.
Read the caseThe UK Green Investment Bank used a little state money to crowd in private capital
A government-owned investor co-invested £1.6bn in green projects and mobilised £5.6bn of private capital alongside.
Read the caseStarship moved last-mile delivery onto the sidewalk to win the expensive final leg
A six-wheeled footpath robot dodges traffic and parking, making the costliest mile cheap.
Read the caseSkyCell's hybrid container holds a medicine's temperature with no cable or dry ice
A container that runs ~270 hours on a charge keeps 2-8°C pharma within a 0.05% excursion rate, then recycles.
Read the caseDisplayPort won the PC display slot with a packetized interface no vendor owns
VESA's DisplayPort packetizes the link and embeds the clock, so a thin royalty-friendly cable carries video, audio and data.
Read the caseThe CD won audio by Philips and Sony agreeing to one joint standard in 1979
Philips and Sony settled on a single 120mm, 16-bit, 74-minute Red Book disc, and the world adopted one format.
Read the caseColdHubs sells cold storage by the crate a day, not the fridge
A 10-foot solar cold room in the market keeps produce up to 21 days for about 25 cents a crate a day.
Read the caseUkraine's open-source Prozorro made procurement transparent enough to stop graft
An open-source, two-stage e-procurement platform plus a volunteer watchdog saved Ukraine almost $6bn in public funds.
Read the caseGermany priced every hospital case by diagnosis group, and hospitals did more
A single diagnosis-related group priced every inpatient stay; hospital activity rose about 20% in the reform's wake.
Read the caseAjinomoto printed a newspaper that keeps lettuce fresh, as an ad
A newspaper printed with an ethylene-absorbing coating preserves lettuce; stores wrap lettuce in it, so the medium does the job.
Read the caseUnipads turned menstrual blood, blamed for ruining crops, into fertiliser
Lab tests showed menstrual blood is nutrient-rich; 115,000 farmers used it as fertiliser, growing 45+ crops across 155 villages.
Read the caseSamsung's Impulse turns speech into taps so stutterers can speak
A Galaxy Watch app translates a stutterer's words into rhythmic haptics, taking rhythm therapy out of the clinic.
Read the caseKnorr made a stock cube that removes the bitter-taste gene curse
The Supercube filters bitterness so the 1 in 4 with TAS2R38 can eat vegetables; 30K gene strips went in a week.
Read the caseAirlines pooled spare parts instead of each stocking them twice
The IATP lets 111 airlines share 9,088 aircraft parts, so a member rents a spare for $27k a year instead of buying it for ~$450k.
Read the caseDP World stacked empty containers 16-high in a box-bay vending machine
DP World's BOXBAY Empty Superstack stores 20/40-foot empty containers up to 16 tiers high in an enclosed automated rack, freeing the yard from moving them.
Read the caseAn Indian port let trucks book a gate slot to flatten the peak
Gateway Terminals India became the first at JNPA to use an automated Truck Appointment System, time-slotting arrivals to cut congestion and turnaround.
Read the caseSkip lists used coin flips instead of rotations to stay balanced
William Pugh's skip list assigns each node a level with a coin flip, getting expected log(n) operations with far simpler code than a balanced tree.
Read the caseRaft matched Paxos but was designed to be understood, so it won
Raft matched Paxos on safety and performance but deliberately made itself understandable, and so got more consensus systems built correctly.
Read the caseNagle's algorithm batched tiny TCP segments to stop small-packet floods
Nagle let TCP send one small segment at a time and held the rest until an ACK returned, stopping a flood of one-byte packets.
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