Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appA political scientist repurposed a cattle-counting AI: drone imagery becomes a headcount that cut Bolsonaro's claimed 600,000 rally to an estimated 185,000.
Read the caseWith Guam overrun by brown tree snakes and its forest birds gone, USDA parachutes dead mice laced with acetaminophen into the treetops.
Read the caseUnited skipped the small certain reward (miles for all) and ran a first-class-trip lottery for vaccinated flyers — behavioral science did the marketing.
Read the caseRide-hailing replaced visible surge with upfront fares tuned to each rider's willingness to pay, paying drivers separately and pocketing the spread.
Read the caseSliding letter columns make words from a fixed pool — players can recall, intuit or brute-force answers, so being stuck is never the end.
Read the caseTen early mornings earned a bowl of noodles: Tokyo Metro gamified off-peak riding with streaks and collective unlock rewards.
Read the caseInside its $90M third fund, Susa carved out a parallel vehicle for its current founders to invest alongside the firm — 40+ signed up, at zero economics.
Read the caseTeodor Grantcharov's operating-room black box records video, audio and anesthesia data, then AI counts the errors surgeons' memories leave out.
Read the caseEight weeks of CBT plus $200 cut crime and violence about 50% among 999 of Monrovia's most dangerous men — and the effect held a decade later.
Read the caseFearing for his job on a failing gas field, engineer Nick Steinsberger swapped fracking gel for water, bleach and soap — inventing slickwater fracturing.
Read the caseStarling's two-person team made piezo buzzers play trills and fake dynamics via resonance sweeps — no new hardware, just different code.
Read the caseA two-time NBA All-Star put his name on a $15 sneaker and beat the price-equals-quality signal with chainsaw cut-tests and a season played in them.
Read the caseAfter Egypt and the UAE blocked Signal in 2016, Open Whisper Systems shipped domain fronting: censors see a connection to Google, and stay blind to Signal.
Read the caseNo Iraqi cards, no Amazon access: Randi Rahbar bought on her own European cards via UK/US addresses and took cash at the door — 20% on a $100 order.
Read the casePooled diaspora demand, Dubai consolidation and landings at underused Eldoret let Somali-run cargo firms undercut Nairobi's official distributors.
Read the caseSince 1975 Roosevelt Island has flushed its trash at 65 mph through underground tubes to a central compactor, keeping garbage trucks off its narrow streets.
Read the caseRivest built a lock solvable only through ~80 trillion sequential squarings — parallel hardware buys nothing, so elapsed time itself becomes the key.
Read the caseRiley Walz found citation numbers follow a fixed pattern, scraped them in real time and mapped every ticketing officer — until the city pulled the feed.
Read the caseRoute-specific WhatsApp groups turn Rio bus riders into live sensors, out-reporting official apps in suburbs where timetables are fiction.
Read the caseLuis von Ahn made the words OCR couldn't read double as the CAPTCHA itself, so 10 seconds of bot-proofing per user also transcribed the NYT's archive.
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