NHS Lanarkshire swapped children's X-rays for a £400 handheld metal detector
After a Monklands Hospital pilot, A&E teams run a handheld metal detector over children who swallow metal — many skip X-rays and £55 imaging costs entirely.
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300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDMIT's shoebox-sized device bills village solar without individual meters
One power-management unit regulates a village's solar share, meters each house's usage, and turns solar owners into sellers — no meter hardware per home.
Read the caseFood charity Felix matched surplus food to spare lorry space to cut costs
An AI platform dubbed speed dating for trucks matches surplus-food collections to HGVs’ empty space — 30% of UK lorry journeys run with spare capacity.
Read the caseZeolite beads dry the air around crops instead of heating the crops themselves
Rhino Research's engineered zeolite beads trap water molecules, cutting post-harvest rot in the humid tropics and halving the energy of crop drying.
Read the caseStanford pays drivers small random rewards to stay out of rush hour
Balaji Prabhakar's scheme gives off-peak commuters credits worth cash or raffle entries — moving just 10–15% of drivers untangles the peak.
Read the caseSHRI's India toilet blocks sell cleaned groundwater to pay for their own upkeep
Sixteen toilets over one tank: waste becomes biogas, biogas becomes electricity, electricity cleans groundwater — and the water sale funds the cleaning.
Read the caseSevern Trent sent taxi drivers to film water leaks instead of dispatching engineers
In two-week trials the utility had Uber and taxi drivers video about 50 small leaks so base engineers could triage and send only the right fix team.
Read the caseSurrey's ambulance crews X-rayed fall patients at home — 25 of 38 skipped hospital
A paramedic and radiographer answer 999 calls with a backpack X-ray rig; a hospital radiographer reviews scans remotely — most patients stayed home.
Read the caseReactive Technologies sent data over the UK's national grid by modulating its 50Hz hum
Resistors nudged the grid's AC wave to carry messages to detectors nationwide — a broadcast channel for price signals that needs no internet.
Read the caseIn Peru, a probiotic bar soap turns laundry day into a river-cleaning system
Fahrenheit DDB, Andea and Cirsys spent two years on a soap whose microbes eat river pollution — before-and-after samples showed 75-85% pollutant removal.
Read the caseA maths teacher put bike pedals under desks and grades went up
Bethany Lambeth's silent, optional desk pedals channel fidget energy into focus — recall, participation and test scores all improved, she says.
Read the caseThe Nature Conservancy rented flooded rice fields for migrating birds by reverse auction
With over 90% of the Pacific Flyway's California wetlands gone, Eric Hallstein's reverse auction rents farmer-flooded rice fields instead of buying land.
Read the caseIkea made the checkout the farthest point in the store and let exposure do the selling
Ikea's maze layout is the least direct route to the register; researchers estimate half of all purchases are unplanned, and exposure turns browsers into buyers.
Read the caseAn outsider profiled GTA Online's six-minute load times and found one bad JSON sort
Coder t0st disassembled the loading screen, cut wait times about 70%, and Rockstar confirmed the fix, paid a $10,000 bounty and shipped a patch.
Read the caseWall Street bought TV stations for $7M and sold them into the FCC auction for $74M
A private equity firm bought eleven WBGN stations for $7M, sold five into the FCC's 2016 spectrum auction for $73.9M — the flagship alone fetched $20.1M.
Read the caseeasyJet removed seats so the crew-ratio rule would let it fly with three cabin crew
UK rules tie cabin crew headcount to seat count, not passengers. easyJet pulled the back row off its A319s and flew with three crew instead of four.
Read the caseAmnesia's sanity meter is a bluff: no fail state, and the game lies about it
Frictional gave its sanity meter no real consequence and made in-game text lie about one — players assume the worst and scare themselves.
Read the casePressure-activated micro-grip from an insect's foot ended up on World Cup cleats
Bill King's insect-foot-inspired microstructure fabric grips only when a player strikes — passive pressure switching in adidas Predator cleats.
Read the caseHotelTonight made users trace its logo to book — and accidental orders vanished
To confirm a booking in HotelTonight's three-tap app, users trace the bed-shaped 'H' logo — accidental bookings collapsed and revenue rose 10%+ a year.
Read the caseDowntown Columbus paid for bus passes instead of building 4,000 parking spaces
Columbus property owners' district, short 4,000 parking spaces, funded free bus passes for 40,000 downtown workers after a pilot doubled ridership to 12.2%.
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