Vol 2.19 | 051019

Read time: 2 minutes

1

Prime – “the greatest retail innovation of the internet age”

The story behind how a mundane detail like shipping costs led to Amazon rewiring the psychology of how we buy nearly everything in retail.

 


2Billionaire Town

San Francisco stands as a study in contrasts. On the one hand, the city’s growing homelessness crisis has led to a five-fold increase in “human feces incidents” on the city’s sidewalks and streets over the last 7 years. On the other hand, the City by the Bay holds the title as having the highest per capita concentration of billionaires in the world — 1 billionaire for every 11,600 residents — and it’s not even close. New York City ranks #2, with 1 billionaire for every 81,000 people.


3The P.C. PC

Not satisfied with a word processing software that merely catches misspellings and questionable grammatical construction, Microsoft has it’s eye on a new capability for its Word product: advising users when their word choice may be seen as insensitive or offensive. With all the failings and flailings we see in the social media space when it comes to Facebook or Twitter trying to figure out which user posts are sufficiently “bad” to merit removal, why would Microsoft want to wade into that minefield with its otherwise bland and perfectly useful Word tool?

 


4Could 3D Printing Make Organ Donation Obsolete?

When you can take a tissue sample from a patient, extract the necessary cellular material, use that material to create the “ink” for a 3d printer, and then use that ink to 3d print a replacement organ built with the cellular materials that the patient’s body will recognize as its own, the stories of people afflicted with illnesses waiting for a match with an organ donor will soon become a thing of the past. Scientists in Tel Aviv are working in that direction, as they’ve now produced a 3d printed heart with working blood vessels, a first in the field.


5Maybe a Sun Burn Isn’t So Bad After All?

Turns out the chemicals in topical sunscreen that protect against the harm done by sunlight can seep through your skin and deposit themselves directly into your bloodstream. Whether it’s actually bad for your to have avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, and ecamsule coursing through your veins remains to be seen. Studies are now underway.