The eye surgery factory that could not expand
Eight operating tables turned on a slow revolving conveyor. A surgeon sat at the head of each one, and as the tables came around, each performed a single…
Category: Business
The collective farms in your grocery cart
Ocean Spray, Sunkist, Land O’Lakes, Welch’s, Blue Diamond, Cabot. Every one of those brands belongs to a collective farming arrangement that has worked…
The end of a 20-year monopoly on the credit score
For nearly two decades, one scoring model stood between American borrowers and a mortgage. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy a large share of the…
Why companies are putting a meter on AI
Uber gave a new artificial intelligence coding tool to about 5,000 engineers last December. The engineers loved it. By April the company had spent its…
Apple suit highlights security issues
Apple has a name for the security ritual where a resigning employee is escorted straight out the door, access cut on the spot, no two…
The lettuce scare bug
The parasite that emptied lettuce bins at Taco Bell cannot be passed from one person to the next. Cyclospora cayetanensis is a microscopic parasite spread…
The outbreak that emptied tables it never touched
The parasite was traced to Taco Bell. But Subway — which no investigator has linked to the outbreak — lost nearly a fifth of its…
What happens when ideas can’t be protected?
If intellectual property (IP) protections weakened or disappeared, would innovation grind to a halt? The answer: it depends on the industry. In pharmaceuticals, the case…
The patent bargain is broken, CEO says
Patents are Chinese instruction manuals, say Palmer Luckey, founder of defense company Anduril. “The founding fathers never predicted a world where you…
What happens when ideas can’t be protected?
If intellectual property (IP) protections weakened or disappeared, would innovation grind to a halt? The answer: it depends on the industry. In…