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As a child,
Jerry McLaughlin sampled the fruit of
the paw-paw tree, sometimes called the
Indiana banana. It made him sick. But cancer
patients may one day thank Jerry, because many years later, as a chemist looking for
plants that might kill cancer cells, he remembered the paw-paw. He tested it and extracted
a substance that kills cancerous leukemia cells. It's 300 times as effective as
taxol from
the endangered yew tree.
Mark Gottlieb's father backed over him with the family car when
Mark was a child. That experience was the inspiration for the Back-Up Alert--a light
bulb that beeps. Just take out your regular backup light and replace it with Gottlieb's.
Congress may save you the trouble by making them standard equipment.
Ever wonder who reads your faxes between the fax room and your desk? Peter Castro did and
didn't like the idea. So he invented a fax paper that conceals the message until it
reaches the person to whom it's addressed.
Some people think pennies are a waste of time and would eliminate it altogether. Michael Rossides hates carrying any change. He proposes a method of eliminating all coins. His
plan amounts to a betting game which you'd play every time you reach the checkout counter.
The odds would make sure store and customer come out even in the long run, but the process
would be fun. And it would save everybody a lot of time and
trouble.
What the world needs is fewer left-brainers telling us how bad things are and more
creative people willing to do the right-brain thing and make it better.
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