And the tall, bright chimpanzee felt therefore repeatedly humiliated and repeatedly helpless, in a situation for which there was no solution, no way to work at the problem.
Most important, we are working at the roots of the problem by spaying and neutering, at little or no cost, thousands of dogs and cats that would otherwise produce unwanted litters.
Rather than tightly controlled industrial scale projects, in the developing world at least, some of the more interesting, impactful healthcare innovations are coming from lone innovators working at the "long tail" of problems.
Siroya decided to tackle the problem after working at the U.N. researching and building costing models on reproductive health and microfinance.
But he still feels the restaurant is working at the edges of a larger, systemic problem.
Some members of the group said they were still suffering health problems while working at the factory, which employs 18,000 workers at an average monthly wage of about $200, after overtime.
"Whenever the union and the company have tried to solve problems, and have really worked at solving the problem, we have been able to be successful," said Thom McDaniel, the head of the Transport Workers Union Local 556 that represents the airline's flight attendants.
"This may sound obvious, but it wasn't trivial," says Darrell Schlom, a materials scientist now at Cornell University who started working on the problem while at Pennsylvania State University.
Other teams learned that there was disagreement within and between different State Department offices about what they hoped the Stanford teams would be doing -- or whether they should be working on the problem at all.
The final rectangle is a far cry from a polished pebble, but when Evans talks through the iterations and changes, and the primacy of that edge-to-edge display as the driving force behind the process overall, you feel like you were in the design studio spending long nights working away at the problem right alongside him.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working on the problem have come up with a new way of carefully tuning the structure of titanium dioxide, an abundant and cheap material, to do this work.
