What a week. Perhaps you’re disappointed that you didn’t win the bid for the $450.3 million Da Vinci painting. Or you’re feeling inadequate that you weren’t the first to invent a lint roller phone case. Maybe you’re still reeling from this Wheel of Fortune heartbreak.

In any case, rest assured knowing that you’re certainly not feeling as distraught as this cat, and that another empathetic messaging app is allowing users to “unsend” messages. So go ahead and send that risky text, and keep reading for this week’s Five Pointer.

Optical illusions are controlling traffic

A small town in northwest Iceland is taking a creative approach to traffic management. Inspired by similar efforts in New Delhi, the town of Ísafjörður decided to paint a three-dimensional crosswalk, creating an optical illusion that there are objects lying in the street. The intention is to trick speedy drivers’ eyes and cause them to slow down as they approach the seemingly floating crosswalk. If the experiment is a success, the town’s environmental officer thinks 3D crosswalks might become a good replacement for speed bumps.

Bill Gates-opolis

An investment company that Bill Gates controls just bought 24,800 acres of land in the Arizona desert with plans to build a futuristic city. The metropolis will be named Belmont, after the real estate firm involved, and will be a home to 80,000 residential units and more than 3,800 acres of industrial and commercial space. According to Belmont Partners, the city will embrace cutting-edge technology, and will be designed around high-speed data centers and autonomous vehicles. Beyond these broad promises, little is known about the project, and people are theorizing about the right and wrong ways to build cities from scratch.

Scientists map Antarctica’s warm side

Despite being known as the ice continent, Antarctica is actually naturally home to areas of warmth rising from an extensive hydraulic network beneath its vast ice sheet. Researchers at the British Antarctic survey published the most comprehensive map yet of the geothermal heat beneath Antarctica, which experts say will prove key in understanding the continent’s past and future. The map will help scientists understand climate change’s implications and will identify the best areas of the continent to extract ice cores that contain records of past climates.

While your skin cells were sleeping….

A recent study indicates that wounds that occur during the daytime heal faster than those that occur at night—by an astounding rate. Of 118 patients in a UK hospital burn unit, injuries that occurred after dark took an average of 28 days to heal, compared to only 17 days for those that occurred in daytime. The difference comes down to a specific type of skin cell called fibroblasts, which act as the body’s first responder. But fibroblasts like their rest, losing their ability rush quickly to injury sites at night. These findings might help inform decisions about when to perform surgery, and could shed light on when to prescribe steroid drugs that can speed healing by “resetting” a cell body’s internal clock.

(Commerce) content is king

Buzzfeed now employs nineteen people to write commerce content full-time. While historically known for its identity-focused listicles (think: “23 Things Only 90’s Kids Will Understand”), the media company is following both trends and cash flow by moving into more paid and commercial content. The Buzzfeed “Gift-Guide” landing page launched this year, allowing the company to capitalize on fast-moving search trends to track and analyze what their readers want to buy, and make their placements all the more lucrative.

From the Five Pointer archive: