Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

You have to give him a hand

Here are the numbers we're reading and watching for Tuesday.

2 days

That’s the amount of time it takes to make parts for an award-winning robotic hand on a 3-D printer, the BBC reports. Joel Gibbard of Open Bionics says he can use a sensor on his tablet to size an amputee in minutes, print the parts in about 40 hours and fit them together in two hours. The prototype earned Gibbard the James Dyson engineering award, which carries a $3,500 prize and the chance to win the $45,000 international title.

10 percent

That’s how much Netflix stock rebounded on Tuesday, the day after Black Monday — or should we call it Black Friday? Much like that busy holiday shopping day, buyers took advantage of sale-priced high-end tech stocks like Netflix, Apple, Google and Facebook, writes Molly Wood. But the bargains are fading as the global markets began the climb up again.

26

That’s the number of years Carlos Valdez has spent in the same northeast Los Angeles neighborhood. “I’m Highland Park for life,” says Valdez, an entrepreneur who built a computer repair business there. But investors were buying the old brick buildings in the area, rehabbing them and raising the rent. Like so many of his neighbors, Valdez was nearly priced out of his home and business. His story is part of our York & Fig project on gentrification.

5

That’s the number of times China’s central bank has cut its interest rates since November. It’s been the go-to strategy when the Shanghai Composite Index has dropped, as it did Tuesday by 7 percent. Rob Schmitz, Marketplace’s China correspondent in Shanghai, says the central bank “would’ve saved everyone billions of dollars” if it had made that signature move three days ago. If lowering interest rates “had worked the first time, they wouldn’t have had to keep doing it,” he says.