Sickness can hurt farm output by slowing animals' growth, so disease detection systems could improve efficiency by obviating the need for costly clinical testing.

“Yes, the virus is worse, but that doesn’t obviate doing research to make sure that there may be other options.”

Long-acting therapies may obviate the need to remember to take a daily pill to prevent or treat H.I.V.

“There’s not much question that Congress could have obviated all this and solved the issue for any of this litigation,” Willinger said.

For example, NuScale engineers rely on convection to drive cooling water through the core of each SMR, obviating the need for expensive pumps.