Billions of items are scanned daily at supermarkets. What was the profoundly mundane first product ever scanned?

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Before international standards locked it down, a "byte" of computer data was not strictly eight bits, and could legally range anywhere from a single bit up to forty-eight bits depending on the hardware manufacturer.

Before international standards locked it down, a "byte" of computer data was not strictly eight bits, and could legally range anywhere from a single bit up to…

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Technology

Mayo Clinic utilizes generative adversarial networks to hallucinate millions of entirely fake patient medical records that perfectly mirror the statistical properties of real…

Real healthcare data is an absolute privacy minefield, so hospitals simply decided to mathematically hallucinate fake patients instead. These complex…

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Data warehouses are obsessive organizational hubs

Instead of letting information rot in scattered folders, gigantic institutions use massive structured repositories called data warehouses. Every single piece…

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Why Wikipedia biographies overlook so many women

Despite being hailed as the ultimate sum of human knowledge, the open-source encyclopedia suffers from massive demographic biases. An overwhelming majority of…

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Early computers remembered data with echoes in mercury

Early radar and computing systems lacked RAM, so they stored data by turning electrical pulses into sound waves and firing them down a long tube filled with…

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The very first SMS text message ever sent in 1992 wasn't a standard greeting—what exactly did it say?

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Billions of items are scanned daily at supermarkets. What was the profoundly mundane first product ever scanned?

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

Before international standards locked it down, a "byte" of computer data was not strictly eight bits, and could legally range anywhere from a single bit up to forty-eight bits depending on the hardware manufacturer.

Mayo Clinic utilizes generative adversarial networks to hallucinate millions of entirely fake patient medical records that perfectly mirror the statistical properties of real…

Data warehouses are obsessive organizational hubs

Why Wikipedia biographies overlook so many women

Early computers remembered data with echoes in mercury

The very first SMS text message ever sent in 1992 wasn't a standard greeting—what exactly did it say?

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.