Science
Discover facts about science. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Science
Graphic processing units render thousands of pixels at once
While a normal computer processor handles complex tasks one at a time sequentially, a GPU is designed to do thousands of extremely simple tasks…
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The failed malaria cure that created purple dye
An 18-year-old chemist was desperately trying to synthesize artificial quinine to save humanity from a deadly tropical disease. He utterly failed, leaving…
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TNT research accidentally created synthetic musk
Because nothing screams romantic evening quite like high-grade TNT. A chemist named Albert Baur was aggressively trying to synthesize a much more powerful…
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Why misheard phrases can sound perfectly right
When people mishear a phrase, they often invent a completely wrong version that somehow still makes perfect sense. Calling Alzheimer's disease 'old timers…
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Hamburger menus visually represent a stacked list of options
Those three parallel horizontal lines crammed in the corner of your screen are universally known as the hamburger menu. Designed to hide messy navigation…
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Rubber became durable after an accidental stove drop
Before this violent accident, rubber shoes would literally melt into a sticky soup during summer and freeze into brittle shards during winter. Charles…
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Every JPEG save throws away image data
To make massive image files small enough to send over the internet, JPEG compression actively throws away subtle color variations that it assumes you will not…
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Tupperware grew out of wartime plastics
The iconic burping seal on your leftover spaghetti container has deep military roots. Earl Tupper was a plastics pioneer working tirelessly to purify gross,…
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Edge computing processes data physically closer to the user
Sending data back and forth to a centralized data center halfway across the globe causes unacceptable lag. Edge computing dramatically shortens the trip by…
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Topographic maps represent 3D terrain with flat lines
Instead of drawing little cartoon mountains, professionals use contour lines to represent elevation on a totally flat piece of paper. When the concentric…
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Gall-Peters projections maintain area while stretching shape
In a desperate attempt to fix the size distortion of traditional maps, this alternative projection accurately represents the true scale of continents. The…
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Choropleth maps use color shading to visualize dense data
Instead of boring you with spreadsheets, statisticians aggressively color-code regions based on data density to make you feel smart. A choropleth map fills…
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Trojan horses masquerade as totally legitimate payloads
Borrowing directly from classical mythology, this malicious software poses as highly useful or entirely harmless files. You think you are downloading a simple…
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The hydraulic press started with bookbinding
Before they became the ultimate viral sensation for violently crushing watermelons and bowling balls, hydraulic presses had a painfully boring academic job.…
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Why you hear lyrics that were never sung
Your auditory processing system is desperate to make sense of mumbling singers, so it actively hallucinates lyrics that are not there. A mondegreen happens…
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The ice machine invented to fight yellow fever
Because violently dying of a tropical disease is only slightly better with a cold drink. A Florida physician aggressively invented the first mechanical ice…
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English words that mean their own opposites
English is a gloriously broken language where certain words mean totally opposite things depending solely on context. To 'dust' a cake means adding sugar, but…
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Geocoding translates physical addresses into digital points
Your street address is entirely useless to a computer until it gets mercilessly stripped down into raw longitude and latitude. Geocoding algorithms violently…
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Interrobangs combine exclamation points with questions
Typing a question mark followed by an exclamation point is apparently too exhausting for some people, so an entire punctuation mark was invented to merge…
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Serverless computing still needs servers
The tech industry loves terrible naming conventions. Serverless computing absolutely runs on physical servers; the terminology simply means developers no…
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Hexadecimal color codes translate colors into alphanumerics
Instead of calling a color 'teal', computers prefer a brutalist string of six letters and numbers starting with a hash. These values directly instruct the…
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Domain name systems function as internet directories
Humans are completely incapable of memorizing the complex strings of numbers that represent website IP addresses. The DNS seamlessly translates the…
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Portmanteaus violently smash two different words into one
When society is too lazy to invent a brand-new word, it just crashes two existing ones together and hopes for the best. Smog is just smoke and fog. Brunch is…
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Stainless steel was born from a search for better gun barrels
Your shiny kitchen cutlery is a direct byproduct of aggressive weapons manufacturing. In 1913, a metallurgist was desperately trying to invent a new alloy…
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