Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
How your emails leave a carbon footprint
Billions of daily emails rely on data centers to store and transmit them, and the electricity powering those servers generates emissions.
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Voyager carries a recording of a woman thinking about love
Ann Druyan had her brain activity recorded for the Golden Record, thinking about human history and her feelings for Carl Sagan. An hour of recording was…
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Early web browsers were primarily text navigators
Browsers such as Lynx had no graphical interface, so users navigated pages with keyboard commands.
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How submarines navigate without GPS
GPS signals can’t reach deep underwater, so submarines rely on inertial navigation systems with spinning atomic lasers to calculate their position.
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A loudspeaker can aim a warning over kilometers
Long-range acoustic devices concentrate audible sound toward a selected area rather than broadcasting equally in every direction. Genasys describes systems…
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How predictive policing can create its own evidence
When police patrol neighborhoods flagged by past arrest data, those patrols can produce more arrests there—feeding the algorithm data that sends officers back…
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The first computer mouse rolled on two wheels
Bill English built Douglas Engelbart's prototype with two perpendicular wheels inside a wooden housing. Each tracked movement along one axis, letting the…
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Modern smartphones contain precious rare earth metals
Elements such as neodymium and yttrium help power phone speakers and produce screen colors. Extracting rare earth metals can require moving huge amounts of…
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One simulated second took a supercomputer forty minutes
In 2013, Japan’s K computer modeled a network of 1.73 billion neurons with more than 10 trillion connections. Simulating one second of activity took about 40…
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Before Google, the internet had no central index
Before search engines, people found websites through hobbyists' manually curated link lists, printed magazines, or by knowing a site's address.
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Why supercomputers simulate nuclear explosions
International treaties ban physical nuclear testing, so governments use supercomputers to simulate the microscopic physics of nuclear explosions.
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Why spider silk makes an unusually sensitive microphone
Unlike conventional microphone diaphragms that respond to pressure, spider silk vibrates with moving air particles, making it especially sensitive to sound.
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Why audio CAPTCHAs sound demonic
Engineers layer speech with distortion and background noise to make automated transcription harder, but the result can sound eerie or demonic.
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Your heartbeat could become your phone's password
Some security systems can use an electrocardiogram (ECG) to recognize a person's heartbeat pattern, much like a fingerprint. It’s a biometric password, though…
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Your touchscreen inherited a 19th-century typewriter layout
QWERTY emerged while inventors repeatedly rearranged early typewriter keyboards, and the Sholes and Glidden machine brought it to market in 1874. Explanations…
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QR codes were created for car factories
Japanese engineer Masahiro Hara invented QR codes in 1994 to track car parts during manufacturing, because standard barcodes couldn’t hold enough information.
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The typo that knocked thousands of websites offline
An Amazon Web Services engineer entered a value that was too large while trying to run a routine debugging command, taking thousands of websites, apps, and…
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Scientists decoded categories of dream images from brain scans
In a 2013 experiment, researchers woke participants as they drifted into sleep and collected reports of what they had seen. They linked those reports with…
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AI translation can help scholars face mountains of unread clay tablets
A 2023 project trained models to translate Akkadian from cuneiform signs and transliterated text into English. The language had already been deciphered; the…
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The silent signals linking your TV to your phone
Some ads contain ultrasonic beacons that people can't hear but phone microphones can detect. Marketers can use them to connect TV viewing with mobile…
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Why faster computers still feel slow
Developers often rely on heavy, unoptimized frameworks, counting on powerful hardware to brute-force its way through the inefficiency. That can leave apps…
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Why reusing passwords puts your whole digital life at risk
In credential stuffing, hackers use automated scripts to try stolen passwords on many websites. If you reuse one password, a breach at one site can put…
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AI-generated text may carry an invisible signature
Some AI text watermarks work by subtly shifting the likelihood of particular words, leaving a pattern that can identify the model that generated the text.
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Your cloud storage is becoming a junk drawer
Thousands of unread emails, duplicate photos, and abandoned files can create the same sense of clutter as a messy home.
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