Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Asymmetrical encryption pairs public and private keys
Imagine a padlock anyone can snap shut, but only you hold the key to open. Asymmetrical encryption uses two mathematically linked keys. You freely distribute…
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Your carbon monoxide detector won't last forever
People blindly trust that little plastic disc on their ceiling forever, totally unaware it has a strictly enforced expiration date. The internal sensor…
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Why sarcasm confuses sentiment algorithms
If you ever want to completely break an expensive corporate feedback tool, just be highly sarcastic. Automated sentiment systems analyze text strictly by…
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Why games reward you with a tiny burst of music
Pavlov would be incredibly proud of how easily a triumphant cymbal crash controls you. Whenever you open a chest or clear a room, a tiny, satisfying musical…
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EarthBound punishes piracy at the very end
If the cartridge detected it was an illegal copy, it spawned massive amounts of enemies, let you play to the final encounter, and then entirely wiped your…
Discover moreChuck Norris facts started as Vin Diesel jokes
The endless barrage of satirical facts praising the impossible toughness of martial artist Chuck Norris were originally aimed at someone entirely different. A…
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A single Lego brick can withstand enormous force
A single tiny plastic brick can withstand over nine hundred pounds of force before crushing. If you had enough of them, you could structurally build a…
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Sega once put a game console on airplanes
Trapping people in a pressurized metal tube at thirty thousand feet is supposedly the perfect captive demographic for aggressive video gaming. In the mid-90s,…
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Laminators melt plastic pouches to permanently seal paper
Office preservation is basically just wrapping things in hot glue. Heavy heated rollers apply extreme pressure to a plastic pouch lined with heat-activated…
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Screws hold things together by converting rotation to push
A screw is literally just an inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder. When you twist it, those spiraling threads dig into the wood and mechanically pull the…
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How supercomputers can heat people's homes
Server farms are just incredibly loud, expensive radiators. Rather than venting the astronomical heat generated by processing massive data, facilities in…
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Shigetaka Kurita created the original set of one hundred seventy six emojis in the year 1999
The downfall of written language started on a tiny 12x12 pixel grid. Working for a Japanese telecom company, Kurita designed the first rudimentary emojis to…
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Why identical processors perform differently
Despite extreme manufacturing precision, microscopic flaws always occur in silicon wafers. Two identically branded processors will handle heat and electrical…
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All of Wikipedia fits on a cheap thumb drive
All of recorded human knowledge is shockingly tiny. If you strip away all the photos, videos, and interface elements, the raw uncompressed text of every…
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Digital support menus trap frustrated users in endless loops
Nothing demonstrates a corporation's disdain for human interaction quite like a flawlessly designed infinite software maze. Automated help matrices are…
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When one missed parry means replaying 15 minutes
Missing a single parry at the end of a grueling fifteen-minute encounter teleports you all the way back to the foggy entrance. You are forcefully required to…
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Hello world is the universal ritual to test a setup
Before building anything substantial, every developer on earth strictly performs the exact same digital ritual. They write a microscopic script solely…
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Digital watermarking hides invisible ownership data
Piracy is a problem, so media files snitch on themselves. Digital watermarking embeds subtle, localized alterations directly into the audio or video signal.…
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How deleted filenames can leave data behind
Sometimes a file’s name gets deleted, but the actual chunk of data stubbornly remains written on the drive. These are called orphaned inodes. They are…
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Colossal data centers span across millions of square feet
To accommodate our absolutely insatiable appetite for storing uncompressed vacation photos, corporations build sprawling, fortress-like campuses that dwarf…
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Random forest algorithms combine trees to make choices
If one decision tree isn't accurate enough, data scientists deploy a 'Random Forest'. They build hundreds of separate, slightly randomized decision trees and…
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Why gold can't improve an optical cable
Audiophiles love to boast about using pure gold tips on their incredibly expensive optical audio cords. The hilarious part is that optical cables transmit…
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Copper can be recycled without losing conductivity
Unlike plastics that degrade into useless mush after one recycling trip, pure copper simply does not care. Because it is a raw elemental metal, you can melt…
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Massive fan systems suck carbon dioxide directly out of air
Because we cannot stop emitting noxious gasses, some visionaries decided to just build giant vacuums for the sky. These towering arrays use chemical sorbents…
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