Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Code obfuscation scrambles logic to confuse humans
If you don't want people stealing your brilliant intellectual property, you run it through an obfuscator. This tool intentionally destroys perfectly good…
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The salty desert pools behind lithium batteries
The green revolution is powered by giant desert pools of toxic salty sludge left to bake in the sun for months. Once the water vanishes, we scrape up the…
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Why your phone screen gets smudgier
A brand-new smartphone screen feels impossibly smooth and completely repels greasy fingerprints. This magical barrier is just a microscopically thin chemical…
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The first web browser had the same name as the web
When you invent the underlying architecture of modern existence, you are allowed a few naming hiccups. Berners-Lee originally named his browsing software the…
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Folding screens crease right down the middle
Bending a screen in half behaves exactly the way you would expect bending any solid object to behave. No matter how advanced the flexible layers get,…
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Expensive electronic deadbolts fail on misaligned doors
You can spend hundreds on a sophisticated wall lock, only for the entire system to be defeated by humidity. The tiny internal motor lacks the brute physical…
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The stranger who briefly bought Google.com
Even trillion-dollar tech behemoths forget to pay their bills. In 2015, a guy named Sanmay Ved was browsing Google Domains and noticed that 'Google.com' was…
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Why blast furnaces run for decades
Lighting an iron foundry is a permanent, wildly expensive commitment. A massive industrial blast furnace requires incredibly precise thermal expansion of…
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Why your smart thermostat changes the temperature back
Nothing asserts dominance quite like a wall-mounted dial telling you it knows your comfort better than you do. Modern climate control algorithms actively…
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The USB logo is a trident in disguise
Because nothing channels the sheer, destructive power of the ocean god quite like transferring a 2MB PDF document. The USB Implementers Forum designed the…
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Your smart fridge may need an update to make ice
The peak of modern convenience is arguably waiting for a progress bar to finish before you can chill your drink. By replacing basic mechanical switches with…
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The glass that washes itself in sunlight
Washing windows is apparently too tedious for modern chemistry, so we made glass that cleans itself using ultraviolet radiation. When titanium dioxide…
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Why .aq websites must be tied to Antarctica
Securing this domain extension is vastly harder than just paying a registration fee. To claim a website ending in .aq, you must supply literal proof that you…
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C was created to play a space game
Modern computing infrastructure rests on the shoulders of a guy who just wanted to game in peace. In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were…
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Point of sale registers are horribly disguised computers
The massive beige box the exhausted cashier uses to ring up your groceries looks completely alien and heavily specialized. Underneath the bulky plastic shell…
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The Vatican controls the .va web domain
Because divine intervention apparently requires a solid online presence, the absolute smallest state in the world controls the dot-va extension. It is heavily…
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The video game that punished pirates with an unkillable scorpion
Pirates who illegally downloaded the shooter were hunted down by a relentless, unkillable pink arachnid that stalked them across the entire map until they quit.
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Wikipedia has a plan for the end of the world
When society collapses, at least we will have an offline encyclopedia detailing the plot of every 90s sitcom. Wikipedia has a 'Terminal Event Management…
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Stents are tiny expandable wire mesh tubes for arteries
When an essential biological blood highway clogs up with cholesterol, surgeons do not usually scrape it clean. Instead, they snake a tiny collapsed metal cage…
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Trampolines absorb bounces through a ring of metal springs
The black fabric you jump on doesn't stretch at all; it’s essentially rigid. The entire bouncy magic happens entirely at the edges, where dozens of tightly…
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Audio equalizers selectively boost targeted frequencies
Fixing a bad recording is basically just highly precise acoustic surgery. Equalizers split the entire audio spectrum into distinct frequency bands, allowing…
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Why internet lag is rare in South Korea
While the rest of the world angrily stares at buffering wheels, an entire nation essentially lives ten years in the future. South Korea boasts the absolute…
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Bitrate directly throttles data transmission speed
Quality is strictly governed by how much data you can violently shove through a pipe per second. Bitrate measures exactly how many bits of information are…
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How supermarkets stop carts from escaping
Trying to steal a cart results in an abrupt, embarrassing halt. Supermarkets bury a magnetic perimeter wire under the asphalt that triggers a hidden brake…
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