Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Google answers more than 8 billion questions a day
Humanity has essentially outsourced its collective brain to a single algorithm. From diagnosing a mild cough as a terminal illness to figuring out how many…
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The tiny secret that makes plugs reversible
Reversible charging ends look delightfully simple, but they are hiding an absurdly complicated secret inside. To ensure it works no matter which way you…
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Why one extra comma can break JSON
Developers love this data format for being lightweight, but it acts like a strict grammarian with zero tolerance for typos. Leaving a single stray comma at…
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The glass that survives red-hot to ice-cold
Normal glass shatters violently if you even look at it with a warm beverage, but fused quartz is practically invincible. Manufactured by melting pure silica…
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When Cyberpunk 2077 spawned police behind you
When pathfinding is too difficult, simply teleport the problem directly behind the user. At launch, the much-hyped title lacked the code to properly navigate…
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Aluminum heatsinks are cheap but less conductive than copper
Budget electronics always feature silver-colored cooling fins because aluminum is incredibly cheap and lightweight. However, copper absorbs and transfers heat…
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Cherry physical switches were patented in the seventies
Long before they were the holy grail for obnoxious office workers who love loud clicking noises, these precise keyboard switches were purely utilitarian.…
Discover moreWhy the Web was given away for free
In a move that completely baffles modern, profit-obsessed executives, the genius who developed the foundational protocols for the internet refused to cash in.…
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Microfiber cloths are the only safe way to clean a screen
Scrubbing your expensive monitor with a paper towel is a fantastic way to permanently ruin it. Paper products are fundamentally created from coarse wood pulp,…
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Korea printed a metal-type book decades before Gutenberg
Western history textbooks love to loudly claim that Johannes Gutenberg single-handedly changed the world, completely ignoring that Korea beat him to the punch…
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How turning back the clock fooled trial software
Decades of advanced copy protection can often be defeated by pretending it's yesterday. Many trial applications simply log the exact date they were installed…
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Subterranean pipes exploit stable earth temperatures for heat
Surface weather is a chaotic mess, but dig ten feet into the ground and the temperature stays entirely static all year round. By burying hundreds of feet of…
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Combining two utensils to fail at both
The ultimate compromise that pleases absolutely no one. Patented in the late nineteenth century, this hybrid utensil functions as a shallow spoon that spills…
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A controller cord could topple the PS2 Slim
Sony shrank their behemoth console down to the size of a thin hardcover book. It was an engineering marvel that weighed so little, an enthusiastic tug on a…
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The typewriter was invented to help a blind writer
The history of technology is essentially just massive corporations stealing accessibility tools and mass-marketing them to the general public. Pellegrino…
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Web browsers enforce maximum character limits on URLs
You cannot just cram an entire novel into a web address. While the official standards specify no limits, major browsers simply refuse to process URLs…
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A game crash disguised as a victory message
Why fix a fatal exception when you can just lie to the user? Instead of resolving a bug that hard-closed the game upon exit, a clever programmer just edited…
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The iPad came before the iPhone
The world-changing smartphone revolution was actually just a miniaturized afterthought of a massive, stalled tablet project. Apple engineers began prototyping…
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Ancient Egyptians made wooden prosthetic toes
Long before carbon fiber blades, the ancients were fashioning body parts out of wood and leather. Archaeologists discovered a meticulously crafted fake toe on…
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How landfills seal garbage away
Modern trash disposal is actually a feat of highly secure geological mummification. To prevent garbage juice from poisoning the local groundwater, a massive…
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Slot cars draw their driving power directly from the track
Why bother putting batteries in the car when you can just electrify the road? Tiny metal brushes on the bottom of the toy scrape against energized metal rails…
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Quick time events demand button mashing to open heavy doors
Ah, yes, the pinnacle of interactive entertainment: violently attacking a single piece of plastic to turn a doorknob. These prompts artificially inflate the…
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Simon electronic game clones the classic Simon Says format
When translating the childhood playground game into a wildly popular blinking saucer, the creators simply capitalized on the sheer limits of human short-term…
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The digital black hole called /dev/null
Every system needs a void to scream into. Sending any output or files to `/dev/null` in a Unix-based system permanently and irreversibly erases it,…
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