Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The tiny spring that flips your phone screen
Inside the accelerometer, a microscopic suspended mass shifts relative to its frame. Gravity changes the direction of that pull when you tilt the phone,…
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Irradiated food does not become radioactive
Low doses of ionizing radiation kill bacteria and pests, and can keep potatoes from sprouting.
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How scientists measure a room’s brightness
Photometers measure incoming light by converting photons into electrical current, producing a numerical reading instead of relying on your eyes.
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Why scientists deliberately create terrifying emptiness
Vacuum chambers remove air to create conditions with little or no atmospheric pressure. Scientists use them to test how materials and equipment handle…
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You can measure molten metal by looking at it
A pyrometer reads the thermal radiation coming off a surface to estimate its temperature without touching it—useful when metal is too hot for a thermometer.
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Why factories use three currents at once
Three-phase power sends three alternating currents slightly out of sync, creating a smoother, more continuous flow of energy than a single phase. That steady…
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Why radio telescopes listen to the darkness
Radio telescopes detect wavelengths invisible to human eyes, including signals from pulsars and distant galaxies. Cosmic dust that blocks visible light…
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Bending light through liquids exposes their sugar content
A refractometer shines light through crushed grape juice and measures how much it bends; that reading indicates the concentration of dissolved sugars and…
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A molecule's shape can be reconstructed from scattered X-rays
Atoms scatter incoming X-rays into a pattern that researchers use to infer their arrangement. Crystals can create particularly useful repeating patterns;…
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Absorbing raw radiation measures invisible heat waves
A bolometer detects otherwise invisible electromagnetic radiation by absorbing it and measuring the resulting change in electrical resistance.
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Apple Maps once erased the Statue of Liberty
When Apple Maps replaced Google Maps in 2012, it omitted the Statue of Liberty; the launch also drew attention for distorted landmarks such as the Brooklyn…
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Actors performed a screenplay generated by a neural network in 2016
Sunspring, made by Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, used a system called Benjamin to produce dialogue and stage directions from training on screenplays. Human…
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Bill Gates paid $30 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook
Gates bought the Codex Leicester, a scientific notebook by da Vinci, in 1994 and later digitized it.
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Printing Wikipedia became a 7,473-volume art project
In 2015, Michael Mandiberg converted the English encyclopedia into thousands of 700-page volumes, producing a selection as physical books. Even the table of…
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Bad checkpoints make players rewatch cutscenes after every failure
Poorly placed checkpoints can leave a cutscene just before a tough fight, forcing you to watch it again after each failure. Others are so far apart that one…
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Games use invisible boxes to simplify collision checks
Rather than test a click against every detail of a character’s polygonal model, a game can first check whether it falls inside a simple invisible box. That…
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What your computer is doing when it spools a print job
Spooling means your computer queues the job and converts it into printer-ready data. Because many printers have limited processing power, it may send the page…
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How video games create worlds out of noise
Procedural generation uses mathematical noise and a random seed to build terrain, dungeons, or planets from rules instead of designing every feature by hand.
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Your keyboard may break a beam of light
In an optical keyboard switch, pressing a key moves a plastic stem through an infrared beam; interrupting the light registers the keystroke.
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Why your processor needs thermal paste
Even polished processor and cooler surfaces have tiny imperfections that leave air gaps and trap heat. Thermal paste fills those crevices to help transfer…
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How deepfakes make one face move like another
Deepfakes map one person's facial structure and movements, then use a neural network to recreate them with another person's facial texture.
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Why high mouse DPI doesn’t make you more accurate
At very high DPI, tiny hand movements send the cursor farther, which can make precise aiming harder rather than easier.
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Why cheap keyboards feel so mushy
A silicone membrane under the keys replaces individual springs; pressing a key pushes it against a circuit board to register a keystroke.
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Fast travel is really a loading screen
Fast travel skips the journey by unloading the current area and loading the destination—a shortcut for worlds too large to cross repeatedly.
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