Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Perfluorocarbons could let mammals breathe underwater
Drowning is just a matter of inhaling the wrong liquid. Perfluorocarbons can hold so much dissolved oxygen that mice and even humans can theoretically…
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Desalination forces seawater through microscopic membranes
Turning the ocean into tap water isn't a delicate boiling process; it's a brute-force assault. Reverse osmosis plants use immense pressure to shove salty…
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Your rose-scented perfume may come from yeast
Farming actual flowers is apparently too tedious for the modern era. Synthetic biologists have engineered yeast strains that completely bypass the botanical…
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Carbon dating measures the radioactive decay of carbon-14
Finding out how old a bone is requires checking its radioactive half-life. While an organism is alive, it absorbs a steady ratio of unstable Carbon-14 from…
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Municipal tap water uses chloramine for cheap disinfection
Plain chlorine evaporates too fast to protect water on its long journey to your sink. To solve this, water treatment plants mix chlorine with ammonia to…
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Living E. coli can carry a video in its DNA
Your next thumb drive might just be a petri dish full of stomach bugs. Researchers have successfully encoded a video file into the DNA of living E. coli…
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Composting toilets evaporate liquids to decompose waste
Flushing with fresh water is technically an ecological tragedy. Composting toilets separate liquids from solids, using an active fan system to aggressively…
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How pressure kills bacteria without heat
Instead of boiling nutrients away, food scientists just squeeze the life out of pathogens. High-Pressure Processing subjects packaged juice or meats to…
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How machines turn humid air into drinking water
If you don't have a well, you can just forcefully milk the sky. Atmospheric water generators use massive cooling coils to drop the temperature of humid air…
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Pulse oximeters calculate oxygen using red light absorption
That glowing clip the nurse puts on your finger isn't magic; it's basic optical physics. Oxygen-rich blood absorbs infrared light, while oxygen-poor blood…
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Edible plant-based coatings trap moisture in fresh produce
Rotting is natural, but capitalism hates waste. Ag-tech companies now spray avocados and cucumbers with an invisible, tasteless coating derived from plant…
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How UV light makes contaminated water safe
Shining a bright light in your water sounds like holistic nonsense, but UV purifiers are violently effective. The intense ultraviolet radiation penetrates the…
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Cultured dairy utilizes genetically modified flora strains
Your fancy artisanal yogurt is actually a heavily engineered bacterial warfare zone. Dairy scientists use precisely calculated, often genetically optimized…
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Titanium pacemaker casings prevent human immune rejection
Shoving a metal battery into your chest usually pisses off your white blood cells. To avoid the body throwing a massive biological tantrum, pacemakers are…
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The printers turning stem cells into organs
Why wait for a tragic motorcycle accident when you can just print a new kidney? Instead of plastic, biological printers extrude a specialized bio-ink made of…
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Your Mac may be hiding two cookie recipes
While Apple is busy locking down their ecosystem so you can't upgrade your own RAM, they quietly left some culinary easter eggs buried deep in your system…
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Why :-) was invented
The entire concept of relying on little yellow faces to convey human emotion started because scientists lack a sense of humor. In 1982, computer scientist…
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When shipping hard drives beats sending data online
Welcome to the primitive concept of "Sneakernet." If you need to move a massive amount of data—say, a 100-petabyte server farm—doing it over standard…
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Your body can weaken a Wi-Fi signal
Your crippling internet lag might literally be your own fault. Wi-Fi relies on radio waves at the 2.4GHz frequency, which just so happens to be the exact…
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Spinning cooling fans create turbulent noise
Keeping your rig freezing cold literally requires turning it into a miniature, highly annoying wind tunnel. When cooling fans aggressively force air through…
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A planet-sized chip would be almost perfectly flat
Flatter than a pancake and infinitely more expensive. To print microscopic circuitry, raw silicon is polished to an atomic level of absolute flatness. If a…
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The frantic metronome inside every processor
Processors don't just work extremely fast; they strictly obey a frantic, vibrating overlord. The clock speed of a processor dictates precisely how many…
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Why mixing metals can destroy a cooling system
Putting the wrong expensive metals closely together creates a highly localized, destructive electrical loop. Galvanic corrosion occurs when distinct metals,…
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Microscopic crystal structures change over time
Even highly reliable rocks get incredibly tired and start slowly losing track of time eventually. The extremely precise frequency of a timing crystal subtly…
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