Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Bubble wrap traps ambient air between heated plastic sheets
An ideal black body absorbs all incoming radiation, then emits thermal radiation based on its temperature.
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Sweden has a museum for failed products
Opened in Helsingborg in 2017, the Museum of Failure assembled products such as Bic pens marketed for women and the Twitter Peek device. The collection gives…
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Why your phone flips screens at the worst time
The orientation sensor can mistake a shift in your position—especially while you're lying in bed—for a request to rotate the display. The result: your screen…
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How programmers change code mid-run
Monkey patching rewrites a program's behavior while it is running—the digital equivalent of changing a car's tires on the highway.
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Why Facebook is blue
Mark Zuckerberg has said blue was the richest color he could see, so he chose it for the interface.
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When house keys were the size of your forearm
Some ancient wooden keys were nearly as long as an adult’s forearm. They lifted wooden pins inside a door lock.
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Tinder was almost called Matchbox
The founders dropped Matchbox because it sounded like a toy-car brand and chose Tinder for its association with a spark.
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Charging bricks vanish into thin air
When the adapter and cord come apart, the wall plug can get borrowed and never returned, leaving a useless cable and a dead device.
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Batman: Arkham Asylum used a broken glide as copy protection
A protection check in the original PC release could sabotage Batman's gliding in unauthorized copies, making progress fail where the player needed the move.…
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Trampolines stretch heavy steel springs to stop injuries
The canvas provides the landing surface, while the tightly coiled steel springs stretch to absorb and return the jumper’s energy.
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Wikipedia relies on thousands of unpaid nerds to maintain the complete sum of human knowledge
Volunteer editors can spend years debating details as small as a comma in a politician’s biography.
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Binary trees invert themselves to sort stored variables
A binary tree organizes data through branches; inverting one means swapping its left and right branches. It’s a common computer science interview question,…
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America's nuclear-support system was still using eight-inch floppy disks in 2016
A Government Accountability Office review found the disks in a Defense Department system coordinating nuclear-force operations. The same review found aging…
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Drivers teach operating systems how to talk to hardware
Each driver gives the operating system device-specific instructions, so a printer without the right one may be little more than a paperweight.
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Bungee cords are just hundreds of elastic threads woven
A fabric sheath holds many smaller elastic strands together, so a bungee cord can stretch under a jumper's weight.
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Some early radios ran without batteries
A crystal receiver could use energy captured from the radio signal itself to drive headphones. It needed a suitable aerial and produced little power, but no…
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Laptop cooling fans blow scalding hot air
Side-mounted exhaust fans push heat out to keep internal components cooler, sometimes directing hot air onto your hand.
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When your cheek takes over a phone call
If the screen stays on when you hold the phone to your head, your cheek can tap buttons, mute you, end the call, or even dial someone else.
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Emulators mimic completely foreign hardware via software
They imitate another machine’s hardware in software, translating its instructions in real time. That extra work can require far more processing power than the…
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Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9
At the 2002 Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs wheeled a coffin onto the stage, played gloomy organ music, and delivered a eulogy to push developers toward…
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One computer can run dozens of separate systems
A hypervisor lets one physical computer host dozens of isolated operating systems, each running as if it had its own machine while sharing the hardware.
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Throwing water on a hill to slide dangerously fast
The first known recreational wet chute was a steep grassy slope that people poured water on before sliding down.
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Why Emacs users defend their complicated editor
Mastering its many keyboard shortcuts and customizing its setup can make users fiercely loyal to Emacs—even if configuring it sometimes takes time away from…
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How plasma cutters slice through thick metal
A plasma cutter sends compressed gas, such as nitrogen, through a tiny nozzle and superheats it with an electrical arc. The roughly 40,000°F plasma melts the…
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