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
The world's most irresistible popping toy is manufactured via a rapid vacuum suffocation process. Two flat sheets of thin polyethylene film are unrolled over…
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Sweden has a museum for failed products
Because studying success is incredibly boring, but analyzing a spectacular corporate dumpster fire is pure educational gold. The Museum of Failure in Sweden…
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Why your phone flips screens at the worst time
The built-in gyroscope meant to help you watch videos is actively conspiring against you. Shifting your weight while lying in bed will inevitably trigger a…
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How programmers change code mid-run
Usually, you write a script, lock it down, and run it. Monkey patching is the chaotic practice of aggressively rewriting the core behavior of a program while…
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Why Facebook is blue
The defining corporate aesthetic of the world's largest data-harvesting machine was chosen entirely by biological default. Zuckerberg made the interface…
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When house keys were the size of your forearm
Losing your house access tool used to be incredibly difficult. Thousands of years ago, the devices used to lift wooden tumbling pins out of a door brace were…
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Tinder was almost called Matchbox
Before you were swiping right on questionable bathroom selfies, the app had the most uninspired name on the market. The founders quickly realized 'Matchbox'…
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Charging bricks vanish into thin air
The adapter that plugs into the wall is the most highly poached item in any household. Because cords are entirely detachable now, the actual charging block is…
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Pirated Batman games made him crash mid-glide
Instead of a normal ban, illegal versions of Arkham Asylum simply made the hero flap his arms uselessly and plummet to his death whenever he tried to fly.
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Trampolines stretch heavy steel springs to stop injuries
The bouncy canvas itself does almost nothing. All the kinetic energy is absorbed and returned by the perimeter of tightly coiled metal springs stretching to…
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Wikipedia relies on thousands of unpaid nerds to maintain the complete sum of human knowledge
The only thing holding human history together is a desperate lack of touching grass. Despite being one of the top ten websites on the planet, Wikipedia is…
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Binary trees invert themselves to sort stored variables
Software relies heavily on branching data structures called Binary Trees to organize massive datasets quickly. Flipping them upside down, known as 'inverting…
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The tangled code keeping critical systems alive
If the public actually saw the code running their lives, society would collapse in panic. Critical platforms holding immense databases are often a tangled…
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Drivers teach operating systems how to talk to hardware
You can plug a printer in, but without a driver, your computer just sees a useless plastic box. Drivers are hyper-specific instruction manuals that explain to…
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Bungee cords are just hundreds of elastic threads woven
Trusting your life to a single giant rubber band sounds like a terrible idea, so engineers just bundled a bunch of smaller elastic threads into a fabric…
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Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners
Going viral used to take a literal lifetime. While modern apps like TikTok hit 50 million users in a matter of months, it took commercial radio almost four…
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Laptop cooling fans blow scalding hot air
Excellent thermal management just means your computer redirects its suffering onto you. To keep the delicate internal components from cooking themselves,…
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When your cheek takes over a phone call
Making a traditional call is a fantastic way to accidentally mute yourself with your own face. If the screen fails to turn off when pressed to your head, your…
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Emulators mimic completely foreign hardware via software
When you want to run software meant for a different machine, you have to lie to it. Emulators are complex translation layers that pretend to be distinct…
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Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9
Tech executives today give boring, sterilized keynotes, but Steve Jobs understood the power of macabre theatricality. At the 2002 Worldwide Developers…
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One computer can run dozens of separate systems
By utilizing a hypervisor layer, one physical machine can simultaneously run dozens of isolated operating systems. Each individual system operates in blissful…
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Throwing water on a hill to slide dangerously fast
Amusement park staples often have incredibly rural origins. The first known recreational wet chute was essentially just a naturally steep grassy incline in a…
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Why Emacs users defend their complicated editor
When an application requires you to memorize fifty bizarre keyboard combos just to save a file, Stockholm Syndrome sets in rapidly. Loyalists genuinely…
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How plasma cutters slice through thick metal
Blowing away steel requires harnessing the fourth state of matter. A plasma cutter forces compressed gas like nitrogen through a tiny nozzle while an…
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