Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The mysterious face behind a famous CPR mannequin
Resusci Anne's face was modeled on the mask known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, traditionally linked to an unidentified young woman found in the Paris river. Her…
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Identical twins gave surgeons a way around transplant rejection
In 1954, a Boston team successfully transplanted a kidney from Ronald Herrick to his twin Richard. Their near-identical genetic makeup greatly reduced the…
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Early teleprompters fed actors a moving paper script
Before words scrolled on a screen, the machine advanced a continuous paper roll near the camera. It helped performers keep up with the relentless demand for…
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An early ultrasound scan could mean climbing into a water tank
In the 1950s, researchers including Douglass Howry's team used water baths to help ultrasound travel between the scanner and the body. Some experimental…
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The trick that let musicians record over themselves
Les Paul added an extra playback head to a tape machine, letting him hear an earlier track while recording a new one. Songs no longer had to be captured in a…
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Loudspeakers explicitly built for loud public address
Early dynamic loudspeakers were built to project announcements over large outdoor crowds, prioritizing volume over the delicate detail of a violin concerto.
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The first sound recordings had to wait for a way to be heard
Scott de Martinville's phonautograph drew sound vibrations on a surface rather than playing them back. Much later, researchers used those traces to…
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Tesla Easter eggs can turn your map into Mars
Hidden software features can turn the GPS map into Mars, play Christmas music, or make the doors flap.
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Why Nintendo Switch cartridges taste so bitter
Nintendo coats the tiny game cards with denatonium benzoate, an intensely bitter substance, to discourage children from swallowing them. Curious adults have…
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Instagram was built in just eight weeks of coding
Systrom and Krieger pivoted from Burbn, a cluttered check-in app, to a photo-sharing app built around square filters. Instagram launched eight weeks later.
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DVD doesn’t officially stand for anything
As DVDs expanded beyond video to store software and other data, the industry floated “Digital Versatile Disc.” The format’s governing forum ultimately said…
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An AI prompt is not automatically a copyright claim
The U.S. Copyright Office distinguishes asking a system for an image from determining the work's expressive details yourself. Human creative editing or…
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Hands expose a hard problem for AI image generators
A hand can bend, turn, overlap itself, and hide fingers behind whatever it holds. An image generator must make those parts agree in a single picture, and a…
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MySpace erased 50 million songs
In 2019, MySpace disclosed that files from uploads spanning 2003–2015 had been lost during a server-migration project. The missing music was widely estimated…
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The cute e-card that could infect your computer
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, hackers disguised malicious executable files as cute e-cards, counting on people to open them. A teddy bear animation could…
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Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use an iPad
In a 2010 interview, Jobs said his children hadn’t used the newly released iPad, despite his public promotion of it as an educational tool.
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Randomness lets a text model take a different next step
A language model assigns probabilities to possible continuations. Sampling can choose among them instead of always selecting the highest-ranked option, while…
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A clockmaker built an alarm that rang only at 4 a.m.
A clockmaker built an alarm that rang only at 4 a.m. Levi Hutchins made the clock in 1787 for his own early start. Its alarm was fixed to the time he needed,…
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Computer passwords began as a way to share a machine.
Computer passwords began as a way to share a machine. Fernando Corbató's MIT team used passwords in CTSS so multiple users could keep separate files on a…
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Thousands of Apple computers ended up in a Utah landfill.
Thousands of Apple computers ended up in a Utah landfill. About 2,700 Lisa computers were buried in Logan in 1989. The Lisa had helped bring the graphical…
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A one-terabyte drive can show up as about 931 GiB.
A one-terabyte drive can show up as about 931 GiB. Drive makers commonly count a terabyte as one trillion bytes. A gibibyte uses powers of two, so dividing…
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Firefox's name and its logo point to different animals.
Firefox's name and its logo point to different animals. 'Firefox' is a name associated with the red panda, but the browser's familiar animal logo depicts a…
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Some color laser printers leave an invisible-looking signature on the page.
Some color laser printers leave an invisible-looking signature on the page. Tiny yellow dots can encode identifying information such as a printer’s serial…
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Training an AI model can leave a water footprint.
Training an AI model can leave a water footprint. Servers produce heat, and some cooling systems remove it by evaporating water. A research team estimated…
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