Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The mysterious face on every CPR dummy
Every time someone practices mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, they are making out with the ghost of a 19th-century Parisian tragedy. The face of the standard…
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The first successful organ transplant was between twins
Organ transplants were a spectacular failure for decades because the human immune system is aggressively xenophobic to foreign tissues. The breakthrough…
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The first teleprompter was a hand-cranked paper scroll
The smooth, digitally scrolling text you see news anchors reading today has incredibly humble, highly manual origins. The very first teleprompter was…
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Ultrasound was used on ships before babies
Before we used it to print out grainy, black-and-white photos of unborn babies that look like slightly lumpy potatoes, ultrasound was industrial tech. It was…
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The trick that let musicians record over themselves
Guitarist Les Paul was absolutely tired of having to record a song perfectly in a single live take. He essentially hacked a tape machine by adding an extra…
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Loudspeakers explicitly built for loud public address
The high-fidelity stereo system in your living room evolved directly from authoritarian crowd control. The earliest dynamic loudspeakers weren't designed to…
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Before Edison, sound was recorded but not replayed
Decades before Edison, a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville successfully recorded human audio. The tragic catch? He had absolutely no way to…
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Tesla Easter eggs can turn your map into Mars
Because when you're hurtling down the highway in a two-ton battery, you definitely need pop culture references. Modern EVs, especially Teslas, are notorious…
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Why Nintendo Switch cartridges taste so bitter
Nintendo actively chemically weaponized their game cartridges against toddlers. Because the Switch game cards are so small and constitute a major choking…
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Instagram was built in just eight weeks of coding
The platform responsible for destroying an entire generation's self-esteem was cobbled together in two months. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger pivoted from a…
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DVD doesn’t officially stand for anything
We all confidently called them 'Digital Video Discs', but the creators couldn't make up their minds. As the format evolved to hold software and data, the…
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Why AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted
You can generate a breathtaking cyberpunk landscape in Midjourney, but the government doesn't care. The US Copyright Office has firmly ruled that AI-generated…
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Why AI keeps getting hands wrong
For entities capable of passing the bar exam and writing python code in seconds, AI image generators have an embarrassingly hard time with basic human…
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MySpace erased 50 million songs
Imagine dropping your external hard drive, but it holds a decade of a generation's cultural history. During a botched server migration in 2019, MySpace…
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The cute e-card that could infect your computer
Your aunt sending you a sparkling, animated teddy bear used to be the greatest threat to cybersecurity. In the late 90s and early 2000s, malicious hackers…
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Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use an iPad
The ultimate tech hypocrisy lies in the hands of its greatest evangelist. Despite aggressively marketing the iPad as an essential educational tool for the…
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Why AI needs a little randomness
When an AI confidently tells you that Abraham Lincoln invented the Playstation, it's not totally a glitch; it's a feature called 'temperature.' Engineers add…
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Levi Hutchins invented the very first mechanical alarm clock in 1787, but he engineered it with a rather severe limitation: it could only ring at exactly four in the morning.
Levi Hutchins invented the very first mechanical alarm clock in 1787, but he engineered it with a rather severe limitation: it could only ring at exactly four…
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Fernando Corbató created the first computer password system in 1961 to help multiple users keep their files private on a shared mainframe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fernando Corbató created the first computer password system in 1961 to help multiple users keep their files private on a shared mainframe at the Massachusetts…
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Apple literally buried 2,700 of their unsold Lisa computers in a Utah landfill in 1989 to claim a massive tax write-off.
Apple literally buried 2,700 of their unsold Lisa computers in a Utah landfill in 1989 to claim a massive tax write-off. The machine cost a staggering ten…
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Hard drive manufacturers deliberately use the decimal system where one kilobyte equals exactly 1000 bytes to advertise larger capacities, even though computers read data in binary where a kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
Hard drive manufacturers deliberately use the decimal system where one kilobyte equals exactly 1000 bytes to advertise larger capacities, even though…
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Firefox browser's iconic logo does not actually depict a fox on fire, but rather a red panda, because the word is just an English translation of the Chinese nickname for the adorable Asian mammal.
Firefox browser's iconic logo does not actually depict a fox on fire, but rather a red panda, because the word is just an English translation of the Chinese…
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Machine Identification Code is a digital watermark technology implemented by most major color laser printer manufacturers since the 1990s.
Machine Identification Code is a digital watermark technology implemented by most major color laser printer manufacturers since the 1990s. The hardware…
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Generative artificial intelligence data centers consume an astronomical amount of fresh water to operate their evaporative cooling towers and prevent high-performance processors from melting down.
Generative artificial intelligence data centers consume an astronomical amount of fresh water to operate their evaporative cooling towers and prevent…
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