Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
South Korea's fan-death story is a modern household legend
The belief warns against sleeping with an electric fan in a closed room, and has been passed down within families. Explanations vary, from suffocation to…
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Banking's old code is too important to casually replace
COBOL dates to 1959, yet it still runs important financial systems. Replacing a working program means reproducing years of business rules without breaking…
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Zippers were sold as a faster way to dress
Early ads sold the zipper as a time-saver for men fastening their trousers, portraying buttons as an unnecessary delay.
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How a rough strip makes fire
The rough strip ignites a match’s red tip, turning a tiny wooden splinter into an open flame. We barely think twice about keeping these fire starters in a…
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Paired blades bolted into an X shape
Two blades joined at a pivot make a tool that cuts flat sheets—and, less successfully, hair.
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Python got its name from a comedy troupe
Guido van Rossum was reading scripts from Monty Python's Flying Circus while developing the language. He wanted a short, distinctive name, so the comedians…
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The first enduring color photo used three monochrome images
In 1861, Thomas Sutton photographed a tartan ribbon through colored filters for James Clerk Maxwell's demonstration. Projecting the images through…
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People subscribed to live opera by telephone
Before radio broadcasting, services such as Paris's théâtrophone carried performances along telephone wires. A subscriber could listen from elsewhere in the…
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One route to the mouse wheel began with a zoom idea
Microsoft's Eric Michelman wanted an easier way to navigate large Excel sheets and first imagined a lever that zoomed in and out. Scrolling later became the…
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A forgotten beer-can camera recorded eight years of sunlight
Regina Valkenborgh placed the homemade pinhole camera at Bayfordbury Observatory in 2012 and forgot it. When it was recovered in 2020, its photographic paper…
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The same emoji can arrive wearing a different face
Unicode standardizes the character or sequence being sent, while platforms draw their own versions of it. Your phone and the recipient's device can therefore…
Discover moreNASA Perseverance rover runs an onboard artificial intelligence module that translates complex navigational mathematics into plain English sentences so human engineers on Earth…
When a multi-million-dollar Mars rover makes an unexpectedly weird left turn, scientists predictably panic. NASA’s cutting-edge explainable AI forces the…
Discover moreGallium-indium liquid metal alloys printed directly onto flexible polymer fabrics allow smart clothing to stretch to four times its original length without ever breaking the…
Forget rigid smartwatches; the absolute future of tracking your every heartbeat is entirely liquid. By permanently printing gallium-based alloys onto flexible…
Discover moreTesla Autopilot cameras and radar systems constantly cross-examine each other using adversarial sensor fusion to aggressively detect and ignore maliciously projected ghost images…
It turns out hackers can easily project digital pictures of fake humans onto a dark road to make autonomous vehicles slam on the brakes. To combat this,…
Discover moreUltraleap uses heavily concentrated acoustic radiation pressure from hundreds of microscopic ultrasound speakers to project physical sensations directly onto your bare hands…
Virtual reality apparently wasn't dystopian enough without feeling objects that do not actually exist. This system relies on the constructive interference of…
Discover moreMayo Clinic utilizes generative adversarial networks to hallucinate millions of entirely fake patient medical records that perfectly mirror the statistical properties of real…
Real healthcare data is an absolute privacy minefield, so hospitals simply decided to mathematically hallucinate fake patients instead. These complex…
Discover moreIntel Horse Ridge operates at absolute zero temperatures inside commercial quantum computing refrigerators to directly manipulate incredibly fragile qubits without generating…
True quantum computers must operate at near absolute zero, but standard electrical wiring brings vastly too much heat into the chamber. This specialized…
Discover moreScientists at Harvard and MIT are literally strapping lab-grown rat heart muscle tissue onto gold and silicone skeletons to create cyborg stingrays that swim toward light sources…
Frankenstein was just ahead of his time. Why build a clumsy, heavy motor when millions of years of evolution already perfected the muscle? Biohybrid soft…
Discover moreBMW partnered with Nvidia to build a photorealistic Omniverse simulation of their Regensburg manufacturing plant down to the exact millimeter, allowing them to test robotic…
You don't just build a billion-dollar car factory and hope everything fits. Digital twin factories are exact, physics-accurate virtual replicas of massive…
Discover moreDutch medical company Microsure built the MUSA surgical robot to stabilize the trembling hands of human surgeons, scaling down their joystick movements to stitch together…
No matter how steady a surgeon thinks their hands are, the human body naturally pulses, twitches, and breathes. Robotic microsurgery platforms act as physical…
Discover moreMIT researchers engineered magnetic robotic cubes called M-Blocks that autonomously jump, spin, and snap together like self-assembling Legos to form entirely new architectural…
The concept of furniture or buildings that assemble themselves sounds like pure sci-fi, but programmable matter is dragging it into reality. These M-Blocks…
Discover moreKymeta developed flat satellite dishes wrapped in liquid crystal metamaterials that electronically steer radio beams toward speeding SpaceX Starlink orbiters without using any…
Bolting a massive, spinning radar dish to the top of a stealth jet or a luxury yacht ruins the aerodynamics and invites mechanical failure. Metasurface…
Discover moreGoogle trains Gboard algorithms using federated learning, which sends a tiny neural network to your smartphone to study typos locally and only uploads mathematical improvements…
Nobody wants the tech giants literally reading their late-night text messages just to make autocomplete slightly more accurate. Privacy-preserving federated…
Discover moreMatrix PowerWatch integrates spacecraft-grade thermoelectric generators that perpetually power the smartwatch entirely from the body heat radiating off your wrist guaranteeing it…
The daily ritual of chaining your smartwatch to a wall outlet is a testament to the pathetic state of modern battery chemistry. Energy-harvesting wearables…
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