Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Engineers at the University of Illinois injected liquid gallium metal capsules into microchips so circuits can literally bleed and heal themselves in milliseconds when cracked…
If you drop your laptop, the ensuing spiderweb of cracked microscopic logic boards is usually a financial death sentence. However, materials scientists have…
Discover moreAST SpaceMobile launched the gargantuan BlueWalker 3 satellite to beam broadband directly to unmodified iPhones in dead zones completely bypassing the need for terrestrial cell…
The dreaded 'No Service' indicator on your phone screen is about to be eradicated from existence. Historically, satellite phones required clunky, expensive…
Discover moreTangem ring wallets embed military-grade cryptography into a tiny wearable ring that requires your exact biological fingerprint to authorize Bitcoin transfers ensuring hackers…
Alphanumeric passwords are a catastrophic security joke invented in the 1960s that we are inexplicably still using. Biometric crypto hardware fixes the…
Discover moreSherlock Biosciences prints microscopic plumbing networks onto paper strips the size of a postage stamp to detect specific disease mutations in a single drop of spit providing…
Trying to run complex medical diagnostics in rural areas usually involves shipping vials of bodily fluids across the country and waiting weeks. Microfluidic…
Discover moreSkydio engineered weatherproof robotic nests where inspection drones autonomously land to magnetically charge their batteries and upload terabytes of bridge structural data…
Drones are incredibly useful until their batteries die after twenty minutes, forcing a human operator to constantly drive out to remote fields just to swap…
Discover moreHarvard Biodesign Lab created motorized fabric exosuits that analyze your walking gait using machine learning to strategically pull specific cables, giving your leg muscles a…
Bulky robotic mechs look great in sci-fi movies, but nobody wants to walk to the grocery store looking like a Transformer. The Harvard Biodesign Lab…
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Aryballe engineers developed silicon biosensors adorned with artificial proteins that physically bind to odor molecules, allowing a literal computer chip to smell a rotting piece…
Getting judged by a human is bad enough, but having a silicon chip critique the smell of your leftovers is devastating. Aryballe engineered machine olfaction…
Discover moreMIT engineers designed a morphing table called inFORM that utilizes hundreds of motorized mechanical pins to physically render digital 3D models in real time, essentially…
Screens are incredibly flat, which makes them terribly boring for our three-dimensional human brains. The MIT Tangible Media Group invented programmable…
Discover moreMassachusetts Institute of Technology researchers invented a morphing carbon fiber material named AeroMorph that completely transforms flat sheets of plastic into complex three…
Imagine buying a chair from IKEA that ships as a completely flat sheet of cardboard and magically folds itself into a piece of furniture when you run an…
Discover moreBoston Dynamics and Harvard researchers engineered pneumatic silicone tentacles inspired by jellyfish muscles that gently wrap around fragile deep sea coral reefs without…
Traditional industrial robots are terrifyingly strong, rigid, and completely incapable of handling a raw egg without smashing it. Soft robotics shifts the…
Discover moreGeneral Electric constructed an unbelievably precise virtual simulation of the entire European electrical grid allowing engineers to intentionally trigger catastrophic…
You can't safely test experimental power routing strategies on a live electrical grid without risking plunging millions of angry citizens into complete…
Discover morePolygon ID utilizes an advanced cryptographic method called zk-SNARKs allowing users to legally prove they are over eighteen years old to a bartender or website without ever…
Handing over your physical ID card to prove your age is an absurd privacy violation when you think about it, exposing your home address and exact birthdate.…
Discover moreBelgian university scientists printed a seemingly random colorful psychedelic pattern on a standard piece of cardboard that turns humans completely invisible to advanced YOLOv2…
Artificial intelligence sees the world through mathematical confidence scores, which makes it highly susceptible to incredibly dumb optical illusions. By…
Discover moreUnited States military researchers tested the Perdix micro drone swarm where over a hundred autonomous fighter jets deployed from F-18s instantly formed a collective hive mind…
Controlling a hundred drones with a hundred joysticks is biologically impossible for a human operator, so engineers taught machines how to mimic flocks of…
Discover moreSamsung engineers successfully transmitted uncompressed ultra high definition video across a staggering distance using experimental terahertz radio frequencies that pack data…
The transition from 5G to 6G isn't just an incremental upgrade; it requires an entirely new slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. Terahertz frequencies sit…
Discover moreSpotify developers revamped their opaque music discovery algorithms by incorporating transparent knowledge graphs that actively tell listeners exactly which obscure acoustic…
Nobody likes taking advice from a black box, especially when it dictates what media we consume or what products we buy. Traditional machine learning models…
Discover moreApple deliberately corrupts your personal iPhone usage statistics using complex mathematical noise before it leaves the device, guaranteeing that their artificial intelligence…
Tech giants desperately want your data to improve their algorithms, but handing over your personal habits is a massive privacy nightmare. Apple bypassed this…
Discover moreCybersecurity firm Yubico integrated a specialized lattice-based mathematical algorithm known as Kyber into their physical authentication keys to proactively block experimental…
Quantum computers are the ultimate doomsday scenario for modern cybersecurity. Once fully realized, they will be able to shatter standard internet encryption…
Discover moreTesla's massive Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia operates as a completely autonomous grid that detects regional power plant failures and instantly injects megawatts of stored…
The traditional electrical grid is incredibly fragile; one downed transmission line can plunge an entire city into the dark ages while human operators…
Discover moreNeuralink developed a specialized surgical robot that utilizes high-definition optical tracking to independently calibrate and stitch thousands of microscopic electrode threads…
Connecting a computer directly to the human brain requires inserting thousands of microscopic, flexible electrodes into living tissue, a task requiring a…
Discover moreHewlett Packard scientists successfully manufactured microscopic titanium dioxide circuits called memristors that permanently retain electrical states without drawing power,…
For fifty years, computers have suffered from a severe case of digital amnesia—the moment you pull the plug, the RAM completely forgets everything it was…
Discover moreCalifornia Institute of Technology scientists successfully deployed a satellite experiment called MAPLE that collected raw solar energy in the vacuum of space and wirelessly…
Solar panels on Earth are incredibly frustrating because they suffer from a crippling dependency on good weather and the existence of nighttime. Caltech’s…
Discover moreUniversity of Washington engineers constructed a completely battery-free communication device that harvests microscopic amounts of electricity by absorbing stray television…
Batteries are heavy, highly toxic, and notoriously terrible at holding a charge. University of Washington researchers decided to abandon them entirely by…
Discover moreApple engineered the TrueDepth camera system to project thirty thousand invisible infrared dots across your face to mathematically prove your biological liveness and physically…
Fooling early facial recognition systems was embarrassingly easy—a standard color photograph held in front of the lens could bypass the security. Apple’s…
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