Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers engineered a specialized camera system that captures terahertz radiation wavelengths sitting precisely between microwaves and…
X-rays are fantastic for looking at broken bones, but they will blast you with ionizing radiation. Microwaves are safe, but they lack the resolution to see…
Discover moreIntel engineers circumvented the physical limitations of copper wires by laser-welding microscopic light-emitting diodes directly onto silicon processors, allowing massive server…
Copper wires are the technological equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage. They generate heat, consume immense power, and face hard physical speed limits. To…
Discover moreAdvanced Micro Devices dismantled the traditional monolithic processor design by utilizing a microscopic bridge called Infinity Fabric to stitch multiple smaller chiplets…
Moore's Law has been dying a slow, expensive death. Trying to manufacture massive, flawless silicon processors was resulting in a ridiculous amount of…
Discover moreGoogle permanently embedded a microscopic custom security module known as the Titan chip into their massive data center motherboards to cryptographically interrogate every single…
If a hacker manages to compromise a computer's low-level firmware, they effectively own the machine before the operating system even has a chance to boot up.…
Discover moreIntel's Loihi 2 neuromorphic chip literally mimics the human brain's olfactory system to digitally smell hazardous chemicals and explosives in real-time, functioning exactly like…
Imagine teaching a rock to smell. Traditional computers are terrible at processing sensory data because they shuffle information back and forth between memory…
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He played video games by thinking about moving the mouse
Look ma, absolutely no hands. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, Noland Arbaugh had a microscopic chip surgically embedded directly into his motor cortex. The…
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Why Google treats every device as a potential threat
Trust absolutely no one, not even your own CEO. Google pioneered an internal security model that assumes their corporate network is permanently compromised.…
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The space computer that filters satellite photos in orbit
Beaming raw data from orbit down to Earth takes ages and wastes millions of dollars in highly constrained radio bandwidth. Instead of sending raw garbage down…
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How human cells on tiny chips can test drugs
Animal testing is not just cruel; it is surprisingly terrible at predicting actual human reactions. Enter microfluidic organ-on-a-chip automation. Researchers…
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How millions of tiny lights get packed into a TV
Building a true microLED television requires precisely placing over 24 million individual microscopic lights without a single mistake. Because traditional…
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How spacecraft memory survives cosmic rays
When a rogue cosmic ray blasts a traditional computer chip, it can flip a binary bit and brutally crash a billion-dollar spacecraft. Magnetoresistive…
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Invisible beams sent electricity a kilometer
Nikola Tesla’s ultimate dream was wireless electricity, and the military is finally making it a practical reality. The US Naval Research Laboratory…
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The orbital tow truck that rescued a dying satellite
When a multi-million-dollar satellite runs out of fuel in orbit, it usually becomes very expensive space junk. Northrop Grumman solved this by deploying…
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The lab where you can run experiments from a laptop
Instead of forcing scientists to manually pipette toxic chemicals in a basement, Emerald Cloud Lab turned biological research into a remote API. They…
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Your iPhone can map a room with invisible lasers
Your smartphone camera is secretly acting like a heavily miniaturized autonomous car. The solid-state LiDAR array crammed into the back of an iPhone fires…
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These medical sensors dissolve in your sweat
Electronic waste is an absolute nightmare, so Stanford researchers decided to just let your body chemistry destroy their hard work. They engineered…
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The telescope that schedules its own observations
Human astronomers take way too long to decide where to point a giant mirror, so the Vera C. Rubin Observatory completely cut them out of the loop. It utilizes…
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These batteries store solar power in superheated bricks
Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive and prone to exploding to solve grid storage, so engineers decided to just bake rocks instead. Rondo Energy builds…
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How silicon carbide helped Tesla get more from the same battery
Standard silicon chips tap out when things get too hot, taking your electric vehicle's efficiency down with them. Tesla fixed this bottleneck by swapping…
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Scientists turned locusts into bomb-sniffing detectors
Building a digital nose from scratch is ridiculously difficult, so engineers just decided to hijack the biological hardware of bugs. By implanting tiny…
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Surgeons can see a patient's spine in 3D through HoloLens
Slicing into a human spine used to rely heavily on surgeons glancing nervously at 2D monitors across the operating room and using spatial guesswork. Medtronic…
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How AI guardrails block jailbreak attempts
Think you're a genius for typing 'ignore all previous instructions' to get an AI to cheerfully hand over a company's database? Security protocols like…
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Robot hands can feel the texture of Braille dots
Human fingertips are biological marvels, but engineers decided robots shouldn't miss out on the magic. Using neuromorphic processors like Intel's Loihi,…
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Why Microsoft is dunking servers in boiling liquid
Data centers generate so much blistering heat that conventional air conditioning is basically just a gentle breeze in an oven. To stop processors from…
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