Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Mushroom skin became the backing for electronic circuits
Researchers dried a layer of Ganoderma lucidum mycelium into a flexible, insulating sheet and built circuitry on it. The fungal material replaces the support…
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Amazon made a fitness band that judged your voice
The screenless Halo used machine learning to analyze vocal tone and rate conversations for positivity and energy.
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Netflix uses a program that deliberately breaks its servers
Chaos Monkey randomly shuts down production systems to test whether Netflix’s infrastructure can withstand failures. Automated systems detect the outages,…
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MIT tested a wall that redirected wireless signals
RFocus used thousands of small, inexpensive antenna elements that could reflect or pass radio waves. Software adjusted them to improve the signal at a…
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Military chips can erase themselves when tampered with
Some military FPGAs retain sensitive hardware layouts even when powered off. An anti-tamper mesh can detect an intrusion and erase the stored configuration…
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How warehouse robots tell a person from a pillar
Semantic mapping lets a robot label what it sees, rather than treating everything as an unlabeled shape. It can distinguish a person from a pillar or a box,…
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Human brain cells learned to play Pong
Researchers grew hundreds of thousands of neurons on microelectrode arrays and sent them electrical signals representing the ball and paddle. The cells…
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Darktrace cybernetic AI exposes subtle network intrusions and outputs plain English reports detailing the hacker tactics
For example, if an employee's laptop downloads an unusual amount of data at 3 a.m., the system can explain why it flagged the behavior instead of leaving…
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The invisible watermark hiding inside AI images
Researchers embed a secret mathematical pattern in the random noise an AI uses to generate an image. The invisible watermark can survive cropping, color…
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Quantum magnets can create truly random numbers
These devices measure unpredictable electron-spin flips inside magnetic tunnel junctions, producing billions of random bits per second.
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Researchers used AI to add fake tumors to medical scans
A 2019 security study digitally inserted or removed signs of lung cancer in CT images. The altered scans fooled both radiologists and a diagnostic AI during…
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Optical phased arrays steer lasers without motors
An optical phased array changes the phase of light waves on a chip, using their interference to steer the beam without moving parts. That can make lidar…
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When databases start tuning themselves
They monitor performance, predict traffic surges, and can automatically create search indexes and patch security vulnerabilities.
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Starlink relays tractor data from dead zones to cloud
They act as a backhaul: satellites pick up low-power sensor signals in places without cell service and relay them to servers.
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This smartwatch chip works below the usual voltage threshold
Ambiq designs circuits to compute using the very small currents that flow below a transistor's conventional switching threshold. Operating at lower voltage…
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Hackers can steal keys by listening to a CPU
Side-channel attacks can infer a cryptographic key by measuring clues such as a CPU's sound, heat, or power use while it decrypts data. The processor can…
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The sensor that sees bullets by ignoring still objects
Unlike conventional cameras, which capture full frames, event-based sensors register changes in light at individual pixels. By processing only movement, they…
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How AirTags find your lost keys so precisely
AirTags use Ultra-Wideband instead of relying only on Bluetooth signal strength. The technology measures how long radio pulses take to travel, helping your…
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How Microsoft SEAL computes on encrypted data
Microsoft SEAL lets a server perform calculations on encrypted data without first decrypting it. The server returns an encrypted result that you can decrypt…
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A thousand tiny robots assembled a shape from local clues
Harvard’s 2014 Kilobot demonstration gave the swarm a target shape, then used simple rules and nearby signals to organize movement. Individual robots did not…
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Radar can map a landscape through cloud and darkness
Synthetic aperture radar sends out microwave pulses and builds an image from their echoes as the instrument moves. It supplies its own illumination instead of…
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SAP HANA crushing data to fit inside fast RAM
Because RAM is expensive and limited, SAP HANA uses dictionary-based compression to store repeated values once and refer to them with compact codes. This…
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DARPA tracks hardware cloning of unique radio signals
Microscopic manufacturing differences give individual radios distinct electromagnetic fingerprints. DARPA uses adversarial machine learning to spot…
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Cerebras giant AI chips bypass standard silicon slicing
Cerebras's Wafer-Scale Engine uses a single, dinner-plate-sized piece of silicon instead of separate chips cut from a wafer. That lets data travel between…
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