When you type bbc.com, the browser may trigger several invisible network exchanges: it asks a DNS resolver for the site’s address, opens a TCP connection with t...

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Christopher Latham Sholes, the printer and Wisconsin state senator who designed the QWERTY keyboard, was appointed Milwaukee’s postmaster by Abraham Lincoln dur...

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Why did the QWERTY keyboard, arranged in the 1870s to stop mechanical typebars from jamming, outlast every layout designed to beat it over the next 150 years?

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Pixel 3 Night Sight can capture a photo in near-darkness because it doesn’t take one picture — it can take up to 15 short exposures, align them with sub-pixel p...

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Screens use red, green and blue because human retinas carry only three types of colour-sensing cones, tuned near those wavelengths — a display isn’t reproducing...

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Voyager 1 is over 15.8 billion miles from Earth and its generators lose about four watts of power every year

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When you delete a file from a traditional hard drive, the operating system usually removes the pointer to it — the bytes themselves can sit undisturbed until so...

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The Gulf Offshore Research Institute has been awarded $20 million to turn idle Gulf oil platforms into hubs for energy, minerals and aquaculture

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How did a metal box first secured to a converted tanker in April 1956 cut ocean freight loading costs by more than 90 per cent?

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In December 2014, Google introduced a reCAPTCHA checkbox that let many users skip distorted letters while the system weighed browser characteristics and a Googl...

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Microsoft didn’t just stop shipping Flash with Windows 10 — in February 2021 it began silently force-installing update KB4577586, which scrubs the player from t...

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A phone knows which way is up because a silicon chip smaller than a grain of rice contains tiny cantilever beams that physically bend under gravity, and the cir...

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The first GIF ever made was a picture of an airplane — Stephen Wilhite told the New York Times in 2013 that he ‘saw the format I wanted in my head and then I st...

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Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture was destaffed in April 2006 to cut costs, then handed over the following year to a calico cat wearing a custom-made station...

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The ROICE program at the University of Houston started in 2022 as a thought experiment about what to do with thousands of dead Gulf oil wells, pipelines and pla...

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Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and still transmits from more than 24 billion kilometres away on about 22 watts, less power than a frid...

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How did a phone game released in July 2016 briefly double foot traffic to small businesses near landmarks, and why did the effect fade within eight weeks?

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End-to-end encryption hides what you said, but metadata the app or carrier may still hold — who you messaged, when, for how long, and which cell towers your pho...

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How does a fibre-optic strand thinner than a spaghetti noodle carry a signal across 13,000 kilometres of ocean without a single electrical amplifier along the w...

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Wi-Fi signals struggle through walls not because concrete is thick, but because water in the plaster absorbs 2.4 GHz almost exactly the frequency a microwave ov...

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