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A breakthrough in solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries has quietly achieved double the energy density of standard EV batteries — a quiet laboratory victory that...

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In 1985, registering a .com domain cost nothing, required a technical request rather than a shopping cart, and produced only six names in twelve months, before the millionth .com arrived in 1997 and the 100 million mark in 2012

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In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 carrying a map that uses 14 pulsars to pinpoint Earth’s exact position in the Milky Way—a cosmic roadmap designed for curious a...

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Adults who find it physically painful to ask for help, even when they are completely overwhelmed, usually aren’t proud — they are people who realized at an earl...

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In 1962, a single missing character in NASA’s guidance software doomed Mariner 1 just minutes after launch — a transcription error so costly that Arthur C. Clar...

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In 1985, a 14-year-old in Britain could legally drive a Sinclair C5 down a dual carriageway at 15 miles per hour with lorries thundering past at chest height, b...

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In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and the electromagnetic pulse knocked out streetlights, burglar alarms, and a telephone company microwave link in Honolulu nearly 900 miles away, on an island most engineers had assumed was safely out of range

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Research says people who never post on social media aren't antisocial, secretive, or behind the times — they have noticed that performing their life cost them the ability to live in it

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Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn't fully reverse

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The Voyager Golden Record has a small sample of uranium electroplated onto its cover, put there so that whoever finds it can measure how far the metal has decayed and work out how long the record has been drifting, a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.

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Cognitive scientists have a name for the moment you finish a page and realize you took in none of it, and a Harvard study that caught people's thoughts at random found the mind wanders off from whatever the body is doing for almost half of waking life.

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MIT researchers wired EEG sensors onto 54 people writing essays and found that the group using ChatGPT not only thought the least, measured by brain connectivity, but afterwards mostly could not recall a single line of what they had supposedly written.

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In 1245, London engineers built a massive underground lead pipe to bring fresh water three miles into the heart of the city—but during royal weddings and coronations, the city authorities would secretly disconnect the water supply and hook the pipes up to massive vats of claret, turning the public fountains into a political bribe that ran with free wine for days

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A famous African Grey parrot named Alex became the first and only animal to ever ask an existential question about itself—after learning over 100 English words, identifying shapes, and counting objects, Alex looked into a mirror and asked his handler, "What color?" to learn that he was grey

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In 2014, a simple counting glitch known as the "Gangnam Style bug" forced YouTube to completely rewrite its core software architecture—because the site’s engineers had used a 32-bit integer to count video views, never imagining a single music video would surpass 2.1 billion views and completely max out the platform's counter.

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In the early 1970s, a phone phreak nicknamed "Captain Crunch" became famous for a startling trick: a toy whistle packaged in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes produced a perfect 2600 Hz tone — the exact frequency AT&T used to signal an idle line — letting him fool the phone system into handing him free long-distance calls

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Sony's PlayStation 2 was so computationally advanced when it launched in 2000 that the government of Iraq reportedly imported over 4,000 of the gaming consoles — sparking an intense military investigation over fears that the systems would be chained together to build a crude, low-cost supercomputer capable of guiding long-range missiles

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When General James Mattis joined the Theranos board in 2013, he had already spent a year pushing Elizabeth Holmes's fingerprick blood analyser toward soldiers in Afghanistan, and the only reason it never reached the battlefield was an Army regulatory officer named David Shoemaker who kept warning the FDA the device was not approved.

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The legendary video game Pac-Man doesn't actually have an ending—instead, a single 8-bit integer overflow bug causes the game's internal counter to glitch out at Level 256, violently corrupting the right half of the screen into a chaotic mess of random symbols and rendering the final stage completely unplayable.

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When Microsoft was developing Windows 95, developers discovered that SimCity had a severe memory bug that caused it to crash on the new operating system—but instead of forcing the game studio to fix it, Microsoft engineers actually rewrote the core Windows 95 source code to detect if SimCity was running and safely allocate memory for it.

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