News
Almost all of the world's internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.
30+ min ago (645+ words) The great majority of data that crosses between continents travels through fibre-optic cables on the seabed, not through satellites. Estimates put the share at somewhere between 95 and 99 per cent of international traffic. Satellites, for all their visibility, carry the remainder....
In 1997, a team of engineers hid an entire flight simulator inside the code of Microsoft Excel as an unlisted "Easter egg" " and to this day, it remains one of the most sophisticated pieces of hidden software ever secretly shipped to millions of corporate computers
4+ hour, 14+ min ago (792+ words) Somewhere on the hard drives of millions of corporate computers in the late 1990s, buried inside a piece of software almost universally used for tax returns, sales forecasts, and quarterly reports, there was a small 3 D world. You could not reach…...
NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.
18+ hour, 17+ min ago (1346+ words) The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written in a 1970s-era programming language that barely anyone understands anymore, kept alive by a few elderly engineers who remember how…...
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
1+ day, 6+ hour ago (1297+ words) On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer company called Symbolics Inc. became the first business to put its name under. com, not by clicking through a registrar checkout page, but by entering a naming system still small enough to be handled by…...
Stanford scientists just built a room-temperature quantum device that uses "twisted light" to connect electrons and photons " an long-sought breakthrough that could finally take quantum computing out of extreme sub-zero labs and into everyday devices
1+ day, 1+ hour ago (503+ words) Most of the quantum technology you've read about over the last decade comes with a hidden footnote. It is one of the first credible steps toward quantum hardware you could imagine actually deploying outside a specialised facility. To understand the…...
A breakthrough in solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries has quietly achieved double the energy density of standard EV batteries " a quiet laboratory victory that could finally eliminate "range anxiety" and cut the weight of electric cars in half
1+ day, 1+ hour ago (794+ words) The single greatest constraint on electric vehicles, more than anything else, is the battery. So when a research team announces a battery that could meaningfully break the trade-off " by storing roughly twice as much energy in the same weight " it's…...
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. Clarke famously called it "the most expensive hyphen in history"
2+ day, 3+ hour ago (1080+ words) On July 22, 1962, at Cape Canaveral, an Atlas-Agena rocket lifted off the pad carrying a small spacecraft called Mariner 1. It was meant to be a historic flight " the first attempt by the United States to send a spacecraft to another planet....
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.
2+ day, 23+ hour ago (700+ words) Most people know the experience. You reach the bottom of a page, and you realise you have absorbed nothing. Your eyes moved across every line. The words were in focus. Somewhere around the second paragraph your attention left the room,…...
MIT researchers wired EEG sensors onto 54 people writing essays and found that the group using Chat GPT not only thought the least, measured by brain connectivity, but afterwards mostly could not recall a single line of what they had supposedly written.
2+ day, 23+ hour ago (604+ words) The gap between the study and its reception is the more interesting subject, so it is worth starting there. Throughout, the researchers recorded the writers" brain activity using electroencephalography, or EEG, which measures electrical signals at the scalp. The measure…...
People who turn off phone notifications aren't avoiding connection " they're protecting the last parts of their attention that still belong to them
4+ day, 24+ min ago (952+ words) Somewhere in the settings of every phone is a long list of applications, each with a switch governing whether it may interrupt you. For most people the switches are left as they came: on. The phone arrives configured to reach…...