Technology

Each year, the world produces over 300 million tons of plastic, much of which quickly goes into the trash where it takes centuries to decompose. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, women are putting plastic garbage to good use by turning it into bricks to build schools, New York Times reports. Many women in Abidjan make a living...

Whether it’s Apple, Amazon, or Google, our eventual robot overlords have now been officially invited inside a good number of American homes. I mean, if these things are like vampires, we’ve definitely made the wrong move. If you are one of the households with a listening robot (or more than one – guilty), you might...

Velcro was invented in 1941, but after losing its patent in the 1970s, the market was flooded with other “hook and loop” fasteners that, while not Velcro brand, were quickly labeled as such by the public. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzlTFP1h04e/ Basically, anything that sticks together without adhesive is Velcro, right? Maybe, but once a term becomes “genericized” in...

For me, it’s utterly terrifying to think of what would happen if there was a major computer-related disaster and the entire world’s records were wiped out in one second. I guess we never really know what dangers lurk out there in the world of cybercrime, hacking, etc., but it’s scary to think about it, considering...

You don’t need to be a fan of history or obsessed with the Middle Ages to appreciate the hard work and determination that went into this incredible project. The Guédelon is a castle built over the past 20 years in Burgundy, France, with only technology and materials that were available during the 13th century. That...

The ocean (and most of the rest of the planet) is slowly being poisoned by discarded plastics, and people all over the world are looking for ways to try to mitigate, ease, or even reverse the devastating effects that humans are wreaking on the marine environment. The latest effort comes from the southern Indian state...

A physicist in Mexico just solved a problem that has plagued scientists for over 2000 years. Even Isaac Newton couldn’t crack this case — but Rafael G. González-Acuña did. For centuries, lenses have faced a problem: the corners and edges are always a little soft and out of focus. It’s called “spherical aberration,” and it’s...

Deepfake is an AI technology that people on the web are using to produce new, or alter existing, video content in order to make it look as if something that didn’t occur actually did (kind of scary, if you ask me). The videos are created using two competing AI systems that learn from each other,...