In 1947, Harvard’s Mark II ran on roughly 13,000 electromechanical relays, stored numbers across 100 registers, and read instructions from punched paper tape, turning thousands of clicking metal switches into a Navy calculator vulnerable to dust, loose contacts, and one famously misplaced moth

The famous moth in the Harvard logbook is often told as the origin of the word “bug” in computing. The truth is more interesting: the joke only works because engineers had already been calling faults bugs for more than sixty years.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – Jul 27, 2026

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When you tilt a smartphone, gravity shifts microscopic silicon fingers inside its accelerometer by only a few nanometres, changing the capacitance between them and producing the electrical imbalance the phone reads as a new direction for down

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
The retina of the mantis shrimp carries 16 types of colour receptor to the human eye's three — and yet experiments suggest it sees colour worse than we do, using the extra channels for speed instead of subtlety

The retina of the mantis shrimp carries twelve types of colour receptor to the human eye’s three — and yet experiments suggest it sees colour worse than we do, using the extra channels for speed instead of subtlety

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
A bolt of lightning heats the air around it to roughly 30,000 kelvin — about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun — which is why the channel explodes outward and we hear thunder

When a lightning return stroke heats a channel only centimetres wide to roughly 30,000 kelvin, about five times the temperature of the Sun’s visible surface, the air expands so violently that the pressure wave rolls across the ground as thunder

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –

In October 1957, a beachball-sized aluminium sphere called Sputnik 1 began sending 0.3-second pulses on two radio frequencies from orbit, signals amateur operators around the world could receive, making the space age suddenly audible from Earth

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In 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat before roughly 1,000 computing professionals in San Francisco and demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and shared-screen editing in one 90-minute session, a concentrated glimpse of the interactive computer future later remembered as the Mother of All Demos

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
Roughly 99 per cent of international internet traffic runs through about 550 undersea cables — and a handful of private companies including Google, Meta and Amazon now own or lease a growing share of them

Content and cloud networks now account for three-quarters of used international bandwidth, while Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon own, co-own or buy capacity on a growing share of the 600-plus submarine cable systems carrying over 99 per cent of data between countries, a private map hidden below the wireless internet

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
Cool a ceramic made of yttrium, barium and copper oxide to 93 kelvin and it will levitate a magnet indefinitely — the 1986 discovery that finally pushed superconductors above the temperature of liquid nitrogen

In 1987, a year after the breakthrough that revived high-temperature superconductivity, physicists cooled a ceramic of yttrium, barium and copper oxide to 93 kelvin and watched it levitate a magnet indefinitely — the first superconductor cold enough to run on liquid nitrogen instead of scarce, expensive helium

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
GPS satellites tick about 38 microseconds a day faster than clocks on Earth — a relativistic drift Einstein predicted, and one the system corrects every orbit, or your location would drift 10 kilometres off within 24 hours

GPS satellites tick about 38 microseconds a day faster than clocks on Earth — a relativistic drift Einstein predicted, and one the system corrects every orbit, or your location would drift 10 kilometres off within 24 hours

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
Every year about 27.7 million tonnes of Saharan dust cross the Atlantic on the trade winds, and NASA's CALIPSO satellite has traced it fertilising the Amazon with roughly the same quantity of phosphorus the rainforest loses to rivers

Every year about 27.7 million tonnes of Saharan dust cross the Atlantic on the trade winds, and NASA’s CALIPSO satellite has traced it fertilising the Amazon with roughly the same quantity of phosphorus the rainforest loses to rivers

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team –
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