Lifestyle
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 66 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Explained
Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots
Internet
A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram
Computing
The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow
Internet
The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark
Tech Explained
In the small hours of 2 September 1859, a telegraph operator in Portland, Maine disconnected his batteries because they were throwing sparks, and then discovered he could still send a clean message to Boston using nothing but the current the aurora was pushing through the wire above his head.
Tech Explained
In 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong lost 28,800 plastic bath toys overboard in the North Pacific, and oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer spent the next two decades tracking yellow ducks and blue turtles as they washed up in Alaska, Maine, and eventually the coast of Scotland, quietly rewriting the textbook map of ocean currents.
Tech Explained
In 1942, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil received US Patent 2,292,387 for a frequency-hopping radio system synchronised by a perforated paper roll borrowed from a player piano, a technique the Navy filed away as unworkable and which now underpins every Wi-Fi router, Bluetooth earbud, and GPS receiver on Earth.
Lifestyle
In 1859 a storm on the Sun struck the Earth so hard that telegraph wires threw sparks and operators were shocked at their desks, and scientists warn the same event today would knock out power grids across entire continents.
Internet
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.
Computing
Every time you book a flight or check a hotel room, your request is routed through a green-screen mainframe system that traces back to the 1960s — and the entire multi-billion-dollar travel industry still relies on this ancient digital foundation because replacing it would be enormously expensive, dangerous, and slow
Computing
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
Computing
A 65-year-old programming language called COBOL still quietly processes over $3 trillion in banking transactions every single day — and because the original engineers are rapidly retiring, banks are scrambling to pay younger developers fortunes just to keep the ancient infrastructure from breaking
Tech Explained
In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and the team launched it with no advertising budget, no headphone jack standard, and an internal forecast of 5,000 units a month that the device beat in its first fortnight.
Lifestyle
A four-month-old Chinese startup just launched a $118 AI collar that claims to translate dog and cat vocalizations into human sentences with 95% accuracy — an extraordinary consumer device that has secured $1 million in funding despite zero independent scientific proof that it actually works
Lifestyle
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.
Lifestyle
The computer that landed Apollo 11 stored its code in "rope memory" that was physically woven by hand by a workforce of women in a Massachusetts factory, a wire through a magnetic ring meaning one and around it meaning zero, so the program that carried humans to the Moon was literally knitted into being.
News
The U.S. Army has officially pushed "jailbroken" software updates to active weapon systems in the Middle East — a frantic, 30-day tactical sprint designed to strip away manufacturer code restrictions so legacy anti-drone cameras and missile radars can finally talk to each other
News
Five years ago, a group of researchers walked out of OpenAI over safety concerns to build a quiet rival named Claude — and after a historic $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, those ex-employees have officially leapfrogged their former bosses to create the most valuable AI startup on Earth
News