Tech Explained
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 24 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Explained
Wi-Fi signals struggle through walls not because concrete is thick, but because water in the plaster absorbs 2.4 GHz almost exactly the frequency a microwave oven uses to heat your dinner
Tech Explained
Voyager 1 is now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth, and its transmitter runs on about 22 watts — less than the bulb in a fridge — yet NASA's Deep Space Network still hears it whisper across nearly 24 hours of one-way light travel
Tech Explained
How did a rubber gasket the size of a dinner plate, stiffened overnight in a Florida cold snap, rewrite the way NASA engineers are allowed to disagree with management?
Tech Explained
A QR code's three corner squares aren't decoration — they're position markers that let a scanner work out the code's orientation in under a millisecond, even when you photograph it upside down or at 45 degrees
Tech Explained
When your phone shoots a portrait, the blurred background isn't optical — the camera builds a depth map from two lenses, then applies a Gaussian blur that mimics a lens aperture the phone is physically too thin to contain
Tech Explained
How did a country with no large rivers and limited land to collect rain build the capacity to meet up to 40 per cent of its water demand with sewage clean enough to drink?
Tech Explained
How did a cracked rubber O-ring the size of a coin, stiffened by a Florida cold snap in January 1986, destroy a space shuttle 73 seconds after launch?
Lifestyle
The rarest form of mental strength in adult life isn't discipline or resilience, it's the capacity to sit inside an unresolved feeling for an hour without needing to name it, fix it, or explain it to anyone
Tech Explained
The 'root' of the internet is 13 named server clusters — labelled A through M — that between them answer roughly 1.6 million DNS queries every second, and one of them, K-root, is run by a Dutch non-profit from more than 140 sites that all share a single IP address
Tech Explained
How did a Sunday driving ban imposed by Dutch prime minister Joop den Uyl during the 1973 oil shock quietly turn empty motorways into the seed of 35,000 kilometres of cycle path?
Tech Explained
Deleting a file removes only the signpost pointing to it — the bytes themselves sit on the disk for weeks or months, which is why forensic tools can still rebuild holiday photos from a drive you thought you wiped
Tech Explained
When YouTube launched in April 2005, its first video was a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of elephants at San Diego Zoo — the site was originally built as a dating service, and the elephant clip was uploaded because no one had sent in a profile
Tech Explained
The JPEG format was finalised in 1992 by a committee that met for six years to agree on how much visual information a human eye would tolerate losing — the answer, roughly 90 per cent, is why every photo on the web looks the way it does
Gaming
How did a publicly humiliated Japanese electronics firm turn a failed CD partnership with Nintendo into a console that outsold every rival of the 1990s?
Tech Explained
How does a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a garden hose carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet traffic across 13,000 kilometres of ocean floor?
Tech Explained
Wi-Fi can slow to a crawl in a crowded café even when the fibre connection is fast, because 2.4 GHz offers only three non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in most places, forcing nearby devices on the same channel to compete for airtime and leaving the webpage waiting behind the spinner
Tech Explained
How did a Cornell graduate student's 99-line bootstrap program in November 1988 infect roughly 6,000 machines — about 10 per cent of the early internet — and force universities to invent the first computer emergency response team?
Tech Explained
When you tap Send on an end-to-end encrypted message, the server passes along a scrambled blob it cannot read — but the timestamps, your contact list and who you spoke to when are still visible to the company running the app
Lifestyle