Archive

September 2026

Every article published in September 2026. 14 articles · Back to full archive

Pixel 3 Night Sight can capture a photo in near-darkness because it doesn't take one picture — it can take up to 15 short exposures, align them with sub-pixel precision and average down the noise while the phone keeps collecting light after you press the shutter

By How It Works · Sep 18, 2026

Screens use red, green and blue because human retinas carry only three types of colour-sensing cones, tuned near those wavelengths — a display isn't reproducing colour, it's tricking three specific proteins in your eye into firing in the right ratio

By How It Works · Sep 17, 2026

Voyager 1 is over 15.8 billion miles from Earth and its generators lose about four watts of power every year

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Sep 16, 2026

When you delete a file from a traditional hard drive, the operating system usually removes the pointer to it — the bytes themselves can sit undisturbed until something else writes over that patch of disk, which is why recovery tools can rebuild photos months later

By How It Works · Sep 14, 2026

The Gulf Offshore Research Institute has been awarded $20 million to turn idle Gulf oil platforms into hubs for energy, minerals and aquaculture

By How It Works · Sep 14, 2026

How did a metal box first secured to a converted tanker in April 1956 cut ocean freight loading costs by more than 90 per cent?

By How It Works · Sep 10, 2026

In December 2014, Google introduced a reCAPTCHA checkbox that let many users skip distorted letters while the system weighed browser characteristics and a Google tracking cookie before deciding whether to show another challenge

By How It Works · Sep 9, 2026

Microsoft didn't just stop shipping Flash with Windows 10 — in February 2021 it began silently force-installing update KB4577586, which scrubs the player from the operating system itself, with the rollout finishing across most Windows machines by July 2021

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Sep 8, 2026

A phone knows which way is up because a silicon chip smaller than a grain of rice contains tiny cantilever beams that physically bend under gravity, and the circuit measures how far they flex in three axes thousands of times a second

By How It Works · Sep 7, 2026

The first GIF ever made was a picture of an airplane — Stephen Wilhite told the New York Times in 2013 that he 'saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming', and insisted the pronunciation was a soft G, like Jif peanut butter

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture was destaffed in April 2006 to cut costs, then handed over the following year to a calico cat wearing a custom-made stationmaster's cap — passenger numbers, which had fallen to about 1.9 million a year, began climbing again within months

By How It Works · Sep 4, 2026

The ROICE program at the University of Houston started in 2022 as a thought experiment about what to do with thousands of dead Gulf oil wells, pipelines and platforms — four years later it received about $800,000 to turn that thinking into commercial repurposing plans

By How It Works · Sep 3, 2026

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and still transmits from more than 24 billion kilometres away on about 22 watts, less power than a fridge bulb, with each signal taking over 22 hours to reach Earth

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Sep 2, 2026

How did a phone game released in July 2016 briefly double foot traffic to small businesses near landmarks, and why did the effect fade within eight weeks?

By How It Works · Sep 1, 2026