Long Reads

Longer explainers,
fewer dead ends.

Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.

Tech Explained

On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn's atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour, not because the mission had failed but because they were terrified of where it might fall if they left it in orbit.

On 15 September 2017, Cassini stopped talking. The spacecraft had spent its final minutes plunging into Saturn's upper atmosphere at roughly 70,000 miles per hour, firing its thrusters at full strength to keep its antenna pointed at Earth while the gas giant tore it apart.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 27, 2026

Tech Explained

When Konrad Zuse switched on the Z3 in his Berlin workshop in May 1941, he had just built the first programmable computer in history out of roughly 2,000 surplus telephone relays, and almost no one in the world knew it existed because the war buried the story for two decades.

On May 12, 1941, a 30-year-old civil engineer named Konrad Zuse stood in a cramped workshop at Methfesselstraße 7 in…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 27, 2026

Tech Explained

At Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory on the Shirahama coast, biologist Shin Kubota has watched the same Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish die and un-die so many times in his tank that he has started writing karaoke songs about an animal that, for all practical purposes, just refuses to stay dead.

Shin Kubota keeps a tank of Turritopsis dohrnii in his lab at Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory, on the…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 27, 2026

Tech Explained

In August 1993, Garry Trudeau spent a week turning Apple's new Newton MessagePad into a Doonesbury joke, including a panel where 'Catching on?' became 'Egg freckles,' and the $699 handheld never fully outran the punchline

In late August 1993, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury turned Apple's new Newton MessagePad into a national handwriting joke.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 27, 2026

Tech Explained

In 1945, Ruth Bourne was one of the young Wrens operating more than 100 Bombe machines at Eastcote, phoning in good stops to Bletchley Park without knowing that Hut 6 codebreakers sometimes cheered on the other end of the line

In 1945, Ruth Bourne was still a teenage Wren at Eastcote, working in a high-walled Bombe outstation where more than 100 machines…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 26, 2026

Tech Explained

In 2022, NASA engineers in Pasadena watched a new image come down from Perseverance and saw a small heap of broken rocks resting on the Martian surface in a pattern that looked almost intentional, and the explanation they eventually offered involved a vanished river that has not flowed in three billion years.

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, in a basin that scientists believe held a lake roughly 3.5 billion…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 26, 2026

Lifestyle

Astronauts who spend more than six months in orbit tend to return with the same change in how they see Earth. Even those warned about it in advance say the actual experience defies explanation

Read enough astronaut interviews and a pattern starts to repeat. People who have spent months aboard the International Space Station come home and describe the view of Earth in strikingly similar terms.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 26, 2026

Lifestyle

People who browse social media but almost never post aren’t passive — they may have quietly opted out of the exhausting performance layer of modern life

There is a particular kind of social media account that looks abandoned but isn't.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 26, 2026