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.

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.

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

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

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.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · May 26, 2026