How It Works
Publishes 1 feed
Make Tech Easier
Uncomplicating the complicated, making life easier
11 posts · contributor
Lately
How does a fibre-optic strand thinner than a spaghetti noodle carry a signal across 13,000 kilometres of ocean without a single electrical amplifier along the way?
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
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
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?
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
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
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?
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?
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
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
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?
Everything on this page was read from markup How It Works published — a rel="me" link, an h-card, or the feed’s own author element. Nothing was inferred from anywhere else. To correct or remove it, get in touch. Machine-readable: JSON