1X-Box Controller
The US Navy replaced expensive and clunky periscope controls on submarines with Xbox 360 controllers, which reduced training time from hours to minutes.
2. GPS location data was purposely reported inaccurately prior to the year 2000 for security purposes as part of US military policy called “selective availability.”
3. Ever since 2003, MIT has published an annual list of 10 breakthroughs in technology. 2020's list included anti-aging drugs, AI-discovered molecules, and hyper-personalized medicine.
4. GeoFraming is an ad targeting tactic where companies track you through your devices based on venues you've visited like a concert or stadium as far as 6 months in the past, then geolocate your home address and target ads to your home IP address with no opt-in.
5. Li-Fi is a potential replacement for Wi-Fi, which uses LED light to transmit data with speeds of up to 200 gigabits per second.
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6E-Bike Goal
In 1991, the Chinese government made developing e-bikes an official technology goal. Electric bike sales went from 150,000 in 1999 to 21 million in 2007, a growth in sales that is unmatched by any other mode of transportation in China
7. Earth Simulator is one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet with nearly 35 trillion operations per second and it's used to model Earth's Climate.
8. Reading books makes AI smarter than reading tweets. “OpenAI Transformer”, an artificial intelligence language model, is trained with 7000 books since it allows the model to associate related information better than as it would be the case if it would be trained with tweets.
9. Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence, later became one of its leading critics when he found his secretary getting very emotionally involved with ELIZA, a chatbot that he himself programmed.
10. The Xbox Underground was a group of teenage hackers who hacked into Epic Games, stole Gears of War 3 source code, and then hacked into Microsoft to steal project Durango (Xbox one) and make their own Xbox One.
11Virtual Reality History
Virtual reality has been in use since 1994 to help individuals struggling with PTSD and depression. These early systems combined VR technology and exposure therapy to treat various behavioral and psychological issues.
12. The term GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) was popularized by Nvidia in 1999 after it marketed the GeForce 256 as “the world's first GPU.”
13. Due to the increase of wireless devices such as smartphones, tablets, and other wifi-capable devices, we're actually running out of airwaves to transmit bandwidth.
14. A 2019 study revealed some plants emit unique ultrasonic sounds when stressed. Measuring between 20-150 kHz, tomato and tobacco plant sounds were fed into a machine learning model and researchers were able to use their intensity and frequency to distinguish between dryness or physical harm.
15. The first documented IoT (Internet of things) cyber-attack which happened between Dec 2013 to Jan 2014 involved over 100,000 smart appliances such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions, and at least one refrigerator.
16AlphaGo
AlphaGo, the AI that beat the world’s best (human) Go player in 2016, consumed one megawatt of power while playing the game, enough to power about 100 homes for a day.
17. A single gram of synthetic DNA contains 250 PERABYTES of storage capacity and can be copied endlessly for free. This is enough storage to theoretically store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks (this information is as of 2017).
18. Tay was an artificial intelligence bot that was released by Microsoft via Twitter on March 23, 2016. It caused controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
19. Israeli researchers have been successful in creating a 3D-printed heart by converting fatty tissue from human patients to form “bio ink” which built the heart layer by layer. Around the size of a rabbit heart, it contains cells, blood vessels, chambers, and other structures a heart needs to function normally.
20. The computer chips that are put into spacecraft are not state of the art but are so old as to be obsolete. Their known reliability makes up for it.
21Government's Hacking Tools
In a 2017 criminal case, the US government put the secrecy of its hacking tools above all else. Prosecutors chose to drop all charges in a case of child exploitation on the dark web rather than reveal the technological means they used to locate the anonymous Tor user.
22. A fundamental limit exists on the amount of information that can be stored in a given space, which is about 10^69 bits per square meter. Regardless of technological advancement, any attempt to condense information further will cause the storage medium to collapse into a black hole.
23. A new kind of scavenger technology allows robots to ‘eat’ metal for energy. Right now when electronics need their own power sources, there are two basic options: batteries and harvesters (like solar panels). This kind of technology can harvest its energy from metals around it.
24. Breeder reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that produce more fissile materials than they consume. They are designed to extend the nuclear fuel supply for the generation of electricity. If you use breeder reactors, there is enough nuclear fuel on earth to power all of humanity (electricity + heat + transportation + industry) for ~4 billion years, thereby making it literally as renewable as the sun-derived renewables (wind/solar/hydro). In other words, the sun will run out of its finite but huge nuclear fusion fuel around the same time. The concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation have been one large impediment to creating breeders.
25. Modern Polaroid film is less technologically advanced than traditional Polaroid film, and that Polaroid photos are now worse than they used to be.
