Thursday, March 30, 2017

8 Astonishing Facts About Technology

Technology and its constant progress throughout history is quite fascinating, and over the last few decades the progress has been incredibly fast-paced and mesmerizing. There are a lot of things in the world of technology that make it so filled with awe, let's take a look at a few facts related to technology and what to expect from it in the near future.

The Origins of Amazon


The whole world knows Amazon as THE online store to go to if you want to buy anything. However, when Amazon first started out in 1994 it began as a bookstore, from here it slowly evolved into the all in one online store that it is today.

The First Braille Printer


A young teenager known as Shubham Banarjee just invented the first ever low-cost braille printer out of Lego bricks. The printer is called the "Braigo" and holds a lot of potential as the foundation of affordable braille printers that might be available on a larger scale in the near future, providing blind people with access to more reading material.

3D Printing is Older Than You Think


We all think of 3D printing as a relatively recent invention that only came out a couple of years ago. However, the truth is that 3D printers are older than the first iPhone. The first 3D printer was invented in 1982 by Charles Hull and was called a Stereolithography device, the technology became popular only recently since it needed time to be refined and improved to make it more practical.

3D Printing Construction

Speaking of 3D printers, the technology is quickly advancing, and there's talk of implementing it in construction work in the near future. NASA is also looking into developing automated 3D printing robots that can be sent into space to construct entire space stations. However, this kind of implementation of 3D printing is still pretty far down the road.

Computing Power And The Climate


It's common knowledge that computers produce heat when they are running, an average laptop can easily get as hot as 70 to 80 degrees Celsius when in use, so imagine how much heat can larger setups produce. Extremely large setups can produce heat and carbon dioxide in large enough quantities to have an impact on the environment itself, Google's servers are reported to produce up to 200 tons of CO2 on a daily basis!

Microsoft's New Take on Large Scale Cooling

Producing CO2 isn't the only problem with large computing setups and data centers, the heat being produced effects performance, and therefore companies spend significant amounts of money on cooling solutions. Microsoft has recently come up with a proposal to build an underwater facility in the ocean to house their cloud data center. Named Project Natick, if it becomes a success, then the largest problem that every data center has to face might be eliminated in the future, turning large scale computing more eco-friendly and more efficient.

Storage Medium That Can Last Forever

Just last year scientists came up with a solution to help store data and have it withstand the test of time. Transparent 5D digital data disks made of glass are capable of holding 360TB of data for as long as 13.8 billion years, the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. These discs are created with a process known as femto second laser writing and store data in five dimensions, each dimension consisting of nano structures, all of which combine to provide an extremely non-volatile storage medium.

The Storage Capacity of DNA


The oldest and most intricate piece of technology in the universe is perhaps the human body, our DNA has a staggering data storage capacity of 455 Exabyte; a single Exabyte contains one billion gigabytes. Just to put things into perspective; data from the entire world can be stored in just 4 grams of DNA.



Author Bio
Tom Carter is a passionate blogger, web developer, and a die-hard game lover. When he is neither writing his next blog post on his blog The Geekly News nor playing games, he often hangs out with his friends at the bowling alley.