Browsing: Saving Tips

In 1959, a Soviet research team in Novosibirsk began breeding silver foxes for nothing but tameness, and within forty generations the animals had floppy ears, curled tails, piebald coats, and a bark, traits no one had selected for but which appeared on their own once fear was removed.

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In 1959, Soviet geneticist Dmitri Belyaev began a breeding experiment in Novosibirsk with a dangerous simplicity: choose only the silver…

In August 2006, naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor waded into a remote grove in Redwood National Park and pointed a laser rangefinder at a tree that turned out to be 380 feet tall, and the National Park Service has refused to disclose its location ever since, fearing the foot traffic alone would kill it.

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In August 2006, two naturalists named Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor waded through ferns and fallen branches in a remote…

Inside a six-walled wedge-foam chamber on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, the background sound is so far below human hearing that visitors start to perceive the grinding of their own joints, the rush of blood in their ears, and eventually a faint ringing that turns out to be the firing of their own nerves.

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Building 87 on Microsoft’s Redmond campus contains a room that registers a background sound level of negative 20.35 decibels, a…

In 1942, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil received US Patent 2,292,387 for a frequency-hopping radio system synchronised by a perforated paper roll borrowed from a player piano, a technique the Navy filed away as unworkable and which now underpins every Wi-Fi router, Bluetooth earbud, and GPS receiver on Earth.

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On August 11, 1942, the US Patent Office issued Patent No. 2,292,387 to Hedy Kiesler Markey, the legal name of…

When the U.S. military finally deployed frequency-hopping spread spectrum on Navy ships during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, the patent that described the technique had expired three years earlier, and its inventor was watching the news in a Los Angeles bungalow without any idea her idea was at sea.

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On August 11, 1942, the U.S. Patent Office granted Patent No. 2,292,387 for a “Secret Communication System” to two inventors…

When Boeing 747-400 pilots needed to update their navigation database as late as 2020, a technician would walk onto the flight deck with eight 3.5-inch floppy disks and feed them one at a time into a slot beside the captain’s seat, because recertifying anything newer than the 1989 avionics would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

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As recently as 2020, updating a Boeing 747-400’s navigation database meant a technician boarding the aircraft every 28 days with…