Questions tagged [technology]
The making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function.
182 questions
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Can a person's age be automatically estimated based on hand gesture analysis?
Background
The Australian Government recently asked for submissions from the public regarding the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 which requires social media platforms to ...
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Does the Sono cancel noise from outside by vibrating a window?
Created by industrial designer Rudolf Stefanich, the Sono sticks to glass surfaces and claims to dial down unwanted noise. After it receives a sound’s vibrations, it claims to reprocess them much like ...
3
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Was AI used in the June 2024 NHS data breach?
There is a BBC segment called "AI Decoded" in which they have convened a panel of cyber security experts. The episode is titled "Hackers expose deep cybersecurity vulnerabilities in AI&...
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Are phones listening to our conversations for ad targeting?
Are 'smartphones' (i.e. Google and social media) listening in on users' conversations for targetted advertising? I don't mean keeping a record of the voice commands we give virtual assistants, but ...
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Does Hamas have 500 km of tunnels under Gaza?
In 2021, Hamas leader said "We have 500 km of tunnels in Gaza".
The reason I find it dubious is due to speed of digging.
Accodring to Wikipedia, a tunnel boring machine can dig in rock in a ...
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Can Russia jam GPS as far as Sofia, Bulgaria (with ships)?
It's been claimed by various observers that Russia is behind GPS glitches in Romania and Bulgaria.
The next day, September 1, it was happening again. Pilots approaching Sofia complained of the same ...
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Can some people beat roulette wheels using "visual ballistics"?
In the past, people beat roulette wheels using machines that measure ball speed and predict where the ball will land. That is discussed in the question Is it possible to gain an edge in roulette ...
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Was the ELIZA effect real?
ELIZA is an oft referenced early chatbot developed in the 1960's. The legend behind it is that the simplistic chatbot was so convincingly human to early users that they supposedly forgot it was a ...
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Did one of the victims of the Buffalo shooting invent a water-powered engine for cars?
According to a number of conspiracy sites (see Natural News and Newspunch), Buffalo shooting victim Aaron Salter Jr had just invented and patented a gas-free car that runs on water (implying that is ...
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Does the Dyson hairdryer measure temperature more than 40 times per second?
According to its product page https://www.dyson.co.uk/hair-care/dyson-supersonic/dyson-supersonic-overview the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer has the following feature
Unlike some others, the Dyson ...
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Does Elon Musk's Starlink system play a significant role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
The DW article Ukraine is using Elon Musk's Starlink for drone strikes about the use of Starlink to provide internet in Ukraine is suggesting that it is playing a role in, e.g., the way president ...
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Is there a PyCon Python Conference held in Iraq?
In a talk given at the Dutch Embassy in San Franciso, Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, claimed that a PyCon is held in Iraq:
The Python user community is formed of ...
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Does Reversing Ceiling Fan Direction Improve Energy Efficiency?
There is an often cited statistic in the HVAC field that reversing the ceiling fan direction can save 10% on heating bills due to air circulation.
I would imagine that this is somewhat true due to the ...
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Do any ATS companies advertise entirely automated resume rejection?
It's not an unheard of notion that employers, particularly large tech companies, might use automated systems to reject candidates, without any human involvement.
This article claims the following:
......
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Did a turkish man invent a steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution and only made it to spin doner kebab? [closed]
I've seen this picture being reposted in many different places recently:
Is it true? Where can this machine be seen? What is it if it's not a steam engine?
Update: The pictures posted above show ...
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Did farmers adopt cars faster than inhabitants of cities?
I learned from this post: Start with a niche that:
Cars are almost among the lucky exception to the niche rule. However, there was still one group of people in the USA that moved from horses to cars ...
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Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style?
I was reading about the Internet Archive's work to archive the materials of a famous New York City typewriter family:
http://blog.archive.org/2020/08/26/an-archive-of-a-different-type/
I was ...
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Can electricity be transmitted wirelessly over Zenneck surface waves?
Viziv Technologies claims that they are researching the ability to send and receive electricity using the Zenneck Surface Waves.
August 2019 press release
Viziv Technologies, LLC, and Baylor ...
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1
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1k
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Are nano diamond batteries a breakthrough in battery technology?
Recently, for some reason, this story first published in January 2020 was again trending on social media (this appeared on my YouTube feed)But for a more quotable version, this version from The ...
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Are blue light filters, not blue lights, on phones and computer screens harmful to sleep?
These existing questions ask whether the blue lights, not blue light filters, from computer screens affect sleep:
Does blue light from screens (phone, computer, TV) before sleep affect sleep?
Does ...
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Did Coinstar add a delay and fake noises because people didn't believe a machine could count coins quickly?
I saw a post on Reddit claiming that Coinstar machines are extremely fast at counting coins, but that the company had to introduce a delay and fake noises to the machines because customers didn't ...
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Does Microsoft telemetry send everything you say into the microphone or type on the keyboard to Microsoft?
The Windows Central (a non-MS site) claims that:
Following are the specific examples of Windows Telemetry data:
Typed text on keyboard sent every 30 minutes
Anything you say into a microphone is ...
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Was the Roman knowledge of how to build aqueducts lost?
In a TED interview, Elon Musk stated:
People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very ...
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Could the Ark of the Covenant have killed by acting as a capacitor?
In the biblical account of Uzzah, he touches the Ark of the Covenant on the road from Gibeah to Jerusalem; this irks the god of Israel, who knocks him out on the spot.
A 2014 Gizmodo article quotes ...
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Do 4K displays use more power, because it is hard for the backlight to shine through those super tiny pixels?
I was watching Linus reviewing the 2020 MacBook Air and he said about the competing laptops that 4K was pointless on a 13" laptop and that it just hurts the battery life, because it's harder for the ...
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Did China steal technology from the USA to make their J-20?
The Chengdu J-20 is a Chinese fighter aircraft.
Wikipedia reports that
The combination of an integrated targeting pod with spherically situated passive-optical tracking system is reported similar ...
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Could 5G make weather satellites less effective?
I've seen a few articles pop up in sources stating that 5G signals will run too close to the 23.8 MHz signal that weather satellites need in order to accurately produce weather forecasts.
National ...
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Is Radio Frequency Radiation carcinogenic at the FCC's 1996 exposure limits?
A 2019 Scientific American blog article, We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe, by Joel M. Moskowitz, warns about the safety of 5G wireless technology.
Yet, since [the 1980s], the preponderance of ...
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How can a call use cellular service when cellular service is off in Airplane Mode? [closed]
According to Verizon (a large company generally positioned to be a trusted source of knowledge for how cellular phones and cellular networks work):
When using Wi-Fi Calling, 911 calls will always ...
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Did hundreds of thousands of people die due to lack of seat belts in the period before they were made mandatory?
In a recent interview, Tesla founder Elon Musk gives a historical reference as example of slow government reaction to public harm:
At 8m15s:
Take something like seatbelts. It was known for, I ...
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Does Microsoft's Hololens create true holograms? [closed]
Microsoft claims that their HoloLens data glasses can produce holograms.
HoloLens lets you create holograms, objects made of light and sound that appear in the world around you, just as if they ...
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Does the Chinese government officially have access to IT equipment sold abroad?
In this segment from an RT program with Rick Sanchez, published June 6th 2019, a person named James Jordan, from the Stanford U Hoover Institute, claims (03:20) that "Chinese government agencies have ...
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Were pen cap holes designed to prevent death by suffocation if swallowed?
Someone posted the following trivia on a social media website:
Do you know that pen caps have holes so that if someone swallows a cap, then air could still pass through?
This started a small ...
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Has ExxonMobil sequestered over 40 percent of all captured CO2?
From ExxonMobil's website on carbon capture and storage (CCS):
With a working interest in approximately one-fifth of the world’s total carbon capture capacity, ExxonMobil is a leader in one of the ...
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Is micro rebar a better way to reinforce concrete than rebar?
Helix Steel's site claims that the small wires (twisted steel micro rebar) they created are a good replacement to a typical rebar concrete reinforcement if not even better.
a reinforcement technology ...
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Does the tipping function on Instacart pay the company instead of the shopper?
A local news story reports the following:
Workers behind Instacart, the grocery delivery company and app, say they’re getting punished for getting a tip.
People who shop and deliver for the app say ...
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Was the wheel invented before the wall?
So, this extraordinary claim has been getting a lot of publicity lately:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQKrfGCd7I8
They say a wall is medieval, well so is a wheel. A wheel is older than a wall. And ...
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Have people died by being shocked through the headphone cord of their cell phone?
The headline of an article in Vice magazine claims that "A 16-Year-Old Has Died After Being Electrocuted by His Headphones"
Last week, a teenager was electrocuted to death while listening ...
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Do antibacterial coatings in fridges reduce bacterial load?
Some modern fridges have "antibacterial coating" in their list of features. It is claimed this reduces the levels of bacteria growth.
Some people go on the further claim this in turn reduces odour ...
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Could 100,000 lives a year be saved thanks to data-mining?
I read in The Guardian (mirror) (published on 2014-06-26):
Google: 100,000 lives a year lost through fear of data-mining
The search firm's CEO and co-founder, Larry Page, estimates 100,000 ...
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Updating voicemail when there is no service, wifi, or electricity
Does updating voicemail during an emergency when there is no electricity, phone service, or wifi actually work or is this simply spam forwarded around and false information? I find it hard to believe ...
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Was there Cyrillic text visible on Intel 386 chips after decapping?
Heise, a German IT news portal, reported today about a chip presented to the State Council, including Erich Honecker, exactly thirty years ago.
They also mention how other chips had been copied from ...
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Is it safe for a child to sleep near a baby monitor?
I have always assumed baby monitors and all wireless technology to be completely safe and have been informed by a 'friend' that I have been endangering my children by using them.
We used an RF ...
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Do Silicon Valley workers send their children to no-phone no-tablet schools?
I have heard someone say that there is a considerable proportion of employees of Silicon tech giants that send their children to schools where no smartphones and no tablets are allowed. Allegedly this ...
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Was 13 year old Tanmay Bakshi hired by Google?
There seems to be some kind of rumour going around that 13-year old Canadian-Indian boy Tanmay Bakshi was hired by Google. If you do a Google search for "tanmay bakshi google" you get lots of hits ...
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During WW2 were 2 broken ships each cut in half and welded together again?
During a lecture with Jennifer Egan, writer and Pulitzer-Prize winner, she was telling stories about the Brooklyn Navy Yard and one of those was that at one point during the second world war, 2 ships ...
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Are Germans buying anti-rape "safety shorts"?
From The Express: Safe shorts to STOP women joggers suffering SEX ATTACKS in Germany are sold out, January 1 2017:
AN ENTREPRENEUR from Germany has created trousers with the aim of protecting women ...
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Was this Harry-Potter themed text written solely by a computer program?
A YouTube video caught my eye with the title, "A Robot Wrote A Chapter To A Harry Potter Book, And It's Absolutely Insane." The video claims that a software algorithm created by Botnik Studios was ...
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Do Electric Cars Inherently Consist of Fewer Parts than Combustion Engine Cars?
A recent Handelsblatt Global Edition article, How electric cars will charge Germany's job market, talks about changes in the job market due to the introduction of electric cars.
One of the first ...
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Could a tattoo encode a wave form to reproduce significant sound sample? [closed]
I just ran into https://skinmotion.com/ which sells "Soundwave Tattoos".
My gut says tattoos cannot have high enough resolution to actually encode 15s of audio - even at speech quality.
Reading all ...
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