Technology never ceases to amaze us. But somethings are far from how we imagine them to be. Here are ten technology facts that may never have crossed you.
10. A 13-year-old boy named Shubham Banerjee created the first braille printer named Braigo (comes from Braille-lego)
9. EBAY started out as a website providing information about Ebola. The site did not start as an online auction website. It had sections for biotech startups, travel and personal shopping and details about Ebola.
8. 3D Printing was invented in the 1980s. Yes, it is not as new as you think. Charles Hull created a model of his Stereolithography machine in 1983 and filed for a patent in 1986.
7. You throw away your electronics for free? You can get money for disposing your electronics at the EcoATM, world’s first automated kiosk that exchanges electronic devices in return for money.
6. Malbolge is world’s toughest programming language. Invented by Ben Olmstead, the language is named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. The aim was to create a language that is almost impossible to use.
5. The International Space Station (ISS) project started in 1998 with a construction cost of $150 billion, being one of the most expensive projects ever.
4. Your google searches have an ecological effect. Google servers release almost 200 tons of CO2 per day performing an estimated 1 billion searches every day.
3. Computation can not be done without generating heat. Rolf Landauer discovered in 1961 that every bit destroyed generates at least kTln2 joules of heat, where k is Boltzmann constant and T is absolute temperature.
2. Microsoft wants to put their cloud data center under water. Project Natick is aimed at building and running a data center submerged in the ocean which can make data centers efficient and eco-friendly solving the biggest problem of keeping them cool.
1. Entire data of the world can be stored in 4 grams of DNA. A gram of DNA can store 455 exabytes of data. An exabyte has one billion gigabytes. The world’s data is around 1.8 zettabytes, and a zettabyte has 1,000 exabytes. So yes, all the world’s data can be stored in a DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon.
