Portal:Technology
The Technology Portal
Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life.
Technological advancements have led to significant changes in society. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistoric times, followed by the control of fire, which contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age allowed greater travel and the creation of more complex machines. More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy. (Full article...)
Recognized articles -
Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.
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On February 20, 2021, United Airlines Flight 328 (UA328/UAL328), a scheduled U.S. domestic passenger flight from Denver to Honolulu, suffered what was technically ruled a contained engine failure despite shedding large pieces of debris, approximately four minutes after takeoff from Denver International Airport (DEN). Parts departing from the engine cowling of the Boeing 777-222 aircraft resulted in a debris field at least 1 mile (1.6 km) long over suburban residential areas of Broomfield, Colorado. Falling debris was recorded by eyewitnesses using smartphone cameras and a dash cam. Debris fell through the roof of a private home and significantly damaged a parked vehicle.
The engine failure resulted in an in-flight engine fire, extensive damage to the engine nacelle, and minor damage to the fuselage. Passengers also recorded video of the engine nacelle damage and in-flight fire and posted these to social media. The failed engine was a Pratt & Whitney (P&W) model PW4077 turbofan. (Full article...)
King's Highway 91, commonly referred to as Highway 91, was a provincially maintained highway in the Canadian province of Ontario that connected Highway 24 south of Collingwood with Highway 26 in Stayner, a distance of 7.9 km (4.9 mi). The majority of the route travels through farmland, with the exception of the portion within Stayner. Highway 91 was established in mid 1937 along an existing road. Aside from paving in 1965, the highway remained unchanged until it was decommissioned at the beginning of 1998 and transferred to Simcoe County. Today the route is officially known as Simcoe County Road 91. (Full article...)
K-149 is a 6.098-mile-long (9.814 km) north–south state highway in the U.S. state of Kansas. Entirely within rural Morris County, K-149's southern terminus is at U.S. Route 56 (US-56) east of Herington and the northern terminus is at K-4 south of White City. The highway passes through grasslands characteristic of the Great Plains and is a two-lane road for its entire length.
K-149 was first designated as a state highway by the State Highway Commission of Kansas, now known as the Kansas Department of Transportation, on February 13, 1957. The highway's alignment has not changed since it was created. (Full article...)
K-149 was first designated as a state highway by the State Highway Commission of Kansas, now known as the Kansas Department of Transportation, on February 13, 1957. The highway's alignment has not changed since it was created. (Full article...)
New York State Route 37B (NY 37B) is an east–west state highway located in St. Lawrence County, New York, in the United States. It serves as a business route of NY 37 through the village of Massena. While NY 37B enters the village, NY 37 bypasses it to the south. The western terminus of the route is at an intersection with NY 37 in the town of Louisville. Its eastern terminus is at a junction with NY 37 just east of the village limits in the town of Massena. NY 37B intersects North Main Street, a state-maintained northward extension of NY 420, in Massena's central district.
The origins of NY 37B date back to the early 20th century when the New York State Legislature created Route 32, an unsigned legislative route extending from North Lawrence to Ogdensburg via Massena. From Waddington to Massena, Route 32 followed River Road and Town Line Road. This portion of the route became part of NY 3 in 1924. In the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, the Waddington–Massena segment of NY 3 became NY 37B. The route was extended east into Massena in the 1950s after NY 37 was realigned to follow a new bypass around the village. (Full article...)
The origins of NY 37B date back to the early 20th century when the New York State Legislature created Route 32, an unsigned legislative route extending from North Lawrence to Ogdensburg via Massena. From Waddington to Massena, Route 32 followed River Road and Town Line Road. This portion of the route became part of NY 3 in 1924. In the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, the Waddington–Massena segment of NY 3 became NY 37B. The route was extended east into Massena in the 1950s after NY 37 was realigned to follow a new bypass around the village. (Full article...)
The Sutphin Boulevard station is a local station on the IND Queens Boulevard Line of the New York City Subway. Located at Sutphin Boulevard and Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, it is served by the F train at all times, the <F> train during rush hours in the reverse peak direction, and a few rush-hour E trains to Jamaica–179th Street during p.m. rush hours.
This station opened on April 24, 1937 as part of an extension of the Independent Subway System's Queens Boulevard Line. In 1953, the platforms at the station were extended to accommodate 11-car trains. Ridership at this station decreased sharply after the opening of the Archer Avenue lines in 1988. This had been the closest subway station to the Long Island Rail Road's Jamaica station after the removal of a portion of the Jamaica Elevated in 1977. (Full article...)
In computer science, a binary search tree (BST), also called an ordered or sorted binary tree, is a rooted binary tree data structure with the key of each internal node being greater than all the keys in the respective node's left subtree and less than the ones in its right subtree. The time complexity of operations on the binary search tree is linear with respect to the height of the tree.
Binary search trees allow binary search for fast lookup, addition, and removal of data items. Since the nodes in a BST are laid out so that each comparison skips about half of the remaining tree, the lookup performance is proportional to that of binary logarithm. BSTs were devised in the 1960s for the problem of efficient storage of labeled data and are attributed to Conway Berners-Lee and David Wheeler. (Full article...)
Barry Docks (Welsh: Dociau'r Barri) is a port facility in the town of Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, a few miles southwest of Cardiff on the north shore of the Bristol Channel. The docks were opened in 1889 by David Davies and John Cory as an alternative to the congested and expensive Cardiff Docks to ship coal carried by rail from the South Wales Coalfield. The principal engineer was John Wolfe Barry, assisted by Thomas Forster Brown and Henry Marc Brunel, son of the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The docks occupy the former sound between Barry Island and the mainland. The contractors built dams to connect each end of the island to the mainland, drained or pumped the water from the site and excavated it. They used the material to level the area around the docks and for the core of breakwaters to protect the entrance. The works included a basin with gates at each end, which served as a lock between the sea entrance and the docks, the dock walls and quays, coal loading equipment and railways to deliver coal from the mines to the docks. A second dock and second entrance lock were added in 1898. The Barry Dock Offices were built in 1897–1900 by the architect Arthur E. Bell. (Full article...)
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Photograph credit: Langley Research Center; restored by Adam CuerdenMary Jackson (1921–2005) was an African American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was succeeded by NASA in 1958. For most of her career, she worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; starting as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division, she later took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available. Realizing that she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor, she accepted a demotion to become a manager of the Federal Women's Program in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, as well as of the Affirmative Action Program. In this role, she worked to influence both the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, engineering and mathematics careers. She was portrayed by Janelle Monáe as a lead character in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. This picture, taken in 1980, shows Jackson working at NASA Langley. -
Photograph: Raimond SpekkingBucket-wheel excavators (BWEs) are heavy equipment used in surface mining. The primary function of a BWE is to act as a continuous digging machine in large-scale open pit mining operations. These BWEs were photographed at the Garzweiler surface mine in Germany. -
Credit: Mike McGregorThe OLPC XO-1 is an inexpensive subnotebook laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries. -
The Australia Telescope Compact Array is a radio telescope operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) at the Paul Wild Observatory, 25 km (16 mi) west of the town of Narrabri in New South Wales, Australia. The telescope is an array of six identical dishes each 22 metres (72 ft) in diameter, which commonly operate in aperture synthesis mode to produce images from radio waves. Five of the dishes can be moved along a 3-kilometre (2 mi) railway track; the sixth is situated three kilometres west of the end of the main track. Each dish weighs about 270 tonnes (270 long tons; 300 short tons).
This photograph, showing five of the Australia Telescope Compact Array's dishes, was taken around 1984, in the late phase of the construction process. It is a long-exposure photograph taken in darkness in the late evening; during the exposure, the photographer, John Masterson, walked around the dishes firing off over 130 flashes using a hand-held flash gun. -
Image credit: Joaquim Alves GasparAn animation showing how to use a vernier caliper, which is a caliper that uses a vernier scale to interpolate linear measurements. Vernier calipers can measure internal and external dimensions using, respectively, the uppermost and lower jaws, and also depths, using the depth probe (located at the right end). In this example, the first two digits (2.4) are decided by the location of the zero of the vernier scale in the centimeter scale, and the last digit (0.07), by the first line of the vernier scale that exactly matches a line of the centimeter scale above. -
Photo credit: UpstateNYerMS Majesty of the Seas is a Sovereign class cruise ship owned and operated by Royal Caribbean International, a cruise line based in Miami, Florida. Her sister ship MS Sovereign of the Seas was the largest cruise ship in the world at the time of its completion in 1988. -
Photo credit: Hans HillewaertWind turbines belonging to the Thorntonbank Wind Farm located in the North Sea, 28 km (17 mi) off the coast of Belgium. Electricity generation started in early 2009, with an initial capacity of 30 MW, and that number is expected to rise to 300 MW by 2015. A 37 km (23 mi) 150 kV undersea cable connects the wind farm to the shore. -
Photo credit: Alfred T. Palmer"Big Pete" Ramagos, rigger at work on Douglas Dam, Tennessee, June 1942. A rigger is a person or company which specializes in the lifting and/or moving of extremely large and/or heavy objects. Riggers use equipment expressly designed for moving and lifting objects where ordinary material handling equipment cannot go. -
A transit map of the New York City Subway, one of the oldest and most extensive public transportation systems in the world. Operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, it has 468 stations in operation on 209 mi (337 km) of routes, with 842 miles (1,355 km) of track. It is the busiest rapid transit rail system by annual ridership in the Western Hemisphere, and fifth busiest in the world. Its stations are located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Staten Island has its own rail line which is not part of the system, but is included in the map as well. -
The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. The webcam was created in 1991 to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee pot by providing, on the user's desktop computer, a live 128×128 pixel greyscale picture of the state of the coffee pot. The webcam was shut down on 22 August 2001, following the Computer Laboratory's move to the William Gates Building. -
The GameCube is a sixth generation video game console released by Nintendo beginning in 2001. Meant as a successor to the Nintendo 64, the GameCube sold approximately 22 million units worldwide. It was the third most-successful console of its generation, behind Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. The GameCube was succeeded by the Wii in 2006. -
Photograph: David GublerThe Wiesen Viaduct is a single-track railway viaduct (concrete blocks with dimension stone coverage) which spans the Landwasser southwest of the hamlet of Wiesen, Switzerland. Designed by Henning Friedrich, then the chief engineer of the Rhaetian Railway, it was built between 1906 and 1909 by the contractor G. Marasi (Westermann & Cie, Zürich) under the supervision of P. Salaz and Hans Studer (RhB). The Rhaetian Railway still owns and uses the viaduct today for regular service with 29 passenger trains per day. An important element of the Davos–Filisur railway, the viaduct is 88.9 metres (292 ft) high, 210 metres (690 ft) long, and has a main span of 55 metres (180 ft). In 1926, the viaduct was the inspiration for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting Brücke bei Wiesen. -
Credit: Berthold WernerA telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that converts sound, typically the human voice, into electronic signals suitable for transmission via cables or other transmission media over long distances through satellite. -
Photograph credit: Dllu
The N700 Series Shinkansen is a Japanese Shinkansen high-speed train with tilting capability developed jointly by JR Central and JR West. It has been used on the Tokaido and San'yō Shinkansen lines since 2007. This photograph shows the train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station, and was captured with a line scan camera using strip photography. -
A woman using a Hollerith pantograph, a machine developed by Herman Hollerith for the punching of cards, providing data which could then be processed. Such tools were used in the 1890 United States Census, the first time the country's census was tabulated by machine. -
A wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axial bearing. The wheel is one of the main components of the wheel and axle which is one of the six simple machines.
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Image credit: Michael OttoA pastoral scene of a lone house, composed using Blender, an open source 3D computer graphics software. Blender can be used for a number of applications and is available for a wide variety of operating systems. -
An overhead power line is a structure used in electric power transmission and distribution to transmit electrical energy along large distances. It consists of one or more conductors suspended by towers or utility poles.
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A billet of enriched uranium, which is uranium where the percent composition of uranium-235 (U) has been increased through the process of isotope separation. Enriched uranium is a critical component for both civil nuclear power generation and military nuclear weapons. -
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General images -
The following are images from various technology-related articles on Wikipedia.
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Eric M. C. Tigerstedt (1887–1925) was known as a pioneer of sound-on-film technology. Tigerstedt in 1915. (from Invention) -
Johannes Gutenberg's printing press was voted the most important invention of the second millennium. (from Invention) -
Thomas Edison with his second phonograph, photographed by Levin Corbin Handy in Washington, April 1878 (from History of technology) -
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The wheel, invented sometime before the 4th millennium BC, is one of the most ubiquitous and important technologies. This detail of the "Standard of Ur", c. 2500 BCE., displays a Sumerian chariot. (from History of technology) -
The compartmented water wheel, here its overshot version (from History of technology) -
Ford assembly line, 1913. The magneto assembly line was the first. (from History of technology) -
Top 30 AI patent applicants in 2016 (from Emerging technologies) -
3D printer (from Emerging technologies) -
Pont du Gard in France, a Roman aqueduct (from History of technology) -
Clock from Salisbury Cathedral, ca. 1386 (from History of technology) -
Self-replicating 3D printer (from Emerging technologies) -
Alessandro Volta with the first electrical battery. Volta is recognized as an influential inventor. (from Invention) -
Agriculture preceded writing in the history of technology. (from History of technology) -
'BUILD YOUR OWN TELEVISION RECEIVER.' Science and Invention magazine cover, November 1928 (from Invention) -
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The preserved Rocket (from History of technology) -
A variety of stone tools (from History of technology) -
A rare 1884 photo showing the experimental recording of voice patterns by a photographic process at the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Many of their experimental designs panned out in failure. (from Invention) -
A late Bronze Age sword or dagger blade (from History of technology) -
Walls at Sacsayhuaman (from History of technology) -
Edison electric light bulbs 1879–80 (from History of technology) -
Newcomen steam engine for pumping mines (from History of technology) -
Design for a flying machine (c.1488) by da Vinci (from History of technology) -
Dome of Florence Cathedral (from History of technology) -
A water-powered mine hoist used for raising ore, ca. 1556 (from History of technology)
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that Pamela McCorduck, who chronicled the evolution of artificial intelligence, regretted not recognizing the technology's potential for misuse?
- ... that Thomas Hall made an electric train that received power from the rails on which it travelled instead of onboard batteries, a new technology at the time?
- ... that Guy Parmelin, now President of Switzerland, opened the study program of cyber security of the Lucerne School of Information Technology in 2018?
- ... that ice XVII (structure shown) potentially has a use in green technology as a medium for storing hydrogen?
- ... that Małgorzata Kalinowska-Iszkowska was awarded a Polish Gold Cross of Merit for her work in information technology?
- ... that Henry E. Sigerist felt "depressed" after reading A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries?
- ... that it was Caltech experimental physicist Rana X. Adhikari's idea to build a gravitational-wave observatory in India?
- ... that the Atari 410 Program Recorder was used to store programs on the Atari 8-bit family, but was also used for computer aided instruction?
Top 10 WikiProject Technology popular articles of the month
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YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second-most visited website in the world, after Google Search. As of January 2024, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total. (Full article...)
Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. He is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world; as of August 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$247 billion. (Full article...)
WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. (Full article...)
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s. (Full article...)
ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. Launched in 2022 based on the GPT-3.5 large language model (LLM), it was later updated to use the GPT-4 architecture. ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Some observers raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace or atrophy human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation. (Full article...)
Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡəl/ GOO-ghəl) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. (Full article...)
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon (/ˈæməzɒn/, AM-ə-zon; UK also /ˈæməzən/, AM-ə-zən), is an American multinational technology company, engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies, the other four being Alphabet (parent company of Google), Apple, Meta (parent company of Facebook), and Microsoft. (Full article...)
