Portal:Technology

 The Technology Portal 

Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge for achieving 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...)

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Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

  • Replica of the Baby at the Science and Industry Museum in Castlefield, Manchester

    The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.

    The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Described as "small and primitive" 50 years after its creation, it was the first working machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic digital computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a full scale operational machine, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. (Full article...)

  • Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Generating electricity from fusion power remains the focus of international research.

    Most nuclear power plants use thermal reactors with enriched uranium in a once-through fuel cycle. Fuel is removed when the percentage of neutron absorbing atoms becomes so large that a chain reaction can no longer be sustained, typically three years. It is then cooled for several years in on-site spent fuel pools before being transferred to long-term storage. The spent fuel, though low in volume, is high-level radioactive waste. While its radioactivity decreases exponentially it must be isolated from the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, though newer technologies (like fast reactors) have the potential to reduce this significantly. Because the spent fuel is still mostly fissionable material, some countries (e.g. France and Russia) reprocess their spent fuel by extracting fissile and fertile elements for fabrication in new fuel, although this process is more expensive than producing new fuel from mined uranium. All reactors breed some plutonium-239, which is found in the spent fuel, and because Pu-239 is the preferred material for nuclear weapons, reprocessing is seen as a weapon proliferation risk. (Full article...)
  • State Route 313 (SR-313) is a 22.506-mile-long (36.220 km) state highway in San Juan and Grand Counties in the U.S. State of Utah. The highway has been designated the Dead Horse Point Mesa Scenic Byway. The highway is an access road for both the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park. The highway is a toll road in Dead Horse Point State Park. Westbound traffic is charged a state park entrance fee at the park boundary.

    The route was assigned north of Moab in the 1975 in place of SR-278, a proposed but never constructed access to Dead Horse Point. The original alignment of the highway featured steep grades and blind corners. The highway was completely rebuilt in the 1980s after sustaining damage while crews rebuilt the access road to Canyonlands National Park. (Full article...)

  • Delhi Metro coming from Noida

    The Delhi Metro is a mass rapid transit system which serves Delhi and its adjoining satellite cities, such as Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Gurugram, Noida and Bahadurgarh, in the National Capital Region of India. The system consists of 10 colour-coded lines serving 256 stations, with a total length of 350.42 kilometres (217.74 mi). It is India's largest and busiest metro rail system and the second-oldest, after the Kolkata Metro. The metro has a mix of underground, at-grade, and elevated stations using broad-gauge and standard-gauge tracks. The metro makes over 4,300 trips daily.

    Construction began in 1998, and the first elevated section (Shahdara to Tis Hazari) on the Red Line opened on 25 December 2002. The first underground section (Vishwa Vidyalaya – Kashmere Gate) on the Yellow Line opened on 20 December 2004. The network was developed in phases. Phase I (three lines) was completed by 2006, and Phase II in 2011. Phase III was mostly complete in 2021, except for a small extension of the Airport Line which opened in 2023. Construction of Phase IV began on 30 December 2019. (Full article...)

  • A T1000 unit at Mortensrud.

    T1000 and T1300 were two rapid transit train classes used on Oslo Metro in Oslo, Norway. The 197 cars were built by Strømmens Verksted, Norsk Elektrisk & Brown Boveri and AEG between 1960 and 1981. They were the first metro trains used in Oslo, and had remained in active use until being replaced by OS MX3000 trains in 2007. Each car was equipped with a driver's cab at one or both ends and four motors, each with 98 kilowatts (131 horsepower). The cars were 17 metres (55 feet 9 inches) long, 3.2 metres (10 feet 6 inches) wide and 3.65 metres (12 feet 0 inches) tall. The trains used 750 V current, and were capable of 70 kilometres per hour (43 miles per hour). Signaling was provided through automatic train protection.

    In 1960, two less powerful T single-car units were built, designed to be prototypes used on the Oslo Tramway. After a one-year trial, they were put into scheduled traffic to the Kolsås Line, where they remained in regular service until 1983. The production series was somewhat different in design and performance. T1000 was both used to refer to the class as a whole, or the first 162 cars, that are only equipped with third-rail shoes. They have four slight variations, which have been given the designations T1–T4. The T1300 was a series of 33 new and sixteen rebuilt T4 trains equipped with pantographs which previously allowed them operate on the western part of the network, prior to it being upgraded to third-rail metro standards. The newer units were designated T5 and T6, while the rebuilt units were designated T7 and T8. (Full article...)


  • There are two kinds of oil shale in Estonia, both of which are sedimentary rocks laid down during the Ordovician geologic period. Graptolitic argillite is the larger oil shale resource, but, because its organic matter content is relatively low, it is not used industrially. The other is kukersite, which has been mined for more than a hundred years. Kukersite deposits in Estonia account for 1% of global oil shale deposits.

    Oil shale (Estonian: põlevkivi; literally 'burning rock') has been defined as a strategic energy resource in Estonia and the oil shale industry in Estonia is one of the most developed in the world. Historically, most of mined oil shale was used for electricity generation. Of all the oil shale fired power stations in the world, the two largest are in Estonia. Although its share decreased in the decade to 2022, direct and indirect use of oil shale still generates about half of Estonia's electricity. About half of mined oil shale is used to produce shale oil, a type of synthetic oil extracted from oil shale by pyrolysis, which is sufficient to keep Estonia as the second largest shale oil producer in the world after China. In addition, oil shale and its products are used in Estonia for district heating and as a feedstock material for the cement industry. (Full article...)
  • Minnesota State Highway 610 (MN 610) is an east–west freeway in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. The freeway connects Interstate 94 (I-94), County Road 81 (CR 81), and CR 130 in northern Hennepin County to U.S. Highway 10 (US 10) in southern Anoka County. MN 610 crosses the Mississippi River on the Richard P. Braun Bridge between suburban Brooklyn Park and Coon Rapids. The highway is 12.3 miles (19.8 km) long.

    The freeway was authorized in 1975, and most of the sections were completed by 2000 (7.2 mi or 11.6 km); the 2.6-mile (4.2 km) section westward to CR 81 in Maple Grove was completed and opened in 2011. The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) opened the last segment extending to I-94 on December 9, 2016. (Full article...)

Selected picture

  • Photo: Arthur Rothstein; Restoration: Lise Broer
    A portrait of George Washington Carver, American scientist, botanist, educator and inventor, from 1942. Much of Carver's fame is based on his research into and promotion of alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. In addition to his work on agricultural extension education for purposes of advocacy of sustainable agriculture and appreciation of plants and nature, Carver's important accomplishments also included improvement of racial relations, mentoring children, poetry, painting, and religion. One of his most important roles was in undermining, through the fame of his achievements and many talents, the widespread stereotype of the time that the black race was intellectually inferior to the white race.
  • Soyuz MS
    Diagram credit: AstroBidules
    The Soyuz MS is the latest revision of the Russian spacecraft series Soyuz. It is an evolution of the Soyuz TMA-M, with modernization mostly concentrated on its communications and navigation subsystems. The spacecraft is used by Roscosmos for human spaceflight. The Soyuz MS has minimal external changes with respect to the Soyuz TMA-M, mostly limited to antennas and sensors, as well as the thruster placement. The first launch, Soyuz MS-01, took place on 7 July 2016 aboard a Soyuz-FG launch vehicle towards the International Space Station. This exploded-view diagram illustrates and labels various components of the Soyuz MS spacecraft and the Soyuz-FG rocket.
  • Mary Jackson
    Photograph credit: Langley Research Center; restored by Adam Cuerden
    Mary 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.
  • Overhead power line
    Credit: Simon Koopmann
    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.
  • Mechanical advantage
    Image credit: Prolineserver/Tomia
    This diagram of four pulley systems illustrates how increasing the number of pulleys increases the mechanical advantage, making the load easier to lift. MA is the factor by which a mechanism multiplies the force put into it. In this diagram, 100 newtons is required to lift the weight off the ground. Each additional pulley increases the MA such that the four-pulley system only needs 25 newtons to accomplish the same task, but the rope must be pulled four times as far.
  • M198 howitzer
    Photo credit: L Cpl. Samantha L. Jones, USMC
    Nine Marines from Mike Battery, 4th Battalion, 14th Marines operate the 155mm M198 howitzer in November 2004. The battery was based at Camp Fallujah, Iraq and was supporting Operation Phantom Fury. All nine members of the M198 crew are present.
  • Wheel
    Credit: fir0002
    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.
  • Picture: Unknown; restoration: Mmxx
    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.
  • Steam turbine
    Photo credit: Christian Kuhna
    The rotor of a modern steam turbine , which converts steam (heat) energy into kinetic (mechanical) energy. The steam path is from the smallest blade, expanding through progressively larger blade elements. Steam turbines are used in power plants to extract mechanical work from pressurized steam and benefit from their high efficiency and high power-to-weight ratio compared to other technologies, leading to their widespread deployment from electricity generation to marine propulsion.
  • Telephone
    Credit: Berthold Werner
    A 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.
  • Image credit: WikipedianProlific
    An animated cut-away diagram of a typical fuel injector, which is used to spray controlled amounts of petrol (gasoline) into an internal combustion engine. A solenoid is activated when fuel is intended to be delivered to the engine, causing the plunger to become pulled toward the solenoid by magnetic force. This uncovers the valve opening, allowing fuel to flow into the atomiser and out the spray tip. The route of fuel is shown in orange; grey/blue indicates no fuel present.
  • SOCATA TBM
    Photograph credit: Michael Mainiero
    The SOCATA TBM (now Daher TBM) is a family of high-performance single-engine turboprop business and utility light aircraft manufactured by Daher. This SOCATA TBM 900 was photographed in flight during the 2015 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh airshow in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The aircraft features a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-64 engine, and a five-blade carbon-fiber propeller, which increases performance and decreases cabin noise. In a passenger configuration, the pressurized cabin is typically fitted with highly finished interiors, featuring luxury materials such as leather and wood veneers.
  • Photograph credit: Unknown; restored by Adam Cuerden
    George Washington Carver (1860s–1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor. Born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, he was raised by his master Moses Carver after being emancipated, having been separated from his parents as an infant during a kidnapping incident. After college, Carver became a professor at Tuskegee Institute, where he developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. Carver spent years developing and promoting products made from peanuts, although none became commercially successful. Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, he was also a leader in promoting environmentalism. Carver received numerous honors for his work, including the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. In an era of very high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community; he was widely recognized and praised in the white community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "black Leonardo".

    This picture of Carver was taken around 1910 and is in the collection of the Tuskegee University archives.
  • Photograph: NACA
    Kitty Joyner (1916–1993) was an American electrical engineer with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and then the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She was hired in 1939 as the organization's first woman engineer, shortly after she had become the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia's engineering program.
  • Mark IV tank
    Photograph: Peter Trimming
    The Mark IV tank was introduced by the British in May 1917 to fight in World War I. The "female" version, as pictured here, was armed with five machine guns. Production of the Mark IV ceased at the end of the War in 1918. A small number served briefly with other combatants afterwards.

    This Mark IV tank, on display in Ashford, Kent, was presented to the town after the end of World War I. The engine was removed to install an electricity substation inside it, though this substation was subsequently removed; the tank's interior is now empty.
  • N700 Series Shinkansen
    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.
  • Movable type
    Photo credit: Willi Heidelbach
    A composing stick and movable type, the system of printing and typography using pieces of metal type, made by casting from matrices struck by letterpunches. The text on the stick reads, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and feels as if he were in the seventh heaven of typography together with Hermann Zapf, the most famous artist of the" [sic].
  • Credit: Mike McGregor
    The OLPC XO-1 is an inexpensive subnotebook laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries.
  • Photograph: Raimond Spekking
    Bucket-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: Stig Nygaard
    An escalator is a moving staircase for carrying people between floors of a building. The device consists of a motor-driven chain of individual, linked steps that move up or down on tracks, allowing the step treads to remain horizontal.

Main topics

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  • Logo used since 2017

    YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, it 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. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. , 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...)
  • Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the 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. , Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the 3rd 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 chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on large language models, it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive user prompts and replies are considered at each conversation stage as context. (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...)

  • Musk in 2022

    Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; , Forbes estimates his net worth to be $193 billion. (Full article...)

  • Logo used since July 2023

    X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share text messages, images, and videos as "tweets". X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. (Full article...)

  • The Google logo used since 2015

    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...)
  • Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software which enable machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs. (Full article...)

  • Logo used since June 13, 2014

    Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages. (Full article...)

  • Bankman-Fried in 2021

    Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried (born March 5, 1992), commonly known as SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for crypto. At the peak of his net worth, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400. (Full article...)

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News

See also: 2024 in science and technology
February 27, 2024 –
Japanese technology company Sony announces it will cut 900 jobs across its global workforce and has also proposed the closure of London Studio as part of the restructuring. (Sony Interactive Entertainment press release)
February 6, 2024 –
The Dutch owner of Yandex, a Russian multinational technology company and search engine, announces the sale of the company to a "fully Russian-owned entity" for 475 billion rubles (US$5.2 billion). (BBC News)
January 29, 2024 –
American neurotechnology company Neuralink announces it has implanted its brain–computer interface in a human brain for the first time, and that the person is "recovering well" with "initial results showing promising neuron spike detection". (The Guardian)

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