Invented

CHICAGO—In a town famous for its deep-dish pizza, Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. has made its own way since the early 1970s, serving an upside-down concoction created by its founder called the pizza pot pie. Today, patrons still line up on the sidewalk of the mainstay of Lincoln Park, a busy North Side neighborhood near Lake Michigan. And the original menu and cozy décor are largely intact—even though the owner died 7½ years ago, and his children, who worked there from a young age, are locked in a…

In modern times, clocks underpin everything people do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible structure that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the foundation of the high-speed computers that conduct financial trading and even the GPS system that pinpoints locations on Earth’s surface with unprecedented accuracy. But humans have likely lived by some version of the clock for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago.…

Scientists at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genoa have successfully created a completely edible, rechargeable battery. The researchers’ paper – “An Edible Chargeable Battery” – was recently published in the Advanced Materials journal, in which they described their proof-of-concept battery cell. If you haven’t yet heard of them, edible electronics have been around for the last couple of years, but they’re still in the early stages. They’re used for…

When Jeremy Kamil started to sequence samples of the rapidly spreading pandemic coronavirus in the spring of 2020, it was clear where he should deposit the genetic data: in GISAID, a long-running database for influenza genomes that had established itself as the go-to repository for SARS-CoV-2 as well. Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says he quickly struck up a friendly…

If ChatGPT hasn’t freaked you out yet, what if I told you the OpenAI chatbot invented its own language? One of the limits of ChatGPT is its inability to recall previous conversations, but as some intrepid users have discovered, you can get around this limitation by asking the chatbot to compress the current conversation into a string of seemingly random letters, numbers, and symbols that will allow it to pick up right where it left off in a new chat. Twitter keeps highlighting the latest AI projects On…

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support…

The problem with mobile phones is that people look at them too much. At least, that's according to the man who invented them 50 years ago.Martin Cooper, an American engineer dubbed the "Father of the cell phone," says the neat little device we all have in our pockets has almost boundless potential and could one day even help conquer disease.But right now, we can be a little obsessed."I am devastated when I see somebody crossing the street and looking at their cell phone. They are out of their minds," the 94-year-old told…

The war between Apple and Android fans can never be resolved. But every time an influential person reveals what phone they use, the scales appear to tilt towards that side. A while back when it was revealed that actor Millie Bobby Brown, famous for her role as Eleven in Stranger Things, was an Android user, the internet went crazy. And now, to give Apple fans a big boost, the father of mobile phones himself has revealed that he uses both an iPhone as well as the Apple Watch.Martin Cooper is widely regarded as the father…

Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have developed a new potato-based concrete called StarCrete, which they say could be used to build structures on Mars. The new material utilizes a very simple recipe, which the scientists say would be easy to replicate on the surface of the Red Planet. It’s a huge change from previous proposals, which have advised using blood and urine to build on Mars.  But how exactly does a potato-based concrete like StarCrete come to life? According to a paper on the new…

A user asked ChatGPT to invent a new game loosely based on Soduko, and the AI did so, resulting in a surprisingly fun game that anyone can play online. “Sum Delete”, a numbers-based logic game was invented earlier this week, after Substack user Puzzled Penguin asked the artificial intelligence-based chatbot for recommendations for puzzle games similar to Soduko.In response, ChatGPT listed five other puzzle games that can test your logic and problem-solving skills, with many of them using numbers.However, the user was…