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The Forgotten Genius of Sister Mary Kenneth Keller: The First Woman to Earn a PhD in Computer Science
Evelyn Marie Keller, she entered the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1932 and took her vows a few years later. Now, most people didn’t associate mid-century convents with bleeding-edge mathematics, but Sister Mary Kenneth was built differently. She breezed through a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a Master’s in Mathematics and… Read more
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Before Wi-Fi, There Was ALOHAnet: How Hawaii Invented the Wireless Network Using Volcanoes and Radio Waves
When you think about the birthplace of modern computer networking, you probably picture a sterile basement laboratory at MIT, a rainy corporate campus in Seattle, or a garage in Silicon Valley full of guys in beige trousers arguing about circuit boards. You probably do not picture a Stanford professor who moved to Hawaii mostly because… Read more
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Synthetic Data: What Happens When AI Runs Out of Human Writing and Starts Eating Its Own Homework?
For the past few years, artificial intelligence companies have been acting like college students pulling an all-nighter before a final exam. They scraped the entire internet (every Wikipedia article, every Reddit thread, every blog post, every digitized book, and every angry product review ever written by a person) to train their large language models. They… Read more
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Meet Jerry Lawson: The Black Engineer Who Invented the Video Game Cartridge So We Could Change Games
If you grew up with a console (whether it was the Atari, the Sega Genesis, the Nintendo 64, or swapping discs on a PlayStation) you probably have fond memories of a very specific ritual: blowing dust out of a plastic slot, slamming a cartridge home, and hearing that glorious chime as the game fired up.… Read more
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Before Auto-Tune Saved Pop Singers, It Was Invented by a Geophysicist Looking for Underground Oil
If you turn on the radio, listen to a modern pop song, or spend five minutes on TikTok, you are hearing Auto-Tune. It is the invisible safety net of the music industry… the digital magic wand that can take a singer who sounds like a cat stuck in a fence and make them sound like… Read more
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How a Kenyan Farmer’s Invention to Scare Off Lions With LED Lights Inspired Engineers Around the World
When I was eleven years old, my biggest technological achievement was figuring out how to blow into a video game cartridge just right so it wouldn’t freeze on the loading screen. When Richard Turere was eleven years old, he was put in charge of protecting his family’s cattle on the edge of Nairobi National Park… Read more