Open Culture » Technology

Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmin...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/aldous-huxley-explains-how-man-became-the-victim-of-his-own-technology-1961.html

In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now considered the first modern automobile. According to the Mercedes Benz website, the car featured a “compact high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke engine i...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/watch-an-enthusiast-drive-the-first-car-ever-made-the-1885-mercedes-benz.html

Even if you can name only one ancient Greek, you can name Plato. You can also probably say at least a little about him, if only some of the things humanity has known since antiquity. Until recent...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/high-tech-analysis-of-ancient-scroll-reveals-platos-burial-site-and-final-hours.html

One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is ...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/what-would-happen-if-a-nuclear-bomb-hit-a-major-city-today-a-visualization-of-the-destruction.html

You have received those odd text messages from a stranger. (“Hi, This is Anita. Have you received the Panamera parts yet?”) You know the messages are spam, but you don’t quite understand th...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-messages-weve-all-been-getting-the-search-engine-podcast-demystifies-the-global-scam.html

When did you last send someone a photo? That question may sound odd, owing to the sheer commonness of the act in question; in the twenty-twenties, we take photographs and share them worldwide wit...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/how-photos-were-transmitted-by-wire-in-1937-the-innovative-technology-of-a-century-ago.html

Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around ...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/03/an-introduction-to-the-astrolabe-the-medieval-precursor-to-the-smartphone.html

Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons Those of us who were playing video games in the nineteen-nineties may remember a fun little platformer, not technically unimpressive for its time, cal...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/the-armored-knight-robot-designed-by-leonardo-da-vinci-circa-1495.html

A little over four years ago, we featured here on Open Culture a set of realistic images of people who don’t actually exist. They were, as we would now assume, wholly generated by an artificial...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/a-preview-of-sora-the-new-openai-tool-that-creates-remarkable-ai-generated-videos.html

?si=aoRK422gthc62UZE If you attend the “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, you can spend time with “Hello Vincent,” a generative Artificial Intelli...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/hello-vincent.html

Four decades ago, our civilization seemed to stand on the brink of a great transformation. The Cold War had stoked around 35 years of every-intensifying developments, including but not limited to...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/isaac-asimov-predicts-the-future-in-1982.html

In 1966, the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which diagnosed how thoroughly the culture of psychotherapy had come to influence ways of life and thoug...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/before-chatgpt-there-was-eliza-watch-the-1960s-chatbot-in-action.html

According to the laws of physics — at least in simplified form — an object in motion will stay in motion, at least if no other forces act on it. That’s all well and good in the realm of the...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/why-perpetual-motion-machines-never-work-despite-centuries-of-experiments.html

The story behind this painting is so sad! 😢Now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish! ❤️ https://t.co/RuASoTfFdk pic.twitter.com/uAwM6SBUGW — Donnel (@DonnelVillager) Decemb...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/ai-completes-keith-harings-unfinished-painting-and-controversy-erupts.html

What history nerd doesn’t thrill to Thomas Edison speaking to us from beyond the grave in a 50th anniversary repeat of his groundbreaking 1877 spoken word recording of (those hoping for loftier...

https://www.openculture.com/2023/12/the-oldest-voices-that-we-can-still-hear-hear-audio-recordings-of-ghostly-voices-from-the-19th-century.html