Wireless’ Unending Evolution Wireless networks are hodgepodge of various and overlapping technologies. No matter how convoluted the acronyms, what it always boils down to is this — wireless networks are radio systems. You can read about the basics of cell phone technology in How Cell Phones Work and How Smartphones Work. No matter which wireless […]
Seeing in Three Dimensions Why can you look at an object in the real world and see it as a three-dimensional object, but if you see that same object on a television screen it looks flat? What’s going on, and how does 3-D technology get around the problem? It all has to do with the
How Instant Film Develops The component that gets the developing process going is the reagent (as in re-agent), a mix of opacifiers, alkali, white pigment and other elements. The reagent sits in a layer just above the light-sensitive layers and just below the image layer. Before you take the picture, the reagent material is all
Inside the iPod Shuffle Although an iPod with 240 or 500 songs might not sound so impressive from the start, you have to consider the size of the iPod Shuffle — it’s about as big as a quarter. The iPod Shuffle stores music using a USB flash drive, the same kind of technology you find
Analog, Digital and HDTV For years, watching TV has involved analog signals and cathode ray tube (CRT) sets. The signal is made of continually varying radio waves that the TV translates into a picture and sound. An analog signal can reach a person’s TV over the air, through a cable or via satellite. Digital signals,
The Layers of a Smartphone The Hardware Today’s smartphones run on processors with clock speeds ranging from 100 – 624 MHz (with a 1 GHz processor looming on the horizon), which would be mind-numbingly slow if they were used to run today’s desktop computers. Many smartphones use power-efficient ARM processors, which are also found in
Before Quartz The wind-up watch is an amazing piece of technology itself! It is part of a continuous research-and-development effort that started at the end of the 14th Century. Over the years, different innovations made wind-up watches smaller, thinner, more reliable, more accurate and even self-winding! The components that you find in today’s wind-up watches
The Tape There are two parts to any audio magnetic recording system: the recorder itself (which also acts as the playback device) and the tape it uses as the storage medium. The tape itself is actually very simple. It consists of a thin plastic base material, and bonded to this base is a coating of
What is plasma? The central element in a fluorescent light is a plasma, a gas made up of free-flowing ions (electrically charged atoms) and electrons (negatively charged particles). Under normal conditions, a gas is mainly made up of uncharged particles. That is, the individual gas atoms include equal numbers of protons (positively charged particles in
Speech to Data To convert speech to on-screen text or a computer command, a computer has to go through several complex steps. When you speak, you create vibrations in the air. The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) translates this analog wave into digital data that the computer can understand. To do this, it samples, or digitizes, the
