How does a TV screen display different colors? By using different intensities of red, green, and blue. These colors can be displayed with liquid crystal or with gases. All screens, no matter how they are made, are divided up into pixels. The word pixel was made from a combination of “picture” and “element”. One pixel […]
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What is flash memory? It is a type of memory that can store data without power and can erase memory in blocks. It is a type of electronically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM). Computers store information on their memory chips in binary, which means everything is reduced to a 1 and a 0. When
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What is an algorithm? An algorithm is a set of instructions to solve a particular problem. The word algorithm came into English from French. It came into French from the Latin word “algorismus”, which was a slightly mistaken translation of the Arabic word “al-Khwarizmi”, which means “native of Khwarazm”. In about AD 825, the Arabic
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How does Ransomware work? By infecting the computer, encrypting all the files, and then trying to sell the victim the decryption key. The first ever ransomware was created in 1989, by an evolutionary biologist at Harvard called Dr. Joseph Popp. To this day, nobody knows why he made it. The Internet wasn’t as extensive then
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How does a 3D printer work? There are four different methods of 3D printing. Fused deposition modeling, stereolithography, digital light processing, and selective laser sintering. 3D printing is becoming more popular in the manufacturing process these days for many reasons, not least because it is additive manufacturing as opposed to subtractive manufacturing. When things are
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How is the Internet connected between countries? Countries are connected by over 500 underwater communications cables. Many people (myself included), think that international Internet connections are made by satellite, but 95% of them go by undersea cable. Satellites are too expensive and too slow. It takes a long time to transmit a signal to a
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How does a laser printer work? They use static electricity to imprint an image onto the paper. Inkjet printers and laser printers are different in that inkjet printers use ink and laser printers don’t. An inkjet printer has liquid ink attached to nozzles that are fixed into the print head. When you want to print
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How does computer encryption work? Most computer encryption works by using prime numbers. What is computer encryption? It is basically a form of code. There have been many different types of code throughout history and they have slowly grown more and more complex. A Caesar cipher is a good example. If you take the word
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What is a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS)? It is when someone tries to shut down a machine or a network by using lots of requests at the same time from lots of different sources. A DDoS is a Denial of Service attack that comes from multiple sources. So, let’s look at a Denial
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I learned this today. A touchscreen works because a tiny electric current is sent to your finger, which allows the device to calculate where your finger is. There are two different types of touchscreen: resistive and capacitive. The touchscreen in the phone you are probably reading this on is a capacitive touchscreen, so let’s look
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