In 1985, a 61-year-old woman at a clinic in Marietta, Georgia, lay down for routine radiation after a lumpectomy and felt a searing blast of heat tear through her chest. The technician checked the screen and told her a burn was impossible. She had in fact absorbed between 15,000 and 20,000 rads instead of the prescribed 200. Her case was the first in the worst series of radiation accidents in the history of medical accelerators, all traced to one machine: the Therac-25, built by Atomic Energy of

Seymour Cray designed the fastest computers on Earth and unwound by digging a tunnel beneath his house, joking that elves visited him there with engineering answers. Born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, he built a device from an erector set at age ten that turned punched paper tape into Morse code. After working on Japanese naval codes as a radio operator in World War II, he joined Engineering Research Associates in 1950 and co-founded Control Data Corporation with William Norris in 1957.This

Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb. It is about 200 times stronger than structural steel, absorbs only 2.3 percent of visible light, and conducts heat ten times better than copper. For decades physicists believed such a two-dimensional crystal could not survive in the real world. Then, in 2004 at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated it by peeling graphite with sticky tape, work that earned the 2010 Nobel Prize in

On May 17, 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley released a screensaver that let ordinary computers sift radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The data came from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which had no connection fast enough to send it, so recordings were mailed to California on hard drives and chopped into 350 kilobyte work units of about 107 seconds each. More than 5.2 million participants in 233 countries eventually logged over two million years

In 1989, MIT engineer Joe Jones built a robotic vacuum out of Lego bricks and nicknamed it Dust Puppy. Corporate America wanted nothing to do with it. Denning Mobile Robot Company said no, Bissell passed, and the idea stalled for a decade until S.C. Johnson funded development through a young company called iRobot in 1999, then pulled out just before manufacturing. iRobot pressed on alone, renamed the machine Roomba, and launched it in September 2002 with three buttons for room size.This episode

In the late 1940s, a Grinnell College student stole a 25-pound pig for a campus luau. The farm belonged to the mayor, and Robert Noyce faced expulsion, a felony charge, and at least a year in state prison. His physics professor, Grant Gale, paid for the pig and negotiated a one-semester suspension. When Noyce returned, Gale showed him two of the first transistors from Bell Labs. This episode follows the minister's son from Burlington, Iowa, born in 1927, from that moment to MIT and on to

In 1987, a 21-year-old Rick Astley released a debut single that hit number one in the US, the UK, and Australia, its booming baritone at odds with the boyish singer shuffling in a trench coat. The video was shot in a week, and he wore his own clothes. By 1994, worn down by the pop machine, he retired at 28 to raise his family. This episode tells what happened next: 14 quiet years, then a bait-and-switch prank that made him the most famous person online without his doing a thing.The prank grew out of

On a train in the American West, engineer Herman Hollerith watched a conductor punch holes in a ticket to record a passenger's hair color, height, and nose, a trick used to stop ticket fraud. Hollerith saw something bigger: if holes could describe a person, a standardized card could encode any statistical fact. This episode follows that idea to the 1890 United States Census, which faced a crisis after the 1880 count took nearly eight years to tabulate by hand.His electromechanical system used

You read a post so outrageous you cannot tell whether its author is a sincere fanatic or a deadpan comedian. That confusion has a name. In 2005, during a heated argument about creationism on a Christian forum, a user called Nathan Poe observed that without a blatant display of humor, no parody of a creationist could avoid being taken by someone as the real thing. This episode traces Poe's Law from that single post to a rule that applies to every form of extremism online.The problem is older than the

On July 15, 2020, the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple all promised to double any Bitcoin sent their way. The mastermind was a 17-year-old who broke no encryption. He and his accomplices phoned Twitter employees working from home, posed as the IT help desk, and sent them to a fake VPN site, netting about $117,000. This episode uses that breach to explain phishing as a hack of human psychology, delivered by email, phone calls, text messages, and now QR codes.The

The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by Al Gross, and the first practical service launched in 1950 for doctors in the New York City area. The device weighed 200 grams, cost $12 a month, and reached 40 kilometers from a single tower. It could only buzz, and physicians hated it, because it invented the condition of being permanently on call. This episode follows the pager from that start through Motorola's transistorized model, the Bellboy shown at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, and

In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made of a synthesized voice repeating the sound of a meow and titled the upload Nyan Cat. Torres had called

In November 1992 there were exactly 26 websites in the world. By August 1995 there were more than 10,000. The difference was NCSA Mosaic, a browser begun in December 1992 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a lab funded through the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, but it was the first to place images inline with text on the same page, and by September 1993 it ran on Windows and the Macintosh.This

On June 26, 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That beep ended a 20-year struggle. It began in 1948 at the Drexel Institute of Technology, where graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food chain president begging for automated checkout. Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which was costly and faded. Then Woodland, sitting on a Florida beach, drew Morse code in the sand and pulled the dots and dashes

In 2014, Mac Miller made fans build a virtual sandwich before they could download Faces. He could get away with it because Faces was a mixtape, not an album. This episode traces how that label came to carry so much freedom. It begins in the Bronx in the 1970s, where DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa ran cables from their mixers into cassette decks and sold copies from car trunks and barber shops, and with Les Kippel, who organized Grateful Dead fans into a mail-order tape trading

On October 21, 2016, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and Airbnb went dark for millions of people. The weapon was an army of baby monitors, cheap webcams, and home routers infected by malware called Mirai. Its creators were three young men: Paras Jha, known online as Anna-senpai, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman. Jha ran ProTraf Solutions, a company that sold protection against the very kind of attack he was launching, and their first targets were rival Minecraft servers.This episode explains how

In 1985, Microsoft asked Encyclopaedia Britannica to partner on a CD-ROM edition. Britannica said no. Its business rested on door-to-door salesmen persuading parents to spend $1,000 to $1,500 on leather-bound prestige, and a cheap plastic disc looked like a toy that would eat its own profits. So Microsoft licensed the text of Funk and Wagnalls, the encyclopedia sold volume by volume at the grocery store, and built a multimedia shell around it under the code name Gandalf.Encarta launched in 1993 at

Microsoft Bob arrived in early 1995 as the answer to a real problem: home computers were moving into living rooms, and nested gray folders scared beginners. Code-named Utopia, designed by researcher Karen Fries and marketed by Melinda Gates, it drew on the Stanford theory of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves that people treat computers like real people in real places. So Bob replaced the desktop with a cartoon house. Click the wall clock for a calendar, the pen and paper for a word processor, and let

In May 2017, a 22-year-old on a week off sat in his childhood bedroom in Ilfracombe, Devon, and stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack, which had hit more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries and forced UK hospitals to turn away patients. Marcus Hutchins noticed the worm tried to contact a long, gibberish, unregistered domain. He registered it for about $10 to track infections, and the spread stopped. The domain was an anti-analysis check that he had turned into a global kill switch.A few months

In February 2000, Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, eBay, and Dell were knocked off the internet within days of each other. Authorities feared sophisticated cyber terrorism. The culprit was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old from the Montreal area who went by Mafiaboy. This episode starts with his childhood: his parents separated when he was five, and at six his father gave him a computer to fill the weekends at the condo. A machine that obeyed every command offered a kind of control his home life did not.On February