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Toy Story 2 was nearly erased from existence when someone at Pixar accidentally ran a delete command on the film’s master files, wiping out roughly 90 percent of the project — and the only reason the production survived was that Galyn Susman, a technical director on maternity leave, had a working copy on a computer at her house.

It is one of the best disaster stories in modern filmmaking, and the remarkable thing is how much of it holds up. In 1998, deep in production on Toy Story 2, someone at Pixar ran a delete command on the film’s master files and watched roughly 90 per cent of the project vanish from the

Close-up of tree roots in a sunlit forest, showcasing natural textures and greenery.

Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

Elderly man with beard and bandana, reacting to smartphone while seated indoors.

A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

Stunning capture of the Orion Nebula (M42) with sparkling stars and vibrant emission clouds.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

A lively view of Hollywood Boulevard with iconic landmarks and busy street life under a clear sky.

The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark

Toy Story 2 was nearly erased from existence when someone at Pixar accidentally ran a delete command on the film’s master files, wiping out roughly 90 percent of the project — and the only reason the production survived was that Galyn Susman, a technical director on maternity leave, had a working copy on a computer at her house.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

Jiroemon Kimura was born in 1897 during Queen Victoria’s reign and died in 2013 at age 116, having personally lived through the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and the smartphone he used to look at photographs in his final years.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

Voyager 1 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio command sent from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it. Every instruction is really aimed at where the spacecraft will be by tomorrow.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

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The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Stunning Aurora Borealis illuminating the night sky in Karasjok, Norway.

In the small hours of 2 September 1859, a telegraph operator in Portland, Maine disconnected his batteries because they were throwing sparks, and then discovered he could still send a clean message to Boston using nothing but the current the aurora was pushing through the wire above his head.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Thousands of yellow rubber ducks float in a vibrant pattern on Chicago's river waters.

In 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong lost 28,800 plastic bath toys overboard in the North Pacific, and oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer spent the next two decades tracking yellow ducks and blue turtles as they washed up in Alaska, Maine, and eventually the coast of Scotland, quietly rewriting the textbook map of ocean currents.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Black and white of operation manual with parts of modern photo camera and directions for users on table in room

In 1942, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil received US Patent 2,292,387 for a frequency-hopping radio system synchronised by a perforated paper roll borrowed from a player piano, a technique the Navy filed away as unworkable and which now underpins every Wi-Fi router, Bluetooth earbud, and GPS receiver on Earth.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

In 1859 a storm on the Sun struck the Earth so hard that telegraph wires threw sparks and operators were shocked at their desks, and scientists warn the same event today would knock out power grids across entire continents.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

Every time you book a flight or check a hotel room, your request is routed through a green-screen mainframe system that traces back to the 1960s — and the entire multi-billion-dollar travel industry still relies on this ancient digital foundation because replacing it would be enormously expensive, dangerous, and slow

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

In 1997, a team of engineers hid an entire flight simulator inside the code of Microsoft Excel as an unlisted “Easter egg” — and to this day, it remains one of the most sophisticated pieces of hidden software ever secretly shipped to millions of corporate computers

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

A 65-year-old programming language called COBOL still quietly processes over $3 trillion in banking transactions every single day — and because the original engineers are rapidly retiring, banks are scrambling to pay younger developers fortunes just to keep the ancient infrastructure from breaking

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

A person using a smartphone in dim, moody lighting with a dark background.

In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and the team launched it with no advertising budget, no headphone jack standard, and an internal forecast of 5,000 units a month that the device beat in its first fortnight.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 31, 2026

A four-month-old Chinese startup just launched a $118 AI collar that claims to translate dog and cat vocalizations into human sentences with 95% accuracy — an extraordinary consumer device that has secured $1 million in funding despite zero independent scientific proof that it actually works

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

The computer that landed Apollo 11 stored its code in “rope memory” that was physically woven by hand by a workforce of women in a Massachusetts factory, a wire through a magnetic ring meaning one and around it meaning zero, so the program that carried humans to the Moon was literally knitted into being.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

The U.S. Army has officially pushed “jailbroken” software updates to active weapon systems in the Middle East — a frantic, 30-day tactical sprint designed to strip away manufacturer code restrictions so legacy anti-drone cameras and missile radars can finally talk to each other

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

Five years ago, a group of researchers walked out of OpenAI over safety concerns to build a quiet rival named Claude — and after a historic $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, those ex-employees have officially leapfrogged their former bosses to create the most valuable AI startup on Earth

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

Anthropic’s unreleased Claude Mythos AI has proven so terrifyingly good at hacking legacy software that the firm locked it behind a secret vetting program — and global central banks are now holding emergency briefings over fears the model could easily “crack open” the invisible, decades-old code holding the world’s banking systems together

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team – May 30, 2026

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Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark

Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

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The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark

In the small hours of 2 September 1859, a telegraph operator in Portland, Maine disconnected his batteries because they were throwing sparks, and then discovered he could still send a clean message to Boston using nothing but the current the aurora was pushing through the wire above his head.

In 1859 a storm on the Sun struck the Earth so hard that telegraph wires threw sparks and operators were shocked at their desks, and scientists warn the same event today would knock out power grids across entire continents.

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

In 1997, a team of engineers hid an entire flight simulator inside the code of Microsoft Excel as an unlisted “Easter egg” — and to this day, it remains one of the most sophisticated pieces of hidden software ever secretly shipped to millions of corporate computers

A 65-year-old programming language called COBOL still quietly processes over $3 trillion in banking transactions every single day — and because the original engineers are rapidly retiring, banks are scrambling to pay younger developers fortunes just to keep the ancient infrastructure from breaking

A four-month-old Chinese startup just launched a $118 AI collar that claims to translate dog and cat vocalizations into human sentences with 95% accuracy — an extraordinary consumer device that has secured $1 million in funding despite zero independent scientific proof that it actually works

NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

The U.S. Army has officially pushed “jailbroken” software updates to active weapon systems in the Middle East — a frantic, 30-day tactical sprint designed to strip away manufacturer code restrictions so legacy anti-drone cameras and missile radars can finally talk to each other

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