Contactless credit cards descend from a batteryless Cold War listening device

Why there are microchips in credit cards

Credit cards have evolved significantly since their invention in 1950, but security lagged in the US for years. Despite handling only a quarter of global transactions, the US once accounted for half of all credit card fraud. The 2013 Target data breach helped push the adoption of chip cards, reducing fraud but shifting risks to online scams.

Listen to a podcast episode from 1440's editor in chief that explains how a credit card transaction works behind the scenes.

When you buy even something as small as a $5 latte, a global relay between banks and networks like Visa and Mastercard is triggered. It all started with a 1958 campaign from Bank of America that jump-started the credit card revolution.

Hacking the body for a future that didn't happen

Journalist Adi Robertson experimented with one of the most accessible biohacks: magnets. Having a tiny magnet in their right ring finger meant they could sense magnetic fields, attract small metal objects, and more. But magnets weaken over time, eroding this new sense. Such implants do more than offer a new way of interacting with the world, they also pose new complications, such as the inability to get an MRI.

Wireless charging uses a magnetic field to move charged particles in a battery

Based on the concept of electromagnetic induction, when a compatible device is placed on a charging pad with correct alignment, the alternating current flowing through the pad creates a changing magnetic field. This magnetic field induces a current in the device, recharging the battery without a connecting wire.

Brain wave-reading earbuds are being used by companies to study workplace performance

Limited safeguards prevent governments from accessing and companies from sharing brain data. Foreign governments may also be developing technology to spy on and potentially disrupt human thoughts.

A US Department of Defense research lab developed the technology for the dark web

Although encryption existed to mask the content of communications across the internet before the 1990s, those managing overseas network infrastructure could determine a spy's affiliation based on where they saw data sent to and received from. To keep this information secret, the US Naval Research Laboratory developed onion routing, which enabled anonymized web browsing. The release of the technology to the public obscured sensitive communications further by growing the volume of anonymous data.

Superconducting qubits have become foundational to today’s quantum computing efforts

Relying on electrons experiencing no friction across metal, these qubits require extremely low temperatures and behave like artificial atoms. The first superconducting qubit, invented in 1999, was large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

Your iPhone started with a Cold War secret

Silicon Valley wasn't supposed to happen. A stretch of California orchard land somehow became the place that built the modern world: chips, PCs, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. But the real story isn't the garage myth. It's a series of contradictions hiding in plain sight.

A look at historical ciphers, from the Spartan 'scytale' to the Navajo Code Talkers

From the Greek word for "hidden writing," cryptography in Ancient Greece took the form of batons around which a long strip of leather or parchment was wrapped, after which messages were written. Recipients needed a scytale of the correct width to encircle received ribbons and reveal the message. Members of the Navajo Nation created a code that remained unbroken throughout its use in World War II.

In 1898, Nikola Tesla wowed a crowd by controlling a boat with no visible connection

Some onlookers thought it was a trick, such a a monkey being inside the boat, rather than mind control or some other metaphysical phenomenon. In reality, Tesla was pioneering radio waves, proving wireless control was possible.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

'Cold War Conversations' podcast shares voices from the conflict's frontlines

This award-winning podcast features gripping interviews with the people who lived through the Cold War—spies, soldiers, defectors, and civilians. Covering everything from the Berlin Wall to nuclear standoffs, it offers unfiltered, emotional accounts of Cold War life and conflict.

Radio waves are used in broadcasting, weather radar, telecommunications, and GPS

Its ability to bend around obstacles and reflect off the ionosphere—an electrified layer of Earth's upper atmosphere—allows this type of light to travel long distances without damaging living things due to its low energy. MRI scanners, WiFi, and Bluetooth technologies are also applications of this form of light.

Electromagnetic repulsion prevents objects from making contact with one another

The feeling of touching something is a sensation caused by the electromagnetic force between the electrons on the surface of objects. Since this force grows to infinity with proximity, no two surfaces can ever achieve matter-to-matter contact.

Nuclear batteries generate electrical currents using radioactive materials

Rather than using electrochemical reactions to produce the electrons that flow through a circuit, isotopes like nickel-63 undergo beta decay—emitting electrons—which a semiconducting material can absorb to establish a charge imbalance that generates current. Such batteries could provide low-power energy for decades.

How the people behind spam text messages make money

If you've ever gotten a text message from a scammer—sometimes even just someone from an unknown number saying hello and calling you by the wrong name—you've probably wondered what they're trying to get out of you. This podcast answers that question. Hint: The answer has to do with cryptocurrency.

Tiny solar-powered tags can now track monarch butterflies across North America

Monarch tracking began in 1935, utilizing low-tech methods to gain a better understanding of migration patterns as monarchs travel to central Mexico during the winter. Each tag weighs 60 milligrams and can be tracked via an app to provide insights into butterfly life cycles.

Listen to the sounds of pulsars, which emit radio pulses up to hundreds of times a second

Just as figure skaters spin faster by tucking in their arms, these celestial objects acquire high rates of spin from the collapse of the cores of massive stars. The star's rotation spins its magnetic field, generating beams of radio waves from its magnetic poles. If either of these poles faces a detector, the signals can be picked up and converted to audio signals.

Palm-scanning is the future of digital payments

Owned by Tencent, WeBank was China's first digital bank and services 340 million customers. Leveraging its parent company's technology portfolio, WeBank is determined to make palm-scanning the biometric equivalent of the credit card.

During flights, cell phones can act like signal jammers as they search for service

When farther from cell towers, these devices expend more energy to emit more powerful signals, which can overwhelm any ground-based tower or radio telescope they fly past. Rather than protecting the flight, airplane mode conserves a cell phone's battery.

The anechoic chamber at Bell Labs absorbs 99.999% of created sound

The space nearly eliminates sound wave reflection, allowing visitors to become aware of noises created by their own bodies, including their heartbeat and skeletal conduction. Experiments inside have contributed to the development of digital audio and phone touch tones.

Who were the Cambridge Five

Recruited in the 1930s, the Cambridge Five infiltrated British intelligence and leaked secrets to the Soviets for decades, shaping WWII and the Cold War.

Designs for the Hubble Space Telescope were based on Cold War spy satellites

By incorporating elements of the KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellites, NASA could incorporate existing classified manufacturing expertise and infrastructure from the intelligence community to expedite the research project.

Mechanical watches measure the passage of time via the vibration of a quartz crystal

When electricity from a battery passes through the crystal inside a watch, the crystal vibrates, creating an electrical signal with a precise frequency of one vibration per second. This signal moves the hand of the watch so that it ticks once per second, allowing it to track the passage of time.

Future self-driving cars may communicate across a closed wireless infrastructure

Current autonomous vehicles collect and analyze their own data through their own hardware and proprietary software. Connecting data from all such cars on a single network will require overcoming challenges related to standardization and security.

The selfie camera exists thanks to Einstein's discovery of the photoelectric effect

Smartphone cameras utilize sensors such as CMOS or CCD to capture light by converting it into electrical signals through the photoelectric effect. Einstein explained this effect by demonstrating that light behaves as both particles and waves simultaneously, a discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize in physics.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

US consumers collectively owe more than $1T to credit card companies—almost as much as they owe in auto loans.

Radioactive elements can introduce software errors because the ionizing radiation they produce can detach electrons from atoms, and computer code relies on the distribution of electrons.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Pure water does not conduct electricity because this flow of energy requires the movement of charged particles, and water is a neutral molecule.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

Experimental hantavirus vaccines and therapies, still under development, have long been funded by the US military.

Track the location of the Voyager probes, currently between 13 and 15 billion miles away from Earth.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.