Tech
5 Tech facts you probably didn’t know!
- Your keyboard is a breeding ground for germs. Why? Because we spend most of our day working (sometimes snacking at our desk) and our – unwashed – hands can transfer germs when we type. A study conducted by UK scientists found out that four out of 33 keyboards tested were potential health hazards, and one had levels of germs five times higher than that found on a toilet seat. Another study that analyzed swabs obtained from keyboards, found microbes including, mold, yeast, and bacteria. Reports have shown that there can be as many as 3000 organisms per square inch of a person’s keyboard. Time to give your hands and that keyboard a good clean!
- Did you know that the space bar is the most commonly hit button on a keyboard? The horizontal key is punched each time you write a word, which perhaps explains why it’s significantly wider than other characters on a board. But in Japan, the space bar is much shorter. Japanese keyboards require switching between latin/roman letters (called rōmaji) and japanese characters (called hiragana and kana), which means additional keys are required for typing. Japanese keyboards are therefore designed a little differently.
- According to Verisign, the first quarter of 2020 closed with 366.8 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains. This business has come a long way since the first commercial internet domain name (symbolics.com) was registered in 1985. Domain names were free up until 1995, when a company called Network Solutions was granted the rights to charge for registrations. The most expensive domain name ever purchased was VacationRentals.com which was brought for a staggering $35 million.
- When most of us think of currency, we envisage paper money, however the reality is quite different. According the Economic Times, 92% of the world’s currency is digital. Most of the money out there is not around for us to see. In fact, a large portion of the money we earn, spend and transfer exists only on a computer’s hard drives. Surprisingly, this means that only 8% of the currency globally is physical money. So, the next time you think about money, try to think less about counting bills with your fingertips and more about numbers on a screen.
- Wikipedia is a highly-popular open collaboration project that provides us with information on any topic that we choose to search for online. Anyone who has internet can access the encyclopedia and is also able to sign up and edit pages. According to Wikipedia:Statistics, Wikipedia develops at a rate of over 1.9 editsper second by editors from all over the world. Currently, the English Wikipedia includes 6,111,711 articles and it averages 598 new articles per day. There is also a very robust bot system in place to counter malicious editing.