"Everyday" technology that blows your mind.

[Northy]

Astronaut pens. Damn wizardry.

[Mercadi]

Genetic engineering. I saw some bright, (and I mean very bright) pink potatoes in store the other day.
There's apples that look perfectly normal, but taste nothing like the real thing. Probably a side effect to being very resistant to insecticides.

[apepi]

Genetic engineering. I saw some bright, (and I mean very bright) pink potatoes in store the other day.
There's apples that look perfectly normal, but taste nothing like the real thing. Probably a side effect to being very resistant to insecticides.

Apples stay in storage before 6 months before they actually are bought.

Astronaut pens. Damn wizardry.

Because pencils are so hard to use

The Joule-Thomson effect. There are other cycles used in refrigeration, though. Isentropic expansion (with a gas doing work on a turbine as it expands) is more thermodynamically efficient.

How do you not have to put more liquid/gas into it? Magic I say!

[Zayva]

Wi-fi. It still amazes me.

[Nadiru]

Here's a more mundane submission: Fiber optic cable. We use so much data that electricity is no longer fast enough to contain our need for faster data streams. So we invented bendable glass in order to put it into a wire so we could use the electricity to turn the electric signals into light signals that get sent across the cable faster than electricity, all so we can load Youtube twenty seconds faster. If you take a section of fiber optic cable and shine a light in one end, it will come out the other end, no matter what shape you contort the cable into. It's really fantastic stuff.

[Osmeric]

Here's a more mundane submission: Fiber optic cable. We use so much data that electricity is no longer fast enough to contain our need for faster data streams. So we invented bendable glass in order to put it into a wire so we could use the electricity to turn the electric signals into light signals that get sent across the cable faster than electricity, all so we can load Youtube twenty seconds faster. If you take a section of fiber optic cable and shine a light in one end, it will come out the other end, no matter what shape you contort the cable into. It's really fantastic stuff.

It's much more amazing than that, actually. First, it's incredibly transparent -- at the absorption minimum (in the near infrared at 1550 nm) optical fiber will transmit 75% of light over a distance of 8 km. If seawater were this transparent one could see all the way down to the bottom, even over the deepest ocean trench.

Second, the fiber used in long haul links is single mode: only a single wave mode propagates through it.

Third: the amplifiers used in fiber cables now operate entirely optically. A laser is used to pump a section of the channel, which is doped with a rare earth element (for example, erbium). The interaction of this pump beam with the data pulses amplifies and cleans up the pulses, preserving their frequencies. The bandwith of such an all-optical amplifier is incredible.

The last is the technology that really drove down the cost of long distance data transmission, since it enabled wavelength-division multiplexing and extremely high bandwidth.

[Annoying]

Because pencils are so hard to use

Graphite in zero G around sensitive electronics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_P...space_programs