Today in 1879, a bar owner in Ohio received a patent for an invention that changed the way we buy and sell things: the cash register. He did it to thwart his bartenders, who he suspected of putting money meant for him in their own pockets.
Today in 1892 a phone system that made automated calls - no switchboard operator - began operating in Laporte, Indiana. The first automatic dial network happened, as the story goes, because of a business dispute between two undertakers.
Glass is versatile stuff, but fragile. A new project out of McGill University is modeled after the material in mollusk shells and could make glass a lot more durable.
It's International Coffee Day, so here's the story of a woman in Dresden, Germany, who made it a lot easier to brew coffee: Melitta Bentz, the inventor of the coffee filter.
The benchmark for Paralympic gold: 55 medals by a single athlete, swimmer Trischa Zorn.
On this anniversary of the release of Windows 95, we look at the origin story of the Comic Sans typeface, which has more haters than most fonts ever get (and a few lovers, too).
Summer is beach season, and for those times when people leave litter and other waste behind, there are two separate projects to develop robots to clean up after them.
Today in 2006, Twttr launched; and in its early days the social media platform gained vowels in its name and fame for a cute whale that would show up during its then-regular outages.
Today in 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri began publicly selling something new: bread that had been sliced by a multi-bladed machine, and the world gained a new way to measure greatness.
The National Geographic Society has recognized a fifth ocean, the Southern Ocean, on earth. How the oceans got their names - and why we don't think of them as one big ocean, which is what it is - is a long and fascinating story.
