Portal:Technology

The Euphrates Dam (Arabic: سَدُّ الْفُرَاتِ, romanized: Sadd al-Furāt; Kurdish: Bendava Firatê; Classical Syriac: ܣܟܪܐ ܕܦܪܬ, romanized: Sekro d'Frot), most commonly known as Tabqa Dam; formerly known as al-Thawra Dam during the Ba'athist era, is an embankment dam on the Euphrates, located 40 kilometres (25 mi) upstream from the city of Raqqa in Raqqa Governorate, Syria. The city of Al-Thawrah is located immediately south of the dam. The dam is 60 metres (200 ft) high and 4.5 kilometres (2.8 mi) long and is the largest dam in Syria. Its construction led to the creation of Euphrates Lake, Syria's largest water reservoir. The dam was constructed between 1968 and 1973 with help from the Soviet Union. At the same time, an international effort was made to excavate and document as many archaeological remains as possible in the area of the future lake before they would be flooded by the rising water. When the flow of the Euphrates was reduced in 1974 to fill the lake behind the dam, a dispute broke out between Syria and Iraq (which is downstream) that was settled by intervention from Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. The dam was originally built to generate hydroelectric power, as well as irrigate lands on both sides of the Euphrates. The dam has not reached its full potential in either of these objectives. (Full article...)

Thessaloniki Metro (Greek: Μετρό Θεσσαλονίκης, listen) is an underground rapid transit system in Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city. The system consists of two lines with 18 stations. It is fully automated and driverless, the first system of its kind in Greece, and is operated by Thessaloniki Metro Automatic (THEMA), a Franco-Italian consortium.

Estimates for the cost of the megaproject are at €3 billion ($3.42 billion today), including €600 million ($686 million) in future interest payments. The project is primarily funded with loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), as well as funds from the Greek government. Construction by a Greco-Italian consortium is overseen by Elliniko Metro, the Greek state-owned company which oversaw the construction of the Athens Metro and Athens Tram. (Full article...)

M-29 is a state trunkline highway in the US state of Michigan that runs in a south–north direction from Chesterfield Township to Marysville. It generally runs along the shore of Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River.

The M-29 designation has been used twice in Michigan starting in 1919. The first designation near Lansing was replaced by U.S. Route 27 (US 27) in 1926. At that time, the M-29 designation was moved to the east side of the state along the current routing and farther north along part of what became US 25 and M-25. The 1933 extension of US 25 replaced the northern section of M-29 leading to the current location of M-29. (Full article...)

Ayer station is an MBTA Commuter Rail station located off Main Street (Route 2A/111) in the Ayer Main Street Historic District of Ayer, Massachusetts. It serves the Fitchburg Line. There are three tracks through the station, two of which are served by a pair of low-level side platforms, which are not accessible. There is a shelter on the inbound platform.

Ayer has been a major railroad interchange since the Fitchburg Railroad opened through South Groton in 1845, followed by the Stony Brook Railroad, Worcester and Nashua Railroad, and Peterborough and Shirley Railroad in 1848. The original depot was replaced with a union station with a large trainshed in 1848. Land speculation and industrial development spurred by the railroad access expanded the tiny farm village into the independent town of Ayer. (Full article...)

The Q79 bus route constituted a public transit line in Queens, New York City. It ran primarily along Little Neck Parkway between Little Neck station and Jamaica Avenue. Service on the route, initially known as the Q12A, began on June 4, 1950, following a request made by Queens Borough President Maurice A. FitzGerald. In 1990, the route was renumbered the Q79. In 1996, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposed extending the route to Floral Park, but this extension was canceled to community opposition. This route was operated by the New York City Transit brand until June 27, 2010, when it was discontinued under system-wide service cuts. (Full article...)

King's Highway 35, commonly referred to as Highway 35, is a provincially maintained highway in the Canadian province of Ontario, linking Highway 401 with the Kawartha Lakes, Haliburton County, and Algonquin Provincial Park. The highway travels from west of Newcastle, through Lindsay, near Fenelon Falls, Coboconk, Minden Hills, and into Haliburton before terminating at Highway 60 to the west of Algonquin Park. Within those areas, it services the communities of Orono, Cameron, Rosedale, Norland, Moore Falls, Miners Bay, Lutterworth, Carnarvon, Buttermilk Falls, Halls Lake, Pine Springs, and Dorset. The winding course of the road, combined with the picturesque views offered along its length, have led some to declare it the most scenic highway in Ontario.

Most of the route, including a portion of Highway 60, was assumed by the Department of Highways (DHO), predecessor to the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) by 1940. In the mid-1950s, several bypasses were constructed to divert Highway 35 away from town centres including Lindsay, Fenelon Falls and Minden. Highway 115 was built east from Enterprise Hill to Peterborough in 1953, and signed concurrently with Highway 35 south for 19 kilometres (12 mi) in 1961. This portion was widened to a divided expressway in the late 1980s. Studies are considering whether to widen the route between Enterprise Hill and Lindsay to four lanes, including reconstructing the trumpet interchange at the former. Expansion of part of the Lindsay bypass to four lanes was scheduled to begin in 2023. (Full article...)

Interstate 35E (I-35E) is an Interstate Highway in the US state of Minnesota, passing through downtown Saint Paul. It is one of two through routes for I-35 through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the other being I-35W through Minneapolis. Thus, both ends of I-35E are shared with I-35W and I-35.

During the early years of the Interstate Highway System, branching Interstates with directional suffixes, such as N, S, E, and W, were common nationwide. On every other Interstate nationwide, these directional suffixes have been phased out by redesignating the suffixed route numbers with a loop or spur route number designation (such as I-270 in Maryland, which was once I-70S) or, in some cases, were assigned a different route number (such as I-76, which was once I-80S). In the case of I-35 in the Twin Cities area, since neither branch is clearly the main route and both branches return to a unified Interstate beyond the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, officials at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) have allowed the suffixes of E and W in Minnesota to remain in the present day. I-35 also splits into I-35E and I-35W in Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, for similar reasons as the I-35 split in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. (Full article...)

ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. Originally released on November 30, 2022, the product uses large language models – specifically generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) – to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. ChatGPT accelerated the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, a period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI operates the service on a freemium model. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts. (Full article...)

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, all of whom were former employees at PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had reached more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of video every day. As of May 2019^[update], videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of video per minute, and as of mid-2024^[update], there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total. (Full article...)

Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ ^ⓘ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is an industrialist, entrepreneur, and former United States public official who is the chief executive officer and largest shareholder of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2025, and became the only trillionaire (in terms of US dollars) in June 2026; as of November 2026, Forbes estimates his net worth to be $849.7 billion. (Full article...)

Facebook is an American social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The name Facebook derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. (Full article...)

A QR code, short for quick-response code, is a type of two-dimensional matrix barcode invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara of the Japanese company Denso Wave for labelling automobile parts. It features white ("0") and black ("1") squares within a square grid featuring fiducial markers on the corners, readable by imaging devices like cameras, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data is then extracted from patterns that are present in both the horizontal and the vertical components of the QR image. (Full article...)

Google LLC (also known simply as Google and pronounced /ˈɡuː.ɡəl/ ^ⓘ or GOO-gəl) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., has been described as a Big Tech company. (Full article...)

WhatsApp Messenger, commonly known simply as WhatsApp, is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and Voice over IP (VoIP) service accessible via desktop and mobile app. Owned by Meta Platforms, the service allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to register. WhatsApp was launched in May 2009. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. As of May 2025, the service had 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular messenger app. The name of the app is meant to sound like "what's up". (Full article...)

Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world in terms of financial assets, with an estimated net worth of US$845 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and $849.7 billion according to Forbes, as of November 8, 2026, primarily from his ownership stakes of 42% of SpaceX and 20% of Tesla. He is eligible to receive additional Tesla and SpaceX equity awards subject to certain conditions. (Full article...)

Anthropic, PBC (stylized as ANTHROP\C) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Anthropic aims to fundamentally change the human condition through the future development of artificial general intelligence, AI that could automate away the large majority of human jobs; and superintelligence, systems that possess generalized intelligence that far surpass that of the most gifted human minds. The company's culture is influenced by effective altruism and the rationalist community, and describes its ultimate goal as creating a "utopia ruled by god in a box". (Full article...)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is also a field of research spanning computer science, engineering, and mathematics that develops and studies methods and software enabling machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. (Full article...)