Portal:Technology

Interstate 475 (I-475) is a north–south auxiliary Interstate Highway in the US state of Michigan. I-475 is a 16.9-mile (27.2 km) bypass route that serves the downtown area of Flint while its parent, I-75, passes through the west side of the city. I-475 starts southwest of Grand Blanc and runs through suburbs of Flint before passing through downtown. There, it intersects I-69 and crosses the Flint River. The freeway turns westerly to connect back to I-75 north of Flint near Mount Morris.

This component freeway of the State Trunkline Highway System was planned in the 1950s and built in the 1970s. The trunkline was first named the Buick Freeway to honor David Dunbar Buick's contributions to Flint's early automotive industry as founder of Buick Motor Company. I-475 was renamed in 1981 the UAW Freeway, honoring the United Auto Workers, a labor union which was active in Flint. At the same time, the name of I-69 in Flint was changed from the "Chevrolet Freeway" to the "Chevrolet-Buick Freeway". Since 2001, I-475 has borne both the UAW and Buick names officially. (Full article...)

There are active proposals to build a new station in South Bend, Indiana, for the South Shore Line commuter rail service to replace the existing South Bend Airport station. The existing South Bend Airport station, built in 1992 on the east side of the airport, is a terminus for the train service. The route that carries the South Shore Line to its current station is considered slow and circuitous. While a number of locations have been looked at, the primary contenders have been relocating the station to the west side of South Bend International Airport or building a station in Downtown South Bend. Construction of a station in Downtown South Bend was championed by Pete Buttigieg during his tenure as mayor of South Bend. In late 2022, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD), the operator of the South Shore Line, advanced plans to begin construction on a new station at the west side of the airport as early as late 2024, commissioning an engineering study to prepare for this. Even if it builds a new station on the west side of the airport, NICTD has not ruled out the possibility of also building a future connection to Downtown South Bend.

When it was first opened in 1992, the current station on the airport's east side was originally intended to be a temporary location for the city's station. In 2006, officials began advancing plans to move the station to the airport's west side. In 2017, these plans again began gathering support. However, soon after, proposals for alternate locations for a station began to arise. The South Bend Chocolate Company proposed locating the station near tourist attractions it was planning to construct. Then-mayor Pete Buttigieg (who had previously supported the plans to relocate the station to the west side of the airport) proposed instead locating the station in downtown South Bend. In 2018, a study was conducted analyzing possible sites for the station (the west side of the airport, downtown South Bend, a location on Honeywell Corporation-owned property, the South Bend Amtrak station, and the South Bend Chocolate Factory site). After the study, both Buttigieg and NICTD president Michael Noland both agreed that the only two sites worth further consideration for a new station were the west side of the airport and downtown South Bend. Later in 2018, the City of South Bend commissioned a further study of the feasibility for a downtown station. NICTD, by 2022, was progressing with plans for a new station on the west side of the airport. Public debate on whether this or a downtown station has persisted, however. (Full article...)

Nebraska Highway 250 (N-250) is a 48.64-mile (78.28 km) state highway in Sheridan County, Nebraska, United States, that connects Nebraska Highway 2 (N-2) in Lakeside with U.S. Route 20 (US 20) in Rushville. For its entire length, N-250 is a two-lane road located entirely within rural agricultural area. (Full article...)

North Carolina Highway 132 (NC 132) is a north-south North Carolina State Highway entirely in New Hanover County. The highway follows College Road for the duration of its route. The southern terminus of NC 132 begins at U.S. Route 421 (US 421) in the census-designated place of Myrtle Grove south of Wilmington. Continuing north, NC 132 continues along a major north-south artillery road in the city of Wilmington. Between Shipyard Boulevard and its northern terminus, NC 132 runs concurrently with US 117. NC 132 shares a short concurrency at the eastern terminus of Interstate 40 (I-40), before continuing north toward Castle Hayne. The northern terminus of NC 132 is located at a roundabout with US 117 and NC 133 just south of the main business district of Castle Hayne.

NC 132 was established in 1958 running along its present-day routing from US 421 to US 117 in Castle Hayne. In 1983 the highway was briefly shifted along the present-day routing of I-40 from Wilmington to US 117 south of Wallace. However, in 1984, NC 132 was reverted to its pre-1983 designation, with the freeway being renumbered as I-40. (Full article...)

The West Somerset Mineral Railway was a standard gauge line in Somerset, England. Originally expected to be 13 miles 420 yards (21.3 km) long its length as built was 11+1⁄2 miles (18.5 km), with a 310-yard (280 m) branch to Raleigh's Cross Mine. The line's core purpose was to carry iron ore northwards from mines on the Brendon Hills to Watchet harbour on the Bristol Channel. From there the ore was shipped northwards to Newport where it was unloaded onto railway wagons and hauled to ironworks at Ebbw Vale. The line opened as intended in 1861. Passenger services commenced in 1865. The mines' and line's "period of prosperity" ended in 1875 and by 1883 all mining had ceased. The line lingered on for passengers and small goods until 1898, when it closed.

A new mineral venture was attempted in 1907, for which much of the line was re-opened and a 2 ft (610 mm)-gauge extension was added, but this failed and the line closed again in 1910. A section of the track was used to test and demonstrate an automatic signal warning device in 1911 and occasionally used in that connection up to 1914. The tracks were lifted for scrap in 1917, after which a light railway was laid on part of the trackbed in 1918 to carry timber. This ended in 1920 and the company was wound up in 1925. (Full article...)

State Route 243 (SR 243) is a state highway in Grant County, Washington. It travels north–south along the Columbia River for 28 miles (45 km), connecting SR 24 at the Vernita Bridge to SR 26 near Vantage. The highway travels through a predominantly rural and desert area, serving two hydroelectric dams and the communities of Desert Aire, Mattawa, and Beverly.

The highway was established as a branch of Secondary State Highway 7C (SSH 7C) in 1957, to be built uphill from the reservoir of the new Priest Rapids Dam. Construction was completed in the early 1960s and it was re-designated as SR 243 during the 1964 state highway renumbering. (Full article...)

New York State Route 368 (NY 368) was a state highway in Onondaga County, New York, in the United States. It was one of the shortest routes in the county, extending for only 1.69 miles (2.72 km) between NY 321 and NY 5 in the town of Elbridge. NY 368 was known as Halfway Road for the hamlet it served near its midpoint. The route was assigned in the 1930s and removed in 1980 as part of a highway maintenance swap between the state of New York and Onondaga County. (Full article...)

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second most visited website in the world, after Google Search. As of January 2024, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. , videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total. (Full article...)

ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on large language models (LLMs), it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive user prompts and replies are considered at each conversation stage as context. (Full article...)

Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in space company SpaceX and automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., formerly Twitter, and his role in the founding of The Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink and OpenAI. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; , Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$221 billion. (Full article...)

Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. , Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s. (Full article...)

Nvidia Corporation (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/, en-VID-ee-ə) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software. (Full article...)

WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. (Full article...)

Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡəl/ ^ⓘ GOO-ghəl) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. (Full article...)

A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms. (Full article...)

X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media websites and the seventh-most visited website in the world. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in posts (formerly "tweets") and like or repost/retweet other users' content. X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. (Full article...)

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI. (Full article...)