Portal:Technology

The M25 or London Orbital Motorway is a major ring road encircling most of Greater London. The 117-mile-long (188 km) motorway is one of the most important roads in the UK and one of the busiest. Margaret Thatcher opened the final section in 1986, making the M25 the longest ring road in Europe upon opening. The Dartford Crossing completes the orbital route but is not classed as motorway; it is classed as a trunk road and designated as the A282. In some cases, including notable legal contexts such as the Communications Act 2003, the M25 is used as a de facto alternative boundary for Greater London.

In the 1944 Greater London Plan, Patrick Abercrombie proposed an orbital motorway around London. This evolved into the London Ringways project in the early 1960s, and by 1966, planning had started on two projects, Ringway 3 to the north and Ringway 4 to the south. By the time the first sections opened in 1975, it was decided the ringways would be combined into a single orbital motorway. The M25 was one of the first motorway projects to consider environmental concerns and almost 40 public inquiries took place. The road was built as planned despite some protests that included the section over the North Downs and around Epping Forest which required an extension of the Bell Common Tunnel. (Full article...)

The Sigma 8–16mm lens is an enthusiast-level, ultra wide-angle rectilinear zoom lens made by Sigma Corporation specifically for use with APS-C small format digital SLRs. It is the first ultrawide rectilinear (non-fisheye lens) zoom lens with a minimum focal length of 8 mm, designed specifically for APS-C size image sensors. The lens was introduced at the February 2010 Photo Marketing Association International Convention and Trade Show. At its release it was the widest viewing angle focal length available commercially for APS-C cameras. It is part of Sigma's DC (Digital Camera) line of lenses, meaning it was designed to have an image circle tailored to work with APS-C format cameras. The lens has a constant length regardless of optical zoom and focus with inner lens tube elements responding to these parameters. The lens has hypersonic zoom autofocus.

The lens is sold in versions that fit the bayonet mounts of Nikon, Canon, Sigma, Sony/Minolta and Pentax APS-C cameras. The lens has been discontinued by Sigma Corporation in 2020. (Full article...)

The Oxted line is a railway line in southern England. It runs from the Brighton Main Line at South Croydon in Greater London to Hurst Green Junction in Surrey, where its two branches diverge. The western branch continues via Lingfield to East Grinstead in West Sussex, whereas the eastern branch runs via Edenbridge Town in Kent to Uckfield in East Sussex. The line is named after the town of Oxted in Surrey and also serves parts of the London Borough of Croydon. The 18-mile-26-chain (29.5 km) South Croydon–East Grinstead section is electrified using the 750 V DC third-rail system and is double track throughout. The unelectrified Hurst Green Junction–Uckfield section is 24 mi 53 ch (39.7 km) in length and, south of Hever, is mostly single track.

Most trains on the Oxted line are operated by Southern, although Thameslink services also run to-and-from East Grinstead at peak times. During off-peak periods on weekdays, there is a half-hourly service between London Victoria and East Grinstead, and an hourly service between London Bridge and Uckfield. Services operated by Class 377 electric multiple units generally call at all stations between Sanderstead and East Grinstead; services operated by Class 171 diesel multiple units call at all stations between Oxted and Uckfield, but generally run non-stop between East Croydon and Oxted. (Full article...)

K-55 is a 12.049-mile-long (19.391 km) west–east state highway in the U.S. state of Kansas. The highway's western terminus is at U.S. Route 81 (US-81) roughly 11 miles (18 km) north of Wellington and the eastern terminus is at K-15 in Udall. It passes through the city of Belle Plaine.

The road's westbound terminus is a triangle-type intersection. Just before the western terminus, the road passes under the Kansas Turnpike, although there is no intersection. Turnpike access is available at K-53 to the north and US-160 to the south near Wellington. (Full article...)

The Roosevelt Island station is a local station on the IND 63rd Street Line of the New York City Subway. Located in Manhattan on Roosevelt Island in the East River, it is served by the M train on weekdays during the day and the F train during weekends and nights.

The Roosevelt Island station was first proposed in 1965, when the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) announced that it would build a subway station to encourage transit-oriented development on Roosevelt Island. The station and the rest of the 63rd Street Line were built as part of the Program for Action, a wide-ranging subway expansion program, starting in the late 1960s. When construction of the line was delayed, the Roosevelt Island Tram was built in 1973. The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation was formed in 1984 to develop the island, but was not successful until October 1989 when the subway station opened along with the rest of the 63rd Street Line. The opening encouraged the development of the island, which has made the station busier. (Full article...)

Delaware Route 58 (DE 58), also known as Churchmans Road, is a state highway in New Castle County, Delaware. The route, which is signed east-west, runs from DE 4 adjacent to the Christiana Hospital in Christiana southeast to DE 273 near Hares Corner. The road passes through suburban areas between Wilmington and Newark, intersecting DE 7 and Interstate 95 (I-95) in Christiana and DE 37 near the Wilmington Airport. Churchmans Road was originally a county road that was paved in the 1930s and realigned twice in the 1950s. DE 58 was designated onto it in the 1980s. (Full article...)

New York State Route 215 (NY 215) was a north–south state highway located within the town of Hamlin in Monroe County, New York, in the United States. It served as the primary highway to and from Hamlin Beach State Park prior to the construction of the Lake Ontario State Parkway. The southern terminus of the route was at an intersection with NY 360 east of the hamlet of Morton. Its northern terminus was at the park on the shore of Lake Ontario. The entirety of NY 215 was named Redman Road.

NY 215 was assigned in the early 1940s to provide a signed connection between NY 360 and Hamlin Beach State Park. It ceased to exist in the early 1970s once it was severed from the Lake Ontario shoreline by a westward extension of the Lake Ontario State Parkway. However, the remaining portion of NY 215 remained state maintained for another 30 years as New York State Route 941P, an unsigned reference route. Ownership and maintenance of NY 941P was transferred to Monroe County as part of a highway maintenance swap that took effect on November 26, 2007. The former routing of NY 941P is now part of unsigned County Route 236 (CR 236). (Full article...)

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was released in November 2022. It uses generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), such as GPT-5, to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, an ongoing 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, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively consumed more than one billion hours of video content every day. As of May 2019^[update], videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content 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 a businessman and entrepreneur known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and xAI. Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2021; as of February 2026,^[update] Forbes estimates his net worth to be around US$852 billion. (Full article...)

Google LLC (/ˈɡuː.ɡəl/ ^ⓘ, 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 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...)

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 and black 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...)

Facebook is an American made social networking service owned by the 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. (Full article...)

Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages. (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 used messenger app. The name of the app is meant to sound like "what's up". (Full article...)

Viral videos are videos that become popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, primarily 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...)

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 a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. (Full article...)