Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Quick Response (QR) codes were popular before the COVID-19 pandemic ...

Today, when you recycle a plastic container, it goes to a material recovery facility, where it must be identified and sorted. Facilities typically rely on imprecise older technology to try to figure ...

Some technologies you use every day, but without thinking about them. The bar code is one of these: everything you buy has one of these black and white striped codes on it. We've all seen how they are ...

The demise of Shelfie, a tool that allowed customers to link their print books to e-books, got me thinking about bar codes. Obviously, one method of linking print to its digital metadata is through ...

Every purchase evokes his design of the rectangular Universal Product Code. But although it became ubiquitous, he received no royalties. By Sam Roberts George J. Laurer, whose design of the vertically ...

As smartphones have become more and more ubiquitous, so have QR codes. These maze-looking squares are a type of matrix bar code that contains data — usually, QR codes point to a website or open a ...