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For kidney patients who do their own dialysis at home, nurses must review information data gathered during a treatment session. “These nurses need to know quickly when there is a problem like peritonitis, which can kill a patient in a day—but not be overwhelmed with alerts and messages,” says Merryl Gross, an information architect and senior UX Designer for Fresenius Medical Care North America. The

SOMETHING NEW HAPPENED IN SPACE IN JANUARY 2019. For the first time, a previously unknown leak of natural gas was spotted from orbit by a microsatellite, and then, because of that detection, plugged.

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IF YOU'RE GOING TO JUMP out of a perfectly good airplane for sport, you could choose any old aircraft. But eco-adventurer Raphaël Domjan chose the SolarStratos, a solar-powered aircraft that's expected to become the first crewed solar plane to fly in the stratosphere. In August, Domjan jumped from the sleek two-seater as it cruised over Payerne, in western Switzerland, to publicize his SolarStratos

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FOR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS, bandwidth has long been king. With every generation of fiber optic, cellular, or Wi-Fi technology has come a jump in throughput that has enriched our online lives. Twenty years ago we were merely exchanging texts on our phones, but we now think nothing of streaming videos from YouTube and Netflix. No wonder, then, that video now consumes up to 60 percent of Internet bandwidth

THE COMPLETION OF THE Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile has made Egypt fear for its very existence. To understand why requires the appreciation of basic water-flow and water-use numbers in the region.

MOTOROLA DEMONSTRATED THE VERY first handheld mobile phone almost a half century ago. It was the size of a brick and weighed half as much. That prototype spawned the first commercial mobile phone a decade later. It, too, was ungainly, but it allowed a person to walk around while sending and receiving phone calls, which at that point was a great novelty. • Since then, mobile phones have acquired many

AS THIS ARTICLE GOES TO press, Hurricane Delta is making landfall not far from where Hurricanes Sally and Laura came ashore earlier in the season. I live on the East Coast of the United States, and fairly far inland, so such storms are not as frequent or intense as they are in states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico. But they are still a concern, if only because they can topple trees and cause widespread

In the 19th century, two scientists separately invented the AC induction motor. Today, it's a common component in robotics. How did we get here and how can modern-day engineers continue to improve the design?

Earlier this year, as the tech workforce moved into the virtual world, Facebook announced that at least some employees could work from home permanently—and choose to relocate. There is a catch to that: Salaries, the company said, would be adjusted to reflect local costs of living. Over the summer, job search firm Hired released a study that reported that only 32 percent of tech professionals around

IN AN AGE PROPPED UP BY quintillions of solid-state devices, should you even care about vacuum tubes? You definitely should! For richness, drama, and sheer brilliance, few technological timelines can match the 116-year (and counting) history of the vacuum tube. To prove it, I've assembled a list of vacuum devices that over the past 60 or 70 years inarguably changed the world. • And just for good measure

Who knew you could get change for an electron? Researchers have designed a nanoelectronic circuit that can tease into existence a strange new kind of quantum “particle.” Its existence confirms decades of speculation about the behavior of electronic circuits in very low temperatures and high magnetic fields—and opens the door for possible applications in next-generation quantum computers.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago this month, Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered a mysterious light that could pass through solid objects, leaving behind a ghostly image of the object's interior. He called the light “X-rays,” the “X” standing for the unknown. The medical community immediately seized upon X-rays as a diagnostic tool. For a time, the retail world also found them useful. From

ALONG WITH everything else going on, we may look back at 2020 as the year that companies finally hit upon a better business model for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Established network companies such as the Things Network and Helium, and new players such as Amazon, have seemingly given up on the idea of making money from selling network connectivity. Instead, they're focused on getting the network

If you'd told me I'd spend my career working on vacuum tubes, I'd have said, ‘No way. That's crazy!’”.

Tiny robots that move through blood vessels. Brain implants that translate thoughts into text. Artificial intelligence tools that diagnose disease. It takes a special kind of journalist to cover such topics, somebody who understands both cutting-edge technology and the messy biology of the human body. In 2016, when IEEE Spectrum launched its biomedical engineering blog, The Human OS, we took great

Wearing face coverings, practicing social distancing, washing hands, and shuttering schools and stores. These are some of the measures that have been implemented to protect people from catching the virus responsible for COVID-19. But just how effective have these interventions been? • Engineers at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton believe they have developed a mathematical modeling approach that could

RFID tags are used across many industries, but when it comes to healthcare, there is a major design challenge: size. If wearable RFID tags are too big and bulky, they could cause patient discomfort. Or, if the tag is for a biomedical implant, it has to be smaller than a grain of rice! Design engineers can optimize the size of an RFID tag for its intended purpose using RF simulation.

Researchers have developed an inhalable artificial corona-virus antibody that they say “straitjackets” the SARS-CoV-2 virus and appears to impede its ability to infect human cells.

For backpackers, it's a treat to escape civilization and traverse the woods, enjoying the ruggedness of the great outdoors. But carrying that heavy backpack for days can undoubtedly be a drag.

Norway, already a world leader in EV adoption, will soon mark a world's first: an Oslo-based fleet of Jaguar I-Pace taxis that can charge wirelessly even as they queue up for passengers.

A team at the Optical Networks Group at University College London (UCL) has sent 178 terabits per second through a commercial single-mode optical fiber that has been on the market since 2007. It's a record for the standard single-mode fiber widely used in today's networks, and twice the data rate of any system now in use. The key to their success was transmitting it across a spectral range of 16.8

Ten years ago, a now-defunct Silicon Valley startup caused a sensation when it introduced the Personal Robot 2, or PR2. Researchers, in particular, loved the PR2 because it was versatile and easier to program than other robots. It allowed them to focus on their research rather than building a new system from scratch. The PR2 helped advance robotic sensing, navigation, and manipulation, but it wasn't

I've been recently engaged with some fairly serious projects, building up my garage semiconductor fab. I wanted to take a break and build something entertaining I could share with other people without the complicated explanations that things like a laser interferometer often require. So I decided to make a digital camera that's purposely got a lower resolution than a smartphone cam but is a lot more

When the COVID-19 lockdown came to the United Kingdom, Sam Battle became a man on a mission. Battle has created many unusual electronic musical instruments under the sobriquet of Look Mum No Computer, including an organ made out of singing Furbys and a synthesizer-bicycle hybrid. As people isolated themselves, he embarked on his most ambitious project yet the KiloDrone.

WHEN SARS-COV-2, a new coronavirus, began to spread outside China in the early months of 2020, both the news media and scientific publications looked back to the most lethal pandemic in modern history. It was called the Spanish flu, though it had nothing whatever to do with Spain.

ELECTION EXPERTS were already concerned about the security and accuracy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Now, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the new risk it creates for in-person voting-not to mention the debate about whether mail-in ballots lead to voter fraud—the amount of anxiety around the 2020 election is unprecedented.

AFTER UNBOXING a new gadget, few people stop to consider how things could go horribly wrong when it's plugged into the wall: A shorted wire could, for example, quickly produce a fire. We trust that our machines will not fail so catastrophically-a trust developed through more than a century of certification processes.

WHEN THE SPANISH FLU PANDEMIC swept across the globe in 1918, it ravaged a population with essentially no technological countermeasures. There were no diagnostic tests, no mechanical ventilators, and no antiviral or widely available anti-inflammatory medications other than aspirin. The first inactivated-virus vaccines would not become available until 1936. An estimated 50 million people died. • Today

IN AN ACHIEVEMENT that would have startled biomedical researchers merely a year ago, vaccines against COVID-19 were already being tested in humans this past March, less than three months after the initial outbreak was identified in China. Many of those vaccines owed their speedy start to the power of artificial intelligence (AI). • The feat is a promising and remarkable turn in the 200-year-plus history

IF YOU WANTED TO “FLATTEN THE CURVE” IN 2019, you might have been changing students' grades or stamping down a rug ripple. Today, that phrase refers only to the vital task of reducing the peak number of people concurrently infected with the COVID-19 virus. Beginning in early 2020, graphs depicting the expected number of infections spread through social networks, much like the virus itself. We've all

AS THE CORONAVIRUS emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Many saw a surge in orders. Robots don't need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don't get sick.

WITHIN MOMENTS OF MEETING EACH OTHER at a conference last year, Nathan Collins and Yann Gaston-Mathé began devising a plan to work together. Gaston-Mathé runs a startup that applies automated software to the design of new drug candidates. Collins leads a team that uses an automated chemistry platform to synthesize new drug candidates. • “There was an obvious synergy between their technology and ours

WALK INTO THE CAMBRIDGE, ONT., OFFICE of health-care equipment company PrescientX and you probably wouldn't suspect you're entering one of the most sanitary places in North America. • In this otherwise-ordinary Toronto-area office suite, you can disinfect your keys, phone, and other portables at the reception area's ultraviolet-sterilization stand. In cooler months, the air you breathe is cleansed

IN JUNE, as the coronavirus swept across the United States, Paloma Beamer spent hours each day helping her university plan for a September reopening. Beamer, an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona, was helping to test a mobile app that would notify users if they crossed paths with confirmed COVID-19 patients. • A number of such “contact tracing” apps have recently had

DIAGNOSTIC TESTING FOR COVID-19 infections is one of the linchpins of the global effort to combat the deadly pandemic. But the strategy normally used for that has a few downsides. For one, the nasopharyngeal swabbing required demands the services of a health care worker, who is then put at risk of contracting the disease. Also, the sample-taking procedure, which involves sticking a very long flexible

As part of UC Davis' commitment to hire leading research faculty with a strong commitment to teaching, research and service that will promote the success of historically underrepresented and marginalized student communities and address the needs of our increasingly diverse state and student population, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis invites

Presents the front cover for this issue of the publication.

AS A RISK CONSULTANT FOR BUSINESSES and a slew of three-lettered U.S. government agencies, Contributing Editor Robert N. Charette has seen more than his share of languishing legacy IT systems. As a civilian, he's also been a casualty of a legacy system gone berserk. A few years ago, his bank's IT system, which he later found out was being upgraded, made an error that was most definitely not in his

ROCKET, A STARTUP THAT BUILDS AI-based tools for recruiters and offers recruitment services of its own, had been on the verge of profitability when the coronavirus pandemic hit. It quickly saw corporate recruitment dry up as the pandemic took hold. • With the halt in hiring affecting its main business, and mounting layoffs at tech companies, Rocket turned its efforts toward matching laid-off engineers

RFID tags are used across many industries, but when it comes to healthcare, there is a major design challenge: size. If wearable RFID tags are too big and bulky, they could cause patient discomfort. Or, if the tag is for a biomedical implant, it has to be smaller than a grain of rice! Design engineers can optimize the size of an RFID tag for its intended purpose using RF simulation.

Protests in the United States and in other countries have brought new attention to the impact of state violence and systemic racism. Economist Lisa D. Cook has directly measured that impact on innovation and invention, and the results are grim. Cook's research showed how segregation laws, lynchings, and state-supported violence suppressed African American invention during the 20th century. By tracking

During hot weather, it's nice to open a window to let in a breeze. Maybe not, though, if the window also lets in a cacophony from cars and trucks roaring past.

Two years ago, Amazon reportedly scrapped a secret artificial-intelligence hiring tool after realizing that the system had learned to prefer male job candidates while penalizing female applicants—the result of the AI training on resumes that mostly male candidates had submitted to the company. The episode raised concerns over the use of machine learning in hiring software that would perpetuate or even

Remember March, when stay-at-home orders and advisories first went into effect in many U.S. states and other places around the world? That month is generally not a big time for consumer electronics sales; gadgets may fly off shelves during the December holiday season, but then there's a bit of a lull.

The National Reconnaissance Office Director's Innovation Initiative (DII) Program funds cutting-edge scientific research in a high-risk, high-payoff environment to discover innovative concepts and creative ideas that transform overhead intelligence capabilities and systems for future national security intelligence needs. The program seeks the brightest minds and breakthrough technologies from industry

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER of time before we turned over to robots the care and feeding of the agricultural products that sustain us. Even with the sophisticated farming machinery introduced over the past century, farming is still decidedly labor-intensive. But sending people out into the fields to toil under the hot sun and take the risks associated with exposure to chemical fertilizers is unsustainable

I'll be honest: when the original AxiDraw came out from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in 2016, I thought it was cute but a curiosity. My thought was that if you were going to play around with reintroducing the venerable technology of the pen-and-paper X-Y plotter, why not do something really different, like the iBoardBot remote-controlled erasable miniature whiteboard? And the AxiDraw's US $475 price

As the COVID-19 pandemic began its explosive spread, tech workers were among the first to switch to working at home in mass numbers. By early March, before regional stay-at-home orders came into play in the United States, most tech professionals at Microsoft and Amazon had already switched to working at home, and others soon followed.

PLEASE NOTE the adjective above: This article is not about the perennial economic dream of never-ending growth but about indefinite or, more accurately, indeterminate growth, the kind that doesn't end at a certain date but rather continues for as long as an organism lives.

THE INTERNET of Things has the potential to usher in many possibilities — including a surveillance state. In the July issue, I wrote about how user consent is an important prerequisite for companies building connected devices. But there are other ways companies are trying to ensure that connected devices don't invade people's privacy.

FIX THE DAMN UNEMPLOYMENT SYSTEM!” • This past spring, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs due to lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And untold numbers of the newly jobless waited weeks for their unemployment benefit claims to be processed, while others anxiously watched their bank accounts for an extra US $600 weekly payment from the federal government.

Your personal and professional experiences with IEEE make you uniquely qualified to help bring in new members. With the Member Get-A-Member (MGM) Program you can get rewarded for word-of-mouth referrals. Earn incentives and awards while helping to grow IEEE membership.

A four-lane street narrows to two to accommodate workers repairing a large pothole. one worker holds a stop sign loosely in his left hand as he waves cars through with his right. human drivers don't think twice about whether to follow the gesture or the sign; they move smoothly forward without stopping.