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For all the amazement that swarms of consumer-grade drones provoke—flying in choreographed clusters to form logos, pictures, and even QR codes in the sky—they're also a subject of some strategic concern among national security experts. Drone swarms, one analyst says, are the new WMD (weapon of mass destruction); “slaughterbots” are the new nightmare technology, says another; one prominent media account

Summary form only given, as follows. NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover takes a "rover selfie," albeit with a twist. For the first time, in this image taken 6 April 2021, a rover captured not only itself but a buddy— the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, which made the trip in Perseverance’s belly. What looks like a single wide-angle shot is actually 62 individual images stitched together, according to Vandi

It's a certain kind of itch that drives people to voluntarily build their own CPU. We start thinking about the papered-over gap in our understanding, the one that lurks between how logic gates and flip-flops work individually and how machine code controls a fully assembled processor. What exactly happens in the magic zone where hardwired circuits start dancing to software's ever-changing tune?

Engineers often find themselves in the role of turning ideas that used to be science fiction into reality. So it's natural that some of them turn the flow of ideas in the other direction, and become authors of science fiction. One such engineer-turned-writer is Divya Srinivasan Breed, who writes her science fiction as S.B. Divya, and whose stories have been nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards.

Sit comes up inside a production steel pipe, natural gas is usually a mixture of the lightest alkanes, which are hydrocarbons of the C n H 2n+2 series. Methane (CH 4 ) dominates (between 85 and 95 percent), followed by ethane (C 2 H 6 , typically 2 to 7 percent by volume), small amounts of propane (C 3 H 8 ), butane (C4H 10 ), and pentane (C 5 H 12 ), and traces of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide

Cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) may be all the rage right now, but they're overshadowing better uses for blockchain and other distributed-ledger technologies. Rather than using them to disrupt financial systems or the art world, distributed ledgers can be used to create trust among Internet of Things devices, which is essential for any successful IoT network.

It took a global pandemic to accomplish one of the most significant advances in the history of vaccinology: widespread, commercial deployment of vaccines derived from nucleic acids. As of this writing, hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And most of those shots have been the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna offerings, which are both of

What's the largest criminal enterprise in the world? Narcotics? Gambling? Human trafficking? • Nope. The biggest racket is the production and trade of counterfeit goods, which is expected to exceed US $1 trillion next year. You've probably suffered from it more than once yourself, purchasing on Amazon or eBay what you thought was a brand-name item only to discover that it was an inferior-quality counterfeit

An elderly woman, living alone in a small mountain village, relaxes in the afternoon after finishing lunch. A square sheet of thin rubber clings to the back of her hand. Like a poultice, it stretches and then wrinkles as she flexes her fingers. • As she reaches for her teacup, the square lights up with a message: “TAKE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE MEDICINE.” She smiles, remembering how she used to struggle

IT'S A BAKING-HOT February day in Matanya, a village that straddles the equator, a few hours' drive north of Nairobi. Smiling broadly, Patrick Gicheru is sowing carrots in layers of soil and compost at his 0.8-hectare farm and recalling a profitable crop of peppers that recently came from the same field. Tomatoes maturing on another plot should be ready for market in a month. “Tomatoes are going for

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Summary form only given, as follows. In 1964, four years after earning a master’s degree in materials science from Stanford, Robert E. Lorenzini decided to go into business for himself. He bought motors, gear heads, and other spare parts from an auction and then built his own furnace for growing single crystals of silicon, to feed the burgeoning semiconductor industry. Inspired by the quick-change

Presents the back cover of the magazine.

Hopefully you've noticed something different about your print IEEE Spectrum this month. It has a new look, the result of a comprehensive redesign whose results will soon be seen on our website as well. For this, we're particularly indebted to the IEEE New Initiatives Committee for its generous support.

It was back in 2005 that the first IEEE Spectrum Awards were presented to Nesscap Co., a South Korean maker of ultracapacitors, and to Microsoft TV, for Internet Protocol television. In those days, the IEEE Spectrum Awards were given out in partnership with EE Times, at the Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards.

For athletes trying to run fast, the proper shoe can be essential to achieving peak performance. For athletes trying to run as fast as humanly possible, a runner's shoe can also become a work of individually customized engineering.

Like vinyl and cassette tapes, cathode ray tubes are experiencing a comeback in some circles. Retrogamers want to experience old titles on the fuzzy displays they were designed for. And makers have been de constructing them for all kinds of projects: In January of 2020, we featured a vector graphics clock based on a CRT originally made for an oscilloscope. But oscilloscope CRTs are relatively rare

During the past 50 years, the world's population has grown about 2.1 times, and consumption has grown more; for some goods, much more. Between 1968 and 2018 (the most recent year for which we have global data), production of both primary energy and of steel rose 3.4 times, that of meat grew 3.5 times, and that of grain grew 2.6 times. The total number of cars on the world's roads rose sixfold, and

You're about to hear a lot about network neutrality again, now that the Biden administration is in the White House. Last time, the issue was ensuring that Internet service providers (ISPs) wouldn't discriminate against different sources of legal traffic on their networks. This time around, you should expect the debate to be about whether to give the Federal Communications Commission enough legal standing

There Were Few bright spots in the pandemic summer of 2020. One of the most dazzling was the flight of U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station and their safe return to Earth aboard a commercial spacecraft from SpaceX. This demonstration was significant for many reasons, one of which was that it suggested a future in which NASA, freed from the demands of getting people to low Earth orbit

In the past year, have you found yourself under stress? Have you ever wished for help coping? Imagine if, throughout the pandemic, you'd had a virtual therapist powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, an entity that empathized with you and gradually got to know your moods and behaviors. Therapy is just one area where we think an AI system that can recognize and interpret emotions could offer

When all is said and done, 5G will cost almost US $1 trillion to deploy over the next half decade. That enormous expense will be borne mostly by network operators, companies like AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and dozens more around the world that provide cellular service to their customers. Facing such an immense cost, these operators asked a very reasonable question: How can we make

Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend. Lossy algorithms are used to get music into the popular MP3 format and turn a digital image into a standard JPEG file. They do this by selectively removing bits, taking what scientists know about the way we see and hear to determine which bits we'd least miss. But no one can make the case that the resulting file is a perfect replica of the original

The security technologist Bruce Schneier has a warning “What you code affects the world now. Gone are the days when programmers could ignore the social context of what they code, when we could say, ‘The users will just figure it all out.’ Today, programs, apps, and algorithms affect society. Facebook's choices influence democracy. How driverless cars will choose to avoid accidents will affect human

For good or ill, the Trump administration's U.S. technology policy-and President Barack Obama's tech policy before that-often set global priorities. The new administration will surely be no different. With the still young Biden administration, and its young-at-heart chief executive, some quandaries lie coiled within puzzles, others represent wholly unprecedented challenges. Climate, economic, pandemic

YOUR GRANDPARENTS' ancient transistor radio might still turn on and tune in to stations broadcasting conventional AM or FM signals. But in this Internet age, a blizzard of content is available from sources accessible only via the Web. What's more, instead of speakers that flood a room with sound, we've grown accustomed to personal listening using earbuds and headphones. Now engineers like Guillaume

While editing an article about skin cancer early in my career, I learned many not-so-cheerful facts about how ultraviolet light causes molecular disruptions in DNA-how the damage is typically incurred early in life, and how people are particularly susceptible when they live closerto the equator than theirfore-bears, as I do.Sincethen, I've tended to avoid the sun rather than revel in it. Now, however

FOSSIL FUELS ARE among the world's most traded commodities: About 75 percent of crude oil, 25 percent of natural gas, and 21 percent of coal production are traded internationally. Electricity, by contrast, is a minor affair: Only about 3 percent of total generation crosses borders.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT is a larger customer of IoT products than you may realize. Veterans Affairs, for example, buys connected IV pumps for its hospitals, while the Environmental Protection Agency buys water sensors to measure pollution.

Even before a woman knows she's pregnant, the placenta swells in size, poised to serve as the fetus's kidneys and liver until the fetus has its own. The placenta starts to “breathe” for the fetus around 12 weeks in. Over a convoluted surface that grows large enough to cover a horse, fetal blood on one side soaks up oxygen from mom's blood on the other. Her oxygen flows seamlessly into the fetus's beating

Computer scientists and engineers have started down a road that could one day lead to a momentous transition: from deterministic computing systems, based on classical physics, to quantum computing systems, which exploit the weird and wacky probabilistic rules of quantum physics. Many commentators have pointed out that if engineers are able to fashion practical quantum computers, there will be a tectonic

IN THE MAY 2002 ISSUE OF THIS MAGAZINE, THE LATE Lester F. Eastman and Umesh K. Mishra made the case for what was then a long-shot technology in the world of power semiconductors: gallium nitride (GaN). They presented an optimistic outlook for powerful, rugged radio-frequency amplifiers in the then-nascent broadband wireless networks and in radar, as well as in power-switching applications for the

The CQVID-19 pandemic put the auto industry on its own lockdown in 2020. But the technological upheavals haven't slowed a bit.

Being a tech journalist can take you to unusual places. Just ask IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Maria Gallucci, shown here in late 2017 aboard an experimental cargo ship in the middle of the North Sea. The trip was the capstone of her shipping-focused itinerary, which began at the United Nations' annual climate conference in Bonn, Germany.

Astronomers detected an Earth-like planet 11 light-years away from our solar system. How? Through data from an échelle spectrograph called HARPS, which finds exoplanets by detecting tiny wobbles in the motion of stars. Engineers looking to further the search for Earth-mass exoplanets can use ray tracing simulation to improve the sensitivity of échelle spectrographs.

LONDON'S NEW YEAR'S EVE FIREWORKS display, initiated as a special event to ring in the year 2000, normally attracts about 3 million people to the edge of the River Thames. As the calendar turned to 2021, a virtual audience watched from home because of COVID-19. The made-for-TV event let viewers witness festivities at locations around the city, including the O2 entertainment complex, Tower Bridge, and

SMART CITIES, LIKE many things, took a beating in 2020. Alphabet, Google's parent company, pulled its Sidewalk Labs subsidiary out of a smart-city project in Toronto. Cisco killed its plans to sell smart-city technology. And in many places, city budgets will be affected for years to come by the pan-demic's economic shock, making it more difficult to justify smart-city expenses.

Charlie is not your average catfish. A master of disguise, this fish is in fact an unmanned underwater vehicle developed by the CIA's Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs in the 1990s. Its mission: to collect water samples without being detected. Charlie's human handler, perhaps disguised as a humble fisherman, controlled the robotic fish via a line-of-sight radio handset. At 61 centimeters

To hear Greg Orzell tell it, the original Chaos Monkey tool was simple: It randomly picked a virtual machine hosted somewhere on Netflix's cloud and sent it a “Terminate” command. Unplugged it. Then the Netflix team would have to figure out what to do.

Like many of you, for the past year I've leda a pretty static existence living and working in my apartment. But with the rollout of COVID–19 vaccinations, I can actually think of returning to a more ambulatory way of life. Which also means that I'm thinking about mobile devices for the first time in a long time, making it just the right moment to spot the recent release of the Watchy, an open-source

NASA's spacecraft have to function with exquisite precision in extraordinarily harsh environments. An essential part of making that happen is rigorous quality assurance on the systems that go into these spacecraft. Jeanette Plante, a quality-engineering technical fellow in NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, is one of the people charged with ensuring that rigor, which goes far beyond the

THE WORLD'S FOOD SUPPLY is now unimaginable without the tomato, which although often called a vegetable is actually a fruit of the Solanum lycopersicum species, native to Central and South America. It gradually diffused through the world after 1500, finally becoming the world's largest “vegetable” crop, with recent harvests around 180 million metric tons a year, nearly twice that of dry onions, five

GAZING INTO THE DARK and seemingly endless night sky above, people have long wondered: Is there another world like ours out there, somewhere? Thanks to new sensors that we and other astronomers are developing, our generation may be the first to get an affirmative answer-and the earliest hints of another Earth could come as soon as this year.

WIRELESS ISN'T ACTUALLY UBIQUITOUS. We've all seen the effects: Calls are dropped and Web pages sometimes take forever to load. One of the most fundamental reasons why such holes in our coverage occur is that wireless networks today are overwhelmingly configured as star networks, This means there's a centrally located piece of infrastructure, such as a cell tower or a router, that communicates with

IT'S SUNDAY MORNING, and, after your socially distanced morning hike, you look at your schedule for the next few days. You need to restock your refrigerator, but the weekend crowds at the supermarket don't excite you. Monday and Tuesday are jam-packed with Zoom meetings, and you'll also be supervising your children's remote learning. In short, you aren't going to make it to the grocery store anytime

This colorless fuel emits no carbon dioxide when burned. It's abundant and common, and it can be made using renewable electricity, water, and air. Both fuel cells and internal combustion engines can use it. Unlike hydrogen, it doesn't need to be stored in high-pressure tanks or cryogenic dewars. And it has 10 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery. For all these reasons, ammonia (NH 3 )

IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Mark Harris got his start by reporting for Which?, a consumer-products magazine in his native United Kingdom that went beyond corporate rah-rah talk by sending products to a lab for testing. “Since then, I've always had it in the back of my mind that you can't really trust these rah-rah people,” he says from Seattle, where he now lives.

How Facebook's patents unlocked a Pandora's box of echo chambers and misinformation

Getting access to prerelease versions of a platform that you know is going to sell by the million is a great opportunity to get a jump on developing a new open-source product. But it's no guarantee of success: As the team responsible for StereoPi, we soon discovered in building a new version of our stereoscopic vision systems that preliminary hardware can introduce its own quirks into the development

“All engineers should anticipate that theywill have to make big domain shifts in their careers,” says Carl Howe, who has worked on everything from electronic music to large-scale networking and parallel processors. “The life cycle of technologies going from adoption to obsolescence has been shortening over the last century. New engineers should expect to go through at least 10 technology boom-and-bust

PERHAPS THE MOST CELEBRATED graphic image of all time was published in 1869 by Charles Joseph Minard, a French civil engineer. He traced the advance of Napoleon's army into Russia and its retreat from 1812 to 1813 by a sequence of thinning bands representing the total number of men. Four hundred twenty-two thousand soldiers crossed eastward into Russia, 100,000 reached Moscow, and 10,000 crossed the

THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic has brought the broadband gap in the United States into stark relief-5.6 percent of the population has no access to broadband infrastructure. But for an even larger percentage of the population, the issue is that they can't afford access, or they get by on mobile phone plans. Recent estimates, for example, suggest that 15 million to 16 million students-roughly 30 percent of