In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote that software is eating the world. Nowadays, the globe is being devoured by a particular kind of software: deep learning, which allows machines to tackle tasks that a short time ago would have seemed inconceivable for a computer to handle, including driving cars and making medical diagnoses. Prepare to add another surprising feat to this list-identifying forged

If you're reading this in the physical pages of IEEE Spectrum, there's a good chance you don't visit our website much, if ever.

In July, U.S. president Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14036, which among other things urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to address “unfair anticompetitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-repair of items.” That order also tasked the Secretary of Commerce to report on “a plan for avoiding contract terms in procurement agreements that make it challenging or impossible for the Department

In 2009, I wrote in these pages about my efforts to add an electric motor to a bicycle—a project that involved a considerable outlay of money and many hours in a machine shop behind a lathe. At the time, e-bikes were still rather exotic, at least in the United States, so it seemed worth the expense and effort to build my own.

When you make technology components that millions of human lives will depend on, meeting both schedules and final operating safety are, to say the least, essential. This is the responsibility shouldered by Ankur Ganguli, executive director of Vehicle Motion Embedded Controls at General Motors Company.

The sport utility vehicle has become an acronym, but the SUV category's name is questionable. What does sport have to do with shopping in Walmart or waiting in a traffic jam? As for the utility, is my Honda Civic not of use, capable of performing several different functions? And the category itself is splitting up, like an amoeba, into two major sub-categories, car SUVs and truck SUVs. Each contains

When I first thought of purchasing an electric bike in 2013, my mind fixed on Tesla's recently released Model S sedan. It represented the promise of electric-a fast, smooth, jaw-dropping machine, one built on innovative ideas to make the impossible possible. This fantasy was dismantled when I stepped foot in my local bike dealer's store. Aside from VanMoof's 10 Electrified, which had just hit the market

The sound must have been deafening-all those champagne corks popping at Christie's, the British auction house, on 15 November 2017. A portrait of Jesus, known as Salvator Mundi (Latin for “savior of the world”), had just sold at Christie's in New York for US $450.3 million, making it by far the most expensive painting ever to change hands.

Growing up in New York City, I always wanted to be a spy. But when I graduated from college in January 1968, the Cold War and Vietnam War were raging, and spying seemed like a risky career choice. So I became an electrical engineer, working on real-time spectrum analyzers for a U.S. defense contractor. In 1976, during a visit to the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, I saw an Enigma, the famous German World

THE FIELD OF AUTOMATED precision agriculture is based on one concept-autonomous driving technologies that guide vehicles through GPS navigation. Fifteen years ago, when high-accuracy GPS became available for civilian use, farmers thought things would be simple: Put a GPS receiver station at the edge of the field, configure a route for a tractor or a combine harvester, and off you go, dear robot! •

For a time, each new processor churned out more waste heat than the last. Had these chips kept on the trajectory they were following in the early 2000s, they would soon have packed about 6,400 watts onto each square centimeter-the power flux on the surface of the sun.

How many IBM PCs can you fit in an 18-wheeler? That, according to historian James W. Cortada, is the most interesting question he's ever asked.

Historians will probably spend decades picking apart the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the shortage of chips that it's caused will be long over by then. A variety of analysts agree that the most problematic shortages will begin to ease in the third or fourth quarter of 2021, though it could take much of 2022 for the resulting chips to work their way through the supply chain to products

As an avid experimenter and builder of random contraptions- and who isn't the best at putting his tools away and normally has multiple projects in various stages of completion-I often run out of work space. So I decided to build a new workbench. One that would be better, not just because it was bigger but because it would be smarter. A bench that could automatically assist me in getting things done

It's easy to set up multiple video feeds in all kinds of locations. Merging those feeds together, combining them with other information, and putting them into context is a tougher challenge, especially when your customers include first responders and intelligence agencies. But that's the job that Cubic Corp. hired Iverson Bell III to do in late 2020, when they chose him “to lead the team responsible

In comparison with Moore's Law, the nonsilicon world's progress can seem rather glacial. Indeed, some designs made of wood or metal came up against their functional limits generations ago.

For decades, our vision of the future has been stuck in a 1960s-era dream of science fiction embodied by The Jetsons and space travel. But that isn't what we need right now. In fact, what if our vision of that particular technologically advanced future is all wrong?

LIFE IS A HARD SCHOOL: First it gives us the test and only then the lesson. Indeed, throughout history humanity has learned much from disasters, wars, financial ruin- and pandemics. A scholarly literature has documented this process in fields as diverse as engineering, risk reduction, management, and urban studies. And it's already clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the arrival of the future

IN EACH OF OUR BRAINS, 86 billion neurons work in parallel, processing inputs from senses and memories to produce the many feats of human cognition. The brains of other creatures are less broadly capable, but those animals often exhibit innate aptitudes for particular tasks, abilities honed by millions of years of evolution.

Europa, one of Jupiter's Galilean moons, has twice as much liquid water as Earth's oceans, if not more. An ocean estimated to be anywhere from 40 to 100 miles (60 to 150 kilometers) deep spans the entire moon, locked beneath an icy surface over a dozen kilometers thick. The only direct evidence for this ocean is the plumes of water that occasionally erupt through cracks in the ice, jetting as high

YOU'VE PROBABLY PLAYED hundreds, maybe thousands, of videos on your smartphone. But have you ever thought about what happens when you press “play”? • The instant you touch that little triangle, many things happen at once. In microseconds, idle compute cores on your phone's processor spring to life. As they do so, their voltages and clock frequencies shoot up to ensure that the video decompresses and

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In 2014, two distinguished Google engineers wrote for IEEE Spectrum about the sobering lessons they’d learned while trying to develop renewable-energy systems that were as cheap as coal. That article, titled “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change,” struck a chord. By the metric of online readership, it was the seventh most popular article Spectrum published in the 2010s. The piece bluntly

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A surgeon at the University Hospital in Essen, Germany, wears a pair of glasses that allow him to see three-dimensional reconstructions of surgical images. The glasses are part of the nearly €70 million upgrade to the hospital’s eye and ENT (ear, nose, and throat) operating theater. The glasses make it easier for surgeons to visualize where body layers, such as bone, are during an operation, even if

Summary form only given, as follows. Problem: In the 1950s, major air disasters were on the rise, but determining the cause was often nearly impossible. Solution: Fit aircraft with a sturdy device that records cockpit conversation for recovery after a crash. Today the flight data and voice recorder seems like an obvious invention, but when David Warren first proposed it at Australia’s Aeronautical

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Ever since a new class of materials called topological insulators was first created-a discovery that helped win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016-researchers have been intrigued by the possibilities for electronics applications such as ultralow-energy transistors, cancer-scanning lasers, and free-space communication beyond 5G. Topological insulators' unusual name stems from their being insulating

Between our modern era of ubiquitous interactive computers and the early days of batch-fed scarce giants lies the minicomputing age. Minicomputers were cheap enough that you could risk letting nonspecialists touch them, and they transformed computing's place in the world. The champions of this era belonged to the Digital Equipment Corp.'s line of PDP computers, starting with the PDP-8 in 1965.

When your job involves working on sensitive information, products and projects' how do you talk about it, not just at work, but also at conferences, when mentoring or recruiting, or at dinner and social events?

Standardization makes life easier, but it is often impossible to introduce it to systems that have a messy evolutionary history. Electricity supply is a case in point.

Ten years ago, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed that software was eating the world. Today, the hottest features in the latest phones are software updates or AI improvements, not faster chips or new form factors. Technology is becoming more mundane, and ultimately, invisible.

Seven years ago, we published an article in IEEE Spectrum titled “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.” We described what we had learned as Google engineers who worked on a well-intentioned but ultimately failed effort to cut the cost of renewable energy. We argued that incremental improvements to existing energy technologies weren't enough to reverse climate change, and we advocated

Think of the many tasks to which computers are being applied that in the not-so-distant past required human intuition. Computers routinely identify objects in images, transcribe speech, translate between languages, diagnose medical conditions, play complex games, and drive cars.

ON 25 JUNE 1912, the Irish writer, inventor, and physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe demonstrated a curious machine at the Optical Society Convention in London. He called it an “exploring optophone,” and his remarkable claim was that it allowed people who were completely blind to “hear” light. The optophone's sensing apparatus-a cell that relied on the photoelectric properties of selenium-was housed

Tick, tick, tick. The rhythm of clocks is universal. But how exactly alike are those ticks? For some vital applications, even vanishingly small deviations can be a problem.

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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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