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

Early one morning last May, a commercial airliner was approaching El Paso International Airport, in West Texas, when a warning popped up in the cockpit: “GPS Position Lost.” The pilot contacted the airline's operations center and received a report that the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range, in South Central New Mexico, was disrupting the GPS signal. “We knew then that it was not an aircraft GPS

In 2015, a group of neuroscientists and engineers assembled to watch a man play the video game Guitar Hero. He held the simplified guitar interface gingerly, using the fingers of his right hand to press down on the fret buttons and his left hand to hit the strum bar. What made this mundane bit of game play so extraordinary was the fact that the man had been paralyzed from the chest down for more than

IN 1960, ASTRONOMER FRANK DRAKE turned the radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., toward two nearby sunlike stars to search for transmissions from intelligent extraterrestrial societies. With a pair of headphones, Drake listened to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for a total of 150 hours across multiple sessions. He heard nothing, except for a single false positive

If you're on Facebook, click on “Why am I seeing this ad?” The answer will look something like “[Advertiser] wants to reach people who may be similar to their customers” or “[Advertiser] is trying to reach people ages 18 and older” or “[Advertiser] is trying to reach people whose primary location is the United States.” Oh, you'll also see “There could also be more factors not listed here.” Such explanations

Cardiac arrhythmia-an irregular heartbeat-can develop in an instant and then quickly, and sometimes fatally, spiral out of control. In the 1960s, physician L. Julian Haywood sought a way to continuously monitor the heart for any rhythm changes. He and his associates developed this prototype digital heart monitor, which they began using in the coronary care unit at what was then Los Angeles County General

With MATLAB® you can use clustering, regression, classification, and deep learning to build predictive models and put them into production.

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Advertisement for Zurich Instruments. Congratulations to Peter Grutter and his group at the Nanoscience & SPM Lab at McGill University on bridging the gap between high spatial and ultrafast temporal resolution to advance molecular and quantum electronics. Observing 100 fs non-linear optical interactions and quantized vibration-modified electron transfer in single molecules with AFM are impressive achievements

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

Contributing Editor W. Wayt Gibbs was well prepared for the assignment when IEEE Spectrum came calling, asking him to dig into the challenges of manufacturing and distributing enough COVID-19 vaccines for all the humans on Planet Earth.

Presents the authors who contributed to this issue of the publication.

Engineers from Fraunhofer IAPT used topology optimization and additive manufacturing to design a heat sink, a common component in many electronic devices. The topology-optimized design was then transformed into a simulation application to automate and customize certain design tasks. Now, engineers, designers, and manufacturers companywide are able to efficiently optimize intricate heat sink geometries

Quantum computers will turbocharge the algorithm that underpins much of modern tech

When you need to send data wirelessly, you have a lot of choices these days. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and cellular connections are some of the more common options, but a relatively new protocol is growing in popularity. LoRa provides low-power, low-bandwidth communications over medium ranges—between 2 and 15 kilometers, depending on how cluttered the environment is.

As Moore's Law sputters, researchers keep looking for ways to boost computing performance. One person working on approaches based around next-generation compilers is Simone Campanoni. As all software written in languages such as C or Java must be passed through a compiler to translate programs into the low-level instructions that the computer executes, any improvements that allow the generated code

In 2008, I concluded that the next major pandemic would arrive before 2021. The very year after this forecast saw a minor event-involving the H1N1 influenza virus-but the 2019 pandemic obviously qualifies as a major global outbreak.

In my office closet, I have a box full of perfectly good smart-home gadgets that are broken only because the companies that built them stopped updating their software. I can't bear to toss them in a landfill, but I don't really know how to recycle them. I'm not alone: Electronic waste, or e-waste, has become much more common.

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Last January in this space we wrote that “technology doesn't really have bad years.” But 2020 was like no other year in recent memory: Just about everything suffered, including technology. One shining exception was biotech, with the remarkably rapid development of vaccines capable of stemming the COVID-19 pandemic.• This year's roundup of anticipated tech advances includes an examination of the challenges

Spoiler alert: We won't get what we want in 2021. A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we can expect to remain in a kind of limbo for months yet, stuck in an uncomfortable place between health and illness, economic contraction and recovery, all while still maintaining awkward distances and yearning for heartwarming hugs.

Apple didn't invent the portable music player, although I challenge you to name one of the approximately 50 digital-music gadgets that preceded the iPod. Apple didn't invent the smartphone either—it just produced the first one that made people line up overnight to buy it.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen, general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote an influential article in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Why Software Is Eating the World.” A decade later now, it's deep learning that's eating the world.

Back in 1990, after significant cost overruns and delays, the Hubble Space Telescope was finally carried into orbit aboard the space shuttle. Astronomers rejoiced, but within a few weeks, elation turned to dread. Hubble wasn't able to achieve anything like the results anticipated, because, simply put, its 2.4-meter mirror was made in the wrong shape.

In a triumph of science, the first two large-scale trials to report the effectiveness of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2—the deadly, highly contagious virus that causes COVID-19—were both great successes right out of the gate. In November, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the much younger biotech company Moderna both reported that their vaccines were about 95 percent effective in preventing cases of

Cranes are a familiar fixture of practically any city skyline, but one in the Swiss City of Ticino, near the Italian border, would stand out anywhere: It has six arms. This 110-meter-high starfish of the skyline isn't intended for construction. It's meant to prove that renewable energy can be stored by hefting heavy loads and dispatched by releasing them.

The Concorde, the world's first supersonic airliner, landed for the last time 17 years ago. It was a beautiful feat of engineering, but it never turned a profit. So why should we believe that Boom Supersonic can do better now?

Companies like Tesla, Uber, Cruise, and Waymo promise a future where cars are essentially mobile robots that can take us anywhere with a few taps on a smartphone. But a new category of vehicles is about to overtake self-driving cars in that leap into the future. Autonomous trucks have been quietly making just as much, if not more, progress toward commercial deployment, and their impact on the transportation

In March 2019, Vice President Mike Pence instructed NASA to do something rarely seen in space projects: move up a schedule. Speaking at a meeting of the National Space Council, Pence noted that NASA's plans for returning humans to the moon called for a landing in 2028. “That's just not good enough. We're better than that,” he said. Instead, he announced that the new goal was to land humans on the moon

West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil and gas will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Since 1989, the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic has relied on a single 7.6-meter satellite dish to connect the island's residents to the rest of the world. While the download and upload speeds have increased over the years, the roughly 4,500 Saints, as the island's residents call themselves, still share a measly 40-megabit-per-second downlink and a 14.4-Mb/s uplink to stay connected.

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Later this year, the Canadian firm Li-Cycle will begin constructing a US $175 million plant in Rochester, N.Y., on the grounds of what used to be the Eastman Kodak complex. When completed, it will be the largest lithium-ion battery-recycling plant in North America.

In the early 20th century, electricity demand was soaring, and the power industry needed help. Newly designed steam generators and turbines were becoming more complex, yet power engineers lacked accurate data about the most important commodity driving those machines: water. Other engineers stepped in to help. Beginning in 1921, Nathan Osborne, Harold Stimson, and Defoe Ginnings worked at the U.S. National

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With MATLAB® you can use clustering, regression, classification, and deep learning to build predictive models and put them into production.

For the past four and a half years, Shreyas Sen has been developing a method for using the human body as a wire, to transmit electrical signals between wearable devices. And the first person he tested it on? Himself. “I do feel if we're trying something new, I should be the first test subject,” Sen says.

Peel back the surf, the sand and the beautiful campus we call home, and you'll see a whole other world. One equally stunning. Because here, world-renowned professors, Nobel laureates and students reimagine what's possible. Their collaboration has transformed oil rigs into reefs and reshaped international law. Over half a century of invention — and reinvention — has allowed our students to achieve the

The stage of the load cycle, potential, local concentration, temperature, and direction of the current all affect the aging and degradation of a battery cell. This is important to consider when developing autonomous vehicles (AVs), which rely on a large number of electronic components to function. When designing long-lasting batteries that are powerful enough to keep up with energy demands, engineers

The approach of a new year is always a time to take stock and be hopeful. This year, though, reflection and hope are more than de rigueur-they're rejuvenating. We're coming off a year in which doctors, engineers, and scientists took on the most dire public threat in decades, and in the new year we'll see the greatest results of those global efforts. COVID-19 vaccines are just months away, and biomedical

The world's most daunting challenges require innovations in engineering, and IEEE is committed to finding the solutions. The IEEE Foundation is leading a special campaign to raise awareness, create partnerships, and generate financial resources needed to combat these global challenges.

In his “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture at Caltech in 1959, physicist Richard Feynman urged his audience to make the microscope ever more powerful so that biologists could explore the “staggeringly small world” beyond. It would be a lot easier to answer fundamental biological questions if we could “just look at the thing,” he said.

Advertisement, IEEE. IEEE journals are trusted, respected, and rank among the most highly cited publications in the industry. IEEE Access is no exception; the journal is included in Scopus, Web of Science, and has an Impact Factor.

THIS CAR, A FOSSIL-FUEL-FREE VEHICLE prototype developed by engineers at the German Aerospace Center, represents a sea change in how vehicles are built and how much energy they use. Its body comprises front and rear sections made of plastic foam sandwiched between thin metal outer layers. The passenger cabin is a two-seater pod designed to absorb the forces acting on the lightweight vehicle in the

ONCE PRICED OUT OF the reach of enthusiasts, field-programmable gate arrays have become affordable in recent years, and have started popping up in all kinds of neat projects. By the very nature of their reconfigurable hardware, FPGAs can be used in many different ways, such as implementing novel CPUs. But from a maker's point of view, a huge part of the attraction lies in the circuits' capacity for

Steven Cherry: People have been talking about CSS—which alternatively stands for carbon capture and storage, or carbon capture and sequestration—for well over a decade. To boost progress, the Carbon XPrize was founded to, as a Spectrum article at the time said, turn “CO 2 molecules into products with higher added value.”

IN 2000, GERMANY launched a deliberately targeted program to decarbonize its primary energy supply, a plan more ambitious than anything seen anywhere else. The policy, called the Energiewende, is rooted in Germany's naturalistic and romantic tradition, reflected in the rise of the Green Party and, more recently, in public opposition to nuclear electricity generation. These attitudes are not shared

I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: A robot haunts my nightmares. For me, Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is 32.5 kilograms (71.1 pounds) of pure terror. It can climb stairs. It can open doors. Seeing it in a video cannot prepare you for the moment you cross paths on a trade-show floor. Now that companies can buy a Spot robot for US $74,500, you might encounter Spot anywhere.

In April of 1966, a shiny white Chevrolet Impala became the first car off the assembly line of a new General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. It was the glorious start of what became a checkered history for the area. This blue-collar town survived an infamous labor strike in 1972, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of GM in 2009, and a string of unmemorable small cars—including the Chevy Vega and Cavalier—before

IT'S OBVIOUS WHY the militaries of the world want missiles that can follow erratic paths at low altitude while flying at five times the speed of sound, eluding any chance at detection or interception. • “Think of it as delivering a pizza, except it's not a pizza,” says Bradley Wheaton, a specialist in hypersonics at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Maryland. “In the

IT'S GREAT TO HAVE NEIGHbors you can depend on, whether you're borrowing a cup of sugar or you need someone to walk your dog while you're out of town. In the western Colorado neighborhood of Basalt Vista, the residents are even closer than most: They share their electricity. But unlike your neighbor with the sugar, the residents of Basalt Vista may not even know when they're being generous. The energy

IN 2007, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney ordered his doctors to disable all wireless signals to and from his Internet-connected pacemaker. Cheney later said that the decision was motivated by his desire to prevent terrorists from being able to hack his pacemaker and use it to lethally shock his heart. Cheney's command to his doctors might seem to some to be overly cautious, but wirelessly connected

NASA's Echo 1 was an early experiment in satellite communication. Launched inside a metal sphere, it inflated in low Earth orbit into a giant Mylar balloon, 30.5 meters across. Project personnel dubbed it a “satelloon.” For four years, it circled the globe every 2 hours, reflecting radio, telephone, and TV signals between ground stations. One of its most novel uses occurred on 9 November 1960, when

The Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University invites applications for multiple tenure-track and tenured faculty positions at the level of Assistant or Associate Professor, although appointment to Full Professor may be considered for candidates with a demonstrated excellent track record in scholarship

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