One day in late 2009, Patrick Mercier, along with a fellow graduate student at MIT and their Ph.D. advisor, sat down with surgeon Konstantina Stankovic to talk about next-generation cochlear implants and other sensors for patients with profound hearing loss. During this conversation, Stankovic pointed out a tiny region within the inner ear that she said had a relatively high concentration of ions.

IF YOU WERE TRYING TO IDENTIFY THE HANDFUL of companies that created a business out of the emergence of electrical engineering in the Victorian era, certainly the list would have to include General Electric. GE's lighting business was established by Thomas Edison in 1892, and it was just sold to engineering wunderkind Robert Madonna and his team at Savant Systems, in Hyannis, Mass. Savant builds high-end

If ever there was life on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover should be able to find signs of it. The rover, scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, in late July or early August, is designed to drill through rocks in an ancient lake bed and examine them for biosignatures, extract oxygen from the atmosphere, and collect soil samples that might someday be returned to Earth.

Drivers can use a number of signals to communicate with other drivers: taillights, high beams, the horn. But car manufacturers envision a future where cars themselves will exchange messages about where they're going and where they've been.

A new study analyzing more than a million samples of Android malware illustrates how malicious apps have evolved over time. The results, published in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, show that malware coding is becoming more cleverly hidden, or obfuscated.

Accurate, instant, cheap, and portable tests for the Coronavirus and its antibodies would allow frequent testing on a mass scale. But the road to such tools is long. Or is it?

Telecommunications can never be too secure. That's why researchers continue to explore new encryption methods. One emerging method is called ghost polarization communication, or GPC. Researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, recently demonstrated this approach in a proof-of-principle experiment.

THE WORLD'S attention turned to space missions in May. That's when two NASA astronauts were the first to be launched into space by an entity other than a nation-state. They're also the first to travel from the United States to the International Space Station (ISS) since 2011, when the space shuttle program ended. But while most of us weren't looking, the important work aboard the space station was

When opportunity knocks, open the door: No one has taken heed of the adage like Nvidia, which has transformed itself from a company focused on catering to the needs of video gamers to one at the heart of the artificial-intelligence revolution. In 2001, no one predicted that the same processor architecture developed to draw realistic explosions in 3D would be just the thing to power a renaissance in

For more than seven years, Blessin Varkey has headed the accessibility lab at Tamana, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that runs two schools and a skill development center for individuals with intellectual, learning, and developmental disabilities. At the lab, his team creates tech tools for sharpening the cognitive, behavioral, and social skills of students. Varkey has been invited to speak about accessibility

AIR CONDITIONING was devised not for comfort but for industry, specifically to control temperature and humidity in a color printing factory in Brooklyn. The process required feeding paper into the presses a number of times, once for each of the component colors, and the slightest misalignment caused by changes in humidity produced defective copies that had to be thrown away.

CONSENT HAS BECOME a big topic in the wake of the Me Too movement. But consent isn't just about sex. At its core, it's about respect and meeting people where they are at. As we add connected devices to homes, offices, and public places, technologists need to think about consent.

"SPRING FESTIVAL. New virus. Spreading person to person. This one has everything." That's the whole of an email message that I dashed off to a friend, a fellow China watcher, on 21 January, after reading a BBC story about China's then-tiny COVID-19 epidemic. Something in that story rang alarm bells in my head.

SOME YEARS AGO, the three of us found ourselves together in a very long security line at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. Maybe, we joked, Superman could use his X-ray vision to help out the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees and the traveling masses.

Admit it-you love your smart watch and all the amazing things you can do with it. But the task of keeping it charged can be annoying. A longer battery life would be great—but with batteries, the amount of energy stored correlates with volume, and bigger batteries add bulk and weight. All wearables, including fitness trackers, audio-enhancing hearables that go in your ear, and augmented-reality contact

On a cold March night last year in Portsmouth, England, an entirely new type of aircraft flew for the first time, along a dimly lit 120-meter corridor in a cavernous building once used to build minesweepers for the Royal Navy. • This is the Phoenix, an uncrewed blimp that has no engines but propels itself forward by varying its buoyancy and its orientation. The prototype measures 15 meters in length

BALANCING ACT: Electricity demand and generation near Onslow, in Western Australia, are continuously balanced thanks to a software-based microgrid controller. It monitors grid conditions at the millisecond scale, allowing efficient use of a 1-megawatt solar farm [left] and a 2.5-MW battery storage facility [middle]. A similar microgrid controller on Jeju Island in South Korea [right] maximizes the

On 12 December 1975, Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson thought he was ready to snap his first digital picture. His portable camera was a prototype that he'd built to test the imaging capabilities of a Fairchild Semiconductor 100-by-100-pixel charge-coupled device. The prototype used a repurposed movie camera lens and recorded the image onto audio tape. It ran on 16 AA batteries, weighed 3.6 kilograms

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As A KID, LARRY HERBST LOVED TINKERING. Naturally enough for someone like that, he trained as an electrical engineer. But early on he decided that a career in engineering might end up forcing him to focus more narrowly than he would like. So after graduating from Brown University, he changed course and studied filmmaking. Ever since, he's made his living as a filmmaker and videographer, and he has

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We're hearing about the problem daily: There aren't enough test kits available to accurately track the new Coronavirus. It's a global problem, although some countries-including the United States-are doing a worse job of testing than others. ¶ More testing, epidemiologists say, would give us a better understanding of how the virus is moving through the population and whether it's waxing or waning. And

There are 53 nuclear reactors currently under construction around the world. Only two are in the United States, once the world's leader in nuclear energy development. And those two reactors represent expansions of a preexisting two-reactor facility, Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga.

Wireless communications most often travel via radio waves. But some scientists see potential in using light to transmit data.

A handful of major technology companies are going all in on a new security model they're calling confidential computing in an effort to better protect data in all its forms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected virtually every facet of life, including scientific research carried out at companies and universities around the world.

Magnetic tape and hard disk drives hold much of the world's archival data. Compared with other memory and storage technologies, tape and disk drives cost less and are more reliable. They're also nonvolatile, meaning they don't require a constant power supply to preserve data. Cultural institutions, financial firms, government agencies, and film companies have relied on these technologies for decades

DRONES ARE USED FOR WORK, play, and even war. But now they've found a new application. Desperate authorities- responding to public gatherings where people make themselves possible vectors for the spread of the coronavirus-have turned to flying drones equipped with loudspeakers that play messages telling people to disperse. This drone was photographed in early April as it hovered over shoppers at a

Was the Sinclair Scientific calculator elegant? It certainly was a hit, gracing the cover of publications like Popular Mechanic s after its release in 1974. Cleverly written firmware dragooned its limited processor, intended only for basic arithmetic, into performing way beyond specifications. This allowed Sinclair to sell a scientific calculator to countless folks who otherwise could not have afforded

After falling slightly in 2018, the number of women in tech being offered less than men for the same job at the same company jumped back up in 2019—to 63 percent. Meanwhile, the average salary differential between U.S. tech workers identifying as male and those identifying as female held steady at 3 percent, according to a 2020 study by the job search firm Hired that was released at the end of March

GIVEN THAT SOME 4,600 years have elapsed since the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the structure stands remarkably intact. It is a polyhedron with a regular polygon base, its volume is about 2.6 million cubic meters, and its original height was 146.6 meters, including the lost pyramidion, or capstone. We may never know exactly how the pyramid was built, but even so, we can say with some confidence

THE INTERNET of Things makes the invisible visible. That's the IoT's greatest feature, but also its biggest potential drawback. More sensors on more people means the IoT becomes a visible web of human connections that we can use to, say, track down a virus.

BACK IN 2012, Netflix released Chaos Monkey, an open-source tool for triggering random failures in critical computing infrastructure. Similar stress testing, at least in a simulated environment, has been applied in other contexts such as banking, but we've never stress tested industrial production during a viral pandemic. Until now.

Around the globe, epidemiologists, statisticians, biologists, and health officials are grappling with these questions. Though engineering perspectives are uncommon in epidemiological modeling, we believe that in this case public officials could greatly benefit from one. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic isn't an obvious or typical engineering problem. But in its basic behavior it is an unstable, open-loop

Ground crews remove cargo from the MD-11 and get the many packages into delivery trucks and small planes as quickly as possible before the start of the morning rush of cargo from Amazon, Walmart, and other online retailers scrambling to deliver Christmas gifts. Meanwhile, construction is snarling traffic on the I-10 freeway into Los Angeles, and because of the fog, the I-15 is no better. Similar messes

THE SEAS HAD TURNED ROUGH as a sudden squall whipped up the winds enough to howl through the rigging. And with those winds came a powerful smell of oil. Soon I could see the characteristic rainbow sheen from my position on the rail of this fishing trawler. It was May of 2016, and we were in the Gulf of Mexico, about 16 kilometers off the southeast coast of Louisiana. · "Skimmer in the water," bellowed

Rossum's Universal Robots-or R.U.R., as it had become known- had premiered two years earlier in Prague and had already become a worldwide sensation. The play, written by Karel Ğapek, describes the creation of enslaved synthetic humans, or robots-a term derived from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor." Ğapek's robots, originally made to serve their human masters, gained consciousness and rebelled

It was about the size of a three-ring binder and weighed 4.5 kilograms. Introduced in 1982, the Graphical Retrieval Information Display (GRiD) Compass was the first portable computer to feature a clamshell design. The bright amber of the laptop's 21.6-centimeter plasma screen could be "viewed from any angle and under any lighting conditions," according to its maker, GRiD Systems Corp. The computer

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The issue you hold in your hands—or are reading on your computer, tablet, or phone—is the first issue that the IEEE Spectrum staff has ever produced with the entire team working at home, spread across eight U.S. states.

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The United States finds itself once more confronting a major natural disaster, albeit one on a scale not experienced since the flu pandemic of 1918. Factors contributing to the crisis are the obvious lack of preparedness on the part of government and the notable absence of coherent decision-making processes for quarantine protocols and the distribution of financial stimulus packages. Add to that the

A respiratory virus named SARS-CoV-2 spread from a market in Wuhan, China, to more than 200 countries in just four months. As of press time, it had infected 1.9 million people, causing a disease known as COVID-19 that has already killed 117,000.

In March, because of the coronavirus, self-driving car companies, including Argo, Aurora, Cruise, Pony, and Waymo, suspended vehicle testing and operations that involved a human driver. Around the same time, Waymo and Ford released open data sets of information collected during autonomous-vehicle tests and challenged developers to use them to come up with faster and smarter self-driving algorithms

The U.S. Global Positioning System fleet of satellites provides critical data for navigation apps, banks, power grids, and other commercial and government infrastructure. But for the past decade, it has operated without a safety net, with no backup system in place. Now, two U.S. federal agencies want to change that, and they could select one or more alternatives by September.

A new sensor could make it safer for humans and robots to interact.

Want more computing power in your processor? Add more silicon. But complexity and cost are starting to erode that maxim.

THE CORONAVIRUS has killed thousands and has made venturing past our front doors a life-and-death gamble. But we're fighting back with all the technology and creativity at our disposal. To dispel fears of going out in public, authorities around the globe are deploying robotslike this one being operated by a volunteer in Wuhan, China-that roll through the streets spraying a disinfectant that makes it

I AM A MEMBER OF A TEAM at IBM Research-Europe, in Zurich, developing microfluidic technologies for medical applications. Two years ago, I was asked to provide high-quality photos and videos of our microfluidic chips for a big tech event. I borrowed a 4K camcorder from a colleague, attached a macro lens to it, built a custom light diffuser using an LED matrix and polyester film, and positioned everything

PREDICTIONS OF WHEN we would run out of oil have been around for a century, but the idea that peak production was rapidly approaching and that it would be followed by ruinous decline gained wider acceptance thanks to the work of M. King Hubbert, an American geologist who worked for Shell in Houston.

LIKE CLEAN WATER and electricity, broadband access has become a modern-day necessity. The spread of COVID-19 and the ensuing closure of schools and workplaces and even the need for telemedicine make this seem like a new imperative, but the idea is over a decade old. Broadband is a fundamental human right, essential in times like now, but just as essential when the world isn't in chaos.

EVEN THOUGH I understand how it works, I consistently find Google's ability to know how long it will take me to drive somewhere nothing less than magical. GPS signals stream location and speed data from the legion of smartphones in vehicles on the roads between my origin and my destination; it takes only a bit of math to come up with an estimate accurate to within a few minutes.

IT'S A PLACE OF SUPERLATIVES. Reporters have called it the most polluted place in the Western Hemisphere. It's also the location of one of the largest construction projects in the world. · At the Hanford Site in south-central Washington state, 177 giant tanks sit below the sandy soil, brimming with the radioactive remnants of 44 years of nuclear-materials production. From World War II through the Cold

THE ERA OF TELECOMMUNICAtions systems designed solely by humans is coming to an end. From here on, artificial intelligence will play a pivotal role in the design and operation of these systems. The reason is simple: rapidly escalating complexity.

Deep-speare's creation is nonsensical when you read it closely, but it certainly "scans well," as an English teacher would say-its rhythm, rhyme scheme, and the basic grammar of its individual lines all seem fine at first glance. As our research team discovered when we showed our Al's poetry to the world, that's enough to fool quite a lot of people; most readers couldn't distinguish the AI-generated

It was 1995. Advances in chip technology continued apace with Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, generally because of the shrinking size of those transistors.

WANT TO GIVE YOUR CODING chops a public workout? Then prove what you can do with the BBC Micro Bot. Billed as the world's first "8-bit cloud," and launched in February, the BBC Micro Bot is a Twitter account that waits for people to tweet at it. Then the bot takes the tweet, runs it through an emulator of the classic 1980s BBC Microcomputer running BASIC, and posts a video of 3 seconds of the output

In 1895 the Russian physicist Aleksandr S. Popov invented a device for detecting electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. More than just a lightning detector, Popov's invention proved the feasibility of radio transmission. He demonstrated it in St. Petersburg on 7 May 1895. Meanwhile, in Italy, Guglielmo Marconi was developing his radio apparatus. In most of the world, Marconi became known as radio's