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On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric Illuminating Co. This master station clock kept a very particular type of time: It used a synchronous self-starting motor in c...

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.As more electric vehicles hit the roads, the environmental impact of their battery production will also increase. This raises a major question: What type of EV battery will be the most environmentally friendly on a large ...

Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use. Employer: Unilever, Colworth Science Park, in Sharnbrook, England Occupat...

Twenty homes scattered across Canada and the northern United States are keeping warm this winter using prototypes of the latest iteration in residential heating systems: cold climate heat pumps. Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t worked well in subzero temperatures....

The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable-energy deployment. At the heart of the problem are utility companies that refuse to pursue interregional transmission project...

Simon Okoro settled into a lawn chair in the Heaven runtime and watched as worlds were born. “I suppose I should feel honored you chose to watch this with me,” said Martin as he sat down next to Simon. “Considering that you don’t believe I exist.” “Can’t we just share a moment? It’s been years since we did anything ...

A novel disc the size of a DVD can hold more than 1 million gigabits—roughly as much as is transmitted per second over the entire world’s Internet—by storing data in three dimensions as opposed to two, a new study finds.Optical discs such as CDs and DVDs encode data using a series of microscopic pits. These pits, an...

In an exclusive interview ahead of an invite-only event today in San Jose, Intel outlined new chip technologies it will offer its foundry customers by sharing a glimpse into its future data-center processors. The advances include more dense logic and a 16-fold increase in the connectivity within 3D-stacked chips, an...

Whenever I hear someone rhapsodize about how much more computer power we have now compared with what was available in the 1960s during the Apollo era, I cringe. Those comparisons usually grossly underestimate the difference. By 1961, a few universities around the world had bought IBM 7090 mainframes. The 7090 was th...

Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you?It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. as the International Business Machines Corp. And a hundred years after th...

Today’s mobile-device speakers and haptic generators have several problems. The first is with the components themselves. The speakers in your smartphone and the system that gives your finger feedback when you touch a virtual button may be relatively small, but they are still big enough to limit how thin our mobile d...

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. If Disney’s history of storytelling has taught us anything, it’s to never underestimate the power of a great sidekick. Even though sidekicks aren’t the stars of the show, they pr...

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away 1 January 2024. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software,” published in Computer, the magazine for members of the IEEE Computer Society, which I read early in my career as an entrepreneur and so...

It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the past decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or research perspective—for a bit over US $200, you can buy a little 27-gram, completely open-source drone, and all you have to do is teach it to fly....

The dream of fusion power inched closer to reality in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) revealed that a fusion reaction had produced more energy than what was required to kick-start it. According to new research, the momentary fusion feat required exquisite choreography...

Since the days of Isaac Newton, the fundamental laws of nature—optics, acoustics, engineering, electronics—all ultimately reduce to a vital, broad set of equations. Now researchers have found a new way to use brain-inspired neural networks to solve these equations significantly more efficiently than before for numer...

Over the past decade, one of the biggest stories in semiconductors has been a surprise eclipsing of traditional silicon—in the field of power electronics, where silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) have raced past silicon to capture multibilllion-dollar segments of the market. And as major applications fe...

Most people have probably experienced the frustration of weak Wi-Fi signals. Even getting a network to cover every corner of a fairly modest house can be a challenge. That’s not a problem for Wi-Fi technology developed by the Australian startup Morse Micro, which just demonstrated a Wi-Fi signal with a 3-kilometer r...

Science fiction as we know it would not exist without Hugo Gernsback. He coined the term “science fiction” as the editor and publisher of Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to the burgeoning genre, which he launched in 1926. The Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy are named after him.Gernsback was a...

If you, like me, think of musical synthesizers as an artifact of 1970s rock and disco, then you, like me, will be surprised to learn that the first electronic synthesizer predates those genres by several decades In 1945, Hugh Le Caine, a physicist at Canada’s National Research Council, began working in his spare tim...

Starlink sent and received texts over a 4G/LTE connection between mobile phones via its latest generation of satellites, called v2mini, for the first time this month, following similar projects from Amazon, Apple, AST SpaceMobile, Huawei, and Lynk Global. Starlink—the satellite constellation operated by SpaceX—will ...

The rising popularity of artificial intelligence has impacted the entire world, including the tiny island of Anguilla. Located in the Caribbean, the country, home to about 15,000 people, has a unique and suddenly in-demand resource.In the late 1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned countries ...

Recent solid-state battery announcements by Volkswagen and QuantumScape are raising hopes in the electric-vehicle market, but automotive battery experts are warning that the road to widespread, solid-state success is still a long and arduous one. A single breakthrough, as if from above, is not likely to turn the who...

IEEE Life Fellow Robert E. Kahn, widely known as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized for “pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet.”The IEEE Foundation sponsors the...