In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and bal … | Continue reading
The America’s Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age report, published last year by the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, and Labor, identified a significant engineering and skills gap. The 27-page report concluded that the shortage of talent in essenti … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjo … | Continue reading
Raquel Urtasun has spent 16 years in the self-driving space, long enough to navigate every metaphorical glorious hill and plunging valley. She took the trip from the early “pipe dream” dismissals, to the “we’re this close” certainty, and back again.The industry is now riding a … | Continue reading
Engineering is so much more than solving problems or writing efficient code. It is about creating solutions that affect billions of lives and contributing to a profession built on innovation, responsibility, and collaboration. Although technical skills remain critical, what truly … | Continue reading
Every generation of mobile networks, from 1G to 5G, has rewritten the rules of how the world lives and works. The coming 6G revolution, by decade’s end, will represent a new direction still, toward a universal data fabric where millions of agents collaborate in real-time across t … | Continue reading
Last year IEEE launched its first virtual career fair to help strengthen the engineering workforce and connect top talent with industry professionals. The event, which was held in the United States, attracted thousands of students and professionals. They learned about more than 5 … | Continue reading
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!How to Keep Your Engineering Ski … | Continue reading
There’s a moment in John Williams’s Star Wars overture when the brass surges upward. You don’t just hear it; you feel propulsion turning into pure possibility.On 16 March 1926, in a snow-dusted field in Auburn, Mass., Robert Goddard created an earlier version of that same feeling … | Continue reading
In April of 2025, OpenAI released a new version of GPT-4o, one of the AI algorithms users could select to power ChatGPT, the company’s chatbot. The next week, OpenAI reverted to the previous version. “The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as syc … | Continue reading
Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer?There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It’s called … | Continue reading
Innovation rarely happens in isolation. Usually, the systems that engineers design are shaped by global teams whose members’ knowledge and ideas move across borders as easily as data.That is especially true in my field of robotics and automation—where hardware, software, and huma … | Continue reading
When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many Europe … | Continue reading
A simmering dispute between the United States Department of Defense (DOD) and Anthropic has now escalated into a full-blown confrontation, raising an uncomfortable but important question: who gets to set the guardrails for military use of artificial intelligence — the executive b … | Continue reading
Through the Artemis Program, NASA hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon in its southern polar region. China, Russia, and the European Space Agency (ESA) have similar plans, all of which involve building bases near the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs)—crater … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjo … | Continue reading
Inside a cavernous hall at the Swiss-French border, the air hums with high voltage and possibility. From his perch on the wraparound observation deck, physicist Walter Wuensch surveys a multimillion-dollar array of accelerating cavities, klystrons, modulators, and pulse compresso … | Continue reading
No one had very high career aspirations for teenager David A. Weston—except for Weston himself. Growing up in London, he scored low on the U.K. national assessment test given to students finishing primary school. The result meant that his next path was either to become a laborer … | Continue reading
At first glance, the Aria EV looks not much different than any other student-built electric prototype—no different than the battery-powered cars built by engineering students from dozens of universities every year. Beneath its panels, however, is a challenge to the modern auto in … | Continue reading
Taara started as a Google X moonshot spinoff aimed at connecting rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa with beams of light. Its newest product, debuting this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, aims at a different kind of connectivity problem: getting internet access into … | Continue reading
As data center developers frantically seek to secure power for their operations, one start-up is proposing a novel solution: build them into floating offshore wind turbines. San Francisco-based offshore wind power developer Aikido Technologies today announced its plans to start h … | Continue reading
This year’s annual election, which begins on 17 August, will include candidates for IEEE president-elect and other officer positions up for election.To see who is running for 2027 IEEE president-elect and the petition candidates, visit the election website.The ballot also include … | Continue reading
When Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska received a Fields Medal—widely regarded as the Nobel Prize for mathematics—in July 2022, it was big news. Not only was she the second woman to accept the honor in the award’s 86-year history, but she collected the medal just months af … | Continue reading
Every time Russia attacks Ukraine’s power infrastructure, Ukrainian engineers risk their lives in the scramble to get electricity flowing again. It’s a dangerous job at best, and a lethal one at worst. It also requires creativity. Time pressure and equipment shortages make it nea … | Continue reading
Sometimes a visually compelling metaphor is all you need to get an otherwise complicated idea across. In the summer of 2001, a Tulane physics professor named John P. Perdew came up with a banger. He wanted to convey the hierarchy of computational complexity inherent in the behavi … | Continue reading
Self-driving cars often struggle with with situations that are commonplace for human drivers. When confronted with construction zones, school buses, power outages, or misbehaving pedestrians, these vehicles often behave unpredictably, leading to crashes or freezing events, causin … | Continue reading
Consider a powerful parallel between the advancements made during the Renaissance and the developments made by today’s engineers.The Renaissance was a uniquely fertile era. Its ethos of curiosity and creativity fostered unprecedented collaboration across disciplines. Artists, sci … | Continue reading
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will have smashed billions of particles together. In all likelihood, it will have found exactly what it found yesterday: more evidence to support the Standard Model of particle physics.For the enginee … | Continue reading
When Xiangyi Cheng published her first journal paper as a principal investigator in IEEE Access in 2024, it marked more than a professional milestone. For Cheng, an IEEE member and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, it … | Continue reading
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quantify and characterize the phe … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjo … | Continue reading
When doctors in the United States refer patients to specialty or post-acute medical care such as physical therapy or long-term nursing care, nearly half never complete the process of finding help. Referrals stall in part because provider directories are outdated, insurance covera … | Continue reading
As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy-intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has … | Continue reading
This is a sponsored article brought to you by Audio Precision.Bluetooth started as a simple wireless connection between a phone and a headset. Since its inception, it has become the invisible scaffolding for music, calls, gaming, and hearing assistance across consumer and profess … | Continue reading
What’s the difference between a stupid idea and a brilliant one? Sometimes, it just comes down to resources. Practically unlimited funds, like limitless thrust, can get even a mad idea off the ground. And so it might be for the concept of putting AI data centers in orbit. In a ra … | Continue reading
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!Standing Out as a Remote Worker … | Continue reading
Mathematics is often regarded as the ideal domain for measuring AI progress effectively. Math’s step-by-step logic is easy to track, and its definitive automatically verifiable answers remove any human or subjective factors. But AI systems are improving at such a pace that math b … | Continue reading
3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound e … | Continue reading
For Cinzia DaVià, collaboration isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the approach she applies to all her professional endeavors.From her contributions to the development of a silicon sensor used in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) particle accelerator experiments to her c … | Continue reading
Your smartwatch can track a lot of things, but at least for now, it can’t keep an accurate eye on your blood pressure. Last week researchers from University of Texas at Austin showed a way you smartwatch someday could. They were able to discern blood pressure by reflecting radio … | Continue reading
AI has driven an explosion of new number formats—the ways in which numbers are represented digitally. Engineers are looking at every possible way to save computation time and energy, including shortening the number of bits used to represent data. But what works for AI doesn’t nec … | Continue reading
Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: societies are deciding it’s no longer kids’ stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum ag … | Continue reading
The first time she tried to seduce me,(atoms falling in a vacuum)she asked about blackberries—(every mass exerts some gravity)Did I know their season, where they grow?(galvanometers, gravimeters)I could answer both easily—(tools to measure small attractions)down the dirt road in … | Continue reading
Data centers for AI are turning the world of power generation on its head. There isn’t enough power capacity on the grid to even come close to how much energy is needed for the number being built. And traditional transmission and distribution networks aren’t efficient enough to t … | Continue reading
IEEE has enhanced its standing as a trusted, neutral authority on the role of technology in climate change mitigation and adaption. Last year it became the first technical association to be invited to a U.N. Conference of the Parties on Climate Change.IEEE representatives partici … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjo … | Continue reading
More money has been invested in AI than it took to land on the moon. Spending on the technology this year is projected to reach up to $700 billion, almost double last year’s spending. Part of the impetus for this frantic outlay is a conviction among investors and policymakers in … | Continue reading
In the rapidly evolving world of engineering technology, professionals devote enormous energy to such tasks as mastering the latest frameworks, optimizing architectures, and refining machine learning models. It’s easy to let technical expertise become the sole measure of professi … | Continue reading