Technology & Engineering

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Applying Different Forms of Mentorship

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!Asking someone to be your mentor is weird. Walking up to someone and asking, “Will you be my mentor?” has always seemed to me like the adult version of a kid walking up to another kid at a party and asking, “Will you be my friend?”What you’re really asking is: “Will you commit some amount of unpaid time to guiding my career for an indefinite period?”...

📅 2026-09-02 19:45:58 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

NASA’s Cargo-Moving Robotic Arm Named 300th IEEE Milestone

In the 1960s NASA began developing a system of reusable space shuttles to make its work more efficient and to reduce costs. The shuttles could launch like rockets, maneuver in Earth’s orbit, and land like airplanes. They also could carry large satellites to and from orbit.Like other types of transportation, machinery eventually breaks down, and parts need to be replaced or fixed. And the cargo being carried to and from Earth has to be moved to its final destination. To complete such tasks, Spar Aerospace (now part of MDA Space) of Brampton, Ont., Canada, and the National Research Council in Ot...

📅 2026-09-02 18:00:03 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

A little over a decade ago, I led the controls design for a first-of-its-kind full digital-control system for a U.S. nuclear plant. It was, on paper, a beautiful machine—engineered to run itself the way a modern airliner does, with operators watching over a system that rarely needed them. And we made a decision that, to an efficiency-minded observer, looked backward: We deliberately left manual steps inside sequences the system could execute on its own.We were solving a specific problem. An operator who only ever supervises automation slowly stops being an operator. The hands go cold. The ment...

📅 2026-09-02 13:00:04 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

IEEE President’s Note: Technology for Social Good

Across IEEE, our strength lies not only in the excellence of our individual communities but also in our ability to bring them together around shared problems that demand interdisciplinary solutions. Our mission as a public charity—to advance technology for the benefit of humanity—is becoming an increasingly powerful differentiator. It is more than a statement of principle; it is a strategic advantage. When engineers and technologists serve with purpose and lead with heart, they strengthen the future of our profession and demonstrate why IEEE is uniquely positioned to lead at the intersection o...

📅 2026-09-01 18:00:04 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

This Teen Helped Native American Students Earn Ham Radio Licenses

For many high school students, summer vacation is a time to unplug. For Ruchira Shree, a rising sophomore at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School South, in New Jersey, the break allows her to ramp up her extracurricular pursuits.Much of her time is spent assisting with IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section activities. She got involved with the PCJS because of her mother, IEEE Senior Member Shubha Bommalingaiahnapallya, a principal engineer at Intel.“I started going to the IEEE meetings when I was little,” Shree says. “I used to go with my mom and just sit in the back of the room.”This summer sh...

📅 2026-08-31 18:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

The E.U.’s AI Drive Undermines Its Own Chip Strategy

This story was originally published by Tech Policy Press.The European Union’s push for technological sovereignty faces an uncomfortable contradiction.As the E.U. rolls out AI factories, gigafactories, and new data centers, it is creating a surge in demand for the advanced semiconductors that underpin artificial intelligence. Yet Europe produces fewer than 10 percent of the world’s chips and remains heavily dependent on U.S. designers and Asian manufacturers for the most advanced processors.That tension sits at the heart of Chips Act 2.0, the European Commission’s planned overhaul of its flagsh...

📅 2026-08-31 14:00:04 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

The First Battery Was Inspired By a Dead Frog

In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibillion-dollar global battery industry. The object’s invention in 1799 grew out of a disagreement that Alessandro Volta—the Italian physicist for whom the unit of measurement for electrical potential is named—had with his friend Luigi Galvani over a dead frog.The Debate Over Animal Electricity Galvani was a well-respected Italian physician. In the 1...

📅 2026-08-31 12:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Noodling on Nuclear Engines

One day in 1982, Joseph “Rod” Canion and two colleagues from Texas Instruments sat down at the House of Pies in Houston and used a placemat to sketch out what would become Compaq’s portable PC. In 1996, Felix Zandman, founder of Vishay Intertechnology, dined at Husker Steak House in Columbus, Neb., grabbed a napkin and drafted a design for a power metal strip resistor, which became crucial to power-management components in industrial, automotive, and consumer applications. Now that wispy piece of paper resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Perhaps most famously, Rob...

📅 2026-08-29 15:35:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Oscar Winner Brings Monsters to Life With His Simulation Software

While walking to school as a child, Jernej Barbič would marvel at how beautiful his home was. He was born and raised in a picturesque village in northwestern Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), located in the European Alps. Surrounded by alpine and beech trees, Barbic dreamed of replicating their swaying in the wind for others to enjoy.At the time, he didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create a system that could do that, but it sparked his interest in computer graphics, he says.Jernej BarbičEmployer University of Southern California, in Los AngelesTitle Professor of computer scienceMember g...

📅 2026-08-28 18:00:04 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Make a Portable Wide-screen Mechanical TV

I never intended to join the cutting edge of electromechanical television. I just wanted to make a nice clock. But sometimes you have to go where the engineering takes you, and in my case it took me to the Scanwheel, a pocket-size wide-screen electromechanical TV with a resolution of 4,096 by 20 pixels. Yup, that’s 4K by 20. The 3D-printed drum [top] is spun by a motor controlled by a driver board [second row, from top]. The driver board, in turn, is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico [middle], which also controls the LEDs [second row, from bottom], which are mounted in the 3D-printed casing [b...

📅 2026-08-27 14:46:56 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

IEEE Student Conference Provides Visibility to Budding Authors

The IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) honor society is preparing to host the Innovating the Future event on 6 November.The inaugural one-day, in-person event is designed to provide a forum for IEEE and IEEE-HKN undergraduate and graduate student authors to present their original research papers. A keynote address and thematic presentation sessions are planned as well. Student attendees can network with their peers and gain firsthand experience with the academic publishing process.To present at the conference, students had to submit an abstract of their research before 1 May. Students whose work was...

📅 2026-08-26 20:00:04 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

A New NASA Design Turbocharges Nuclear Spacecraft

Summary NASA and industry engineers propose a synchronal bimodal nuclear rocket (S‑BNR) to dramatically cut transit times to destinations around the solar system, such as Mars, by combining nuclear thermal and electric propulsion. S‑BNR uses a single reactor with two independent fluid loops and correspondingly optimized fuel zones, eliminating complex mode-switching valves while providing both high thrust and continuous electric power. Major challenges include developing fuel elements that integrate well together, ground testing, nuclear launch safety, and multi-agency collaboration to mature ...

📅 2026-08-26 12:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA

At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 through the Vietnam War and on past the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The machine stopped running only when its moving parts finally gave out.The Harvest computer mattered because of what it was as well as when it ran. For 14 years, it was the engine processing the NSA’s most sensit...

📅 2026-08-25 13:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

AI Companion Robots Are Closing the Human Connection in Modern Homes

This article is brought to you by Ollobot.From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limited by simple voice-command interactions and narrow functionality. Once the novelty wore off, many ended up sitting unused on shelves. As some of those companies went out of business and turned off their servers, many owners likened it to losing a pet.What Ollobot describes as “gentle intelligence” is a useful way to th...

📅 2026-08-25 10:00:03 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

IEEE Senior Membership Demystified

For most of my career, my IEEE membership sat quietly in the background—a line on my résumé, a discount code for a conference registration, and access to the IEEE Xplore digital library, which I underutilized. I didn’t think much about the grade of membership available above that of the regular member. I assumed senior membership was reserved for people further along in their career than I was. They published more papers, had more gray hair, and had worked longer in the field.I was wrong on all three counts. The misunderstanding cost me an important validation of my skills and professional com...

📅 2026-08-24 18:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

What It Takes to Be an Adaptable Engineer

The AI boom has disrupted the way engineers work, introducing new tools to learn, raising expectations for what teams can achieve in a workday, and making it harder to get hired in the first place. This makes it difficult to advise students on which specific coding languages or technical skills they should learn. So amidst the uncertainty, advice for young professionals often turns to a common refrain: Be adaptable. But what does adaptability look like in practice? Engineers often operate on the cutting edge of technology, so dealing with change is a normal part of the job, says Samantha Brunh...

📅 2026-08-24 14:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Building Technology People Can Trust

This article is brought to you by Emerson.I’ve spent much of my career as an engineer, including years in the semiconductor industry. And one lesson has stayed with me through every major technology shift: innovation always creates new complexity.In semiconductors, we have seen that repeatedly. Every generation has delivered breakthroughs in performance and capability, but each step forward made it harder to understand system behavior. What used to be easy to validate on the component level with a test bench now needs a much wider view. “The future of engineering will be defined by who can ver...

📅 2026-08-24 11:37:02 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Poetry for Engineers: Safe Distance

How do I touch youacross the ocean,across cold depthswhere light travels through glass.Not copper—fibers. Optical. Through liquid glass, through flickering lightthat carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses. You say: it’s easier this way. What are we missing like this? You smile.Safe distance. I say: network. Signals slide beneath the sea, through cables thinner than trust, faster than touch,slower than longing. We stand alone, together. Synchronous, yet apart. Icons replace skin, latency replaces breath. This distance protects us. Silence that feels intentional. Everything is under ...

📅 2026-08-23 13:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites

Balaji Ingole rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together.Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. It wasn’t until he reached middle school that he encountered a computer lab, an experience he says changed his life. Almost immediately, he says, the machine felt like a window into a different scale of possibility for him.Balaji IngoleEmployer Amla Commerce in MilwaukeeTitle Project managerMember grade Senior memberAlm...

📅 2026-08-21 18:00:01 • IEEE Spectrum

Technology & Engineering

Stop Hunting, Start Solving: Accelerating Root Cause Analysis with Agentic AI

About this WebinarTurn Yield Excursions into Faster, More Confident Root Cause AnalysisWhen a yield issue emerges, the answer rarely lives in a single system. Critical clues are spread across metrology data, tool traces, chemical analysis, and facilities systems, while growing data volumes make traditional dashboards slow, fragmented, and difficult to act on.What You’ll Learn:Discover how a purpose-built semiconductor analytics platform can help engineers connect insights across domains without moving data. See how Agentic AI, semiconductor-specific visualizations, and push-down compute enable...

📅 2026-08-21 14:32:37 • IEEE Spectrum

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