ENGGtalks Newsroom

04 Apr 23

Robo-Honeycomb Reveals the Secret Lives of Bees

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Interactive robotics is a relatively new field of study, but in a short time it has moved on from just performing preprogrammed repetitive tasks to more complex activities, including interactions with living creatures. Biocompatible and biomimetic robots, for example, are being increasingly used to study animals and plants. Animal-in-the-loop robotic…

03 Apr 23

E-scooters face Paris ban after public referendum

Civil, Structural & Architecture, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Over 100,000 of the city’s residents voted, with 89 per cent of them choosing to end services that rent e-scooters. However, while the tally looks definitive, with over 1.3 million people registered on the electoral lists, participation in the vote represents just seven per cent of those who were eligible.…

02 Apr 23

Neuralink’s FDA Troubles Are Just the Beginning

Biotechnology & Biomedical

Neuralink, the neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk, is at best having a rough initial go-round with the Food and Drug Administration’s human-trials application process. The company also faces additional investigations by two other U.S. government agencies. These setbacks and the broad, cure-all expectations that its founder has placed on…

01 Apr 23

Hey, Siri! You Worried ChatGPT Will Take Your Job?

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

If you ask your everyday smartphone voice assistant if it fears ChatGPT, you don’t generally receive an interesting or informative answer. So is that a problem? Natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI research that led to practical applications like voice assistants and language translators, now seems threatened by…

01 Apr 23

Download “The EV Transition Explained” E-book for Free

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Over the past several months, IEEE Spectrum has published a series of articles exploring the major technological and social transformations we face as the world moves from vehicles with internal-combustion engines to electric vehicles. We have now combined all articles into an e-book, “The EV Transition Explained,” in which author…

31 Mar 23

Video Friday: Grain Weevil

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

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.Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTONICRA 2023: 29 May–2…

31 Mar 23

Aviation, the Unlikely Road to Long-range EVs

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Of all the elements in the periodic table, silicon has the highest capacity for combining with lithium. It can hold 10 times as many lithium ions than the graphite anodes common in today’s lithium-ion batteries. Several carmakers and battery startups are looking at silicon anodes for the next generation of…

31 Mar 23

The Staggering Scale of the EV Transition

Civil, Structural & Architecture

Over the past 20 or so years, contributing editor Robert N. “Bob” Charette has written about some of the thorniest issues facing the planet at large and engineers in particular. For IEEE Spectrum, he’s dug into software reliability and maintenance, the so-called STEM crisis, and the automation paradox, examining those…

31 Mar 23

When AI’s Large Language Models Shrink

Computer & Information Technology

Building ever larger language models has led to groundbreaking jumps in performance. But it’s also pushing state-of-the-art AI beyond the reach of all but the most well-resourced AI labs. That makes efforts to shrink models down to more manageable sizes more important than ever, say researchers. In 2020, researchers at…

31 Mar 23

EU countries agree to double renewable energy targets

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

The 27 nations that form the EU have reached a deal to almost double the share of energy originated by renewable technologies in the next seven years. With this agreement, the EU aims to "fast-track the deployment of renewable energies" as part of the EU's plan "to become independent from…