Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

30 Jul 23

Who Really Invented the Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery?

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Fifty years after the birth of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, it’s easy to see its value. It’s used in billions of laptops, cellphones, power tools, and cars. Global sales top US $45 billion a year, on their way to more than $100 billion in the coming decade. And yet this…

29 Jul 23

This Rwandan Engineer is Learning How to Manage Humanitarian Projects

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

After several years of volunteering for IEEE humanitarian technology projects, Samantha Mugeni Niyoyita decided she needed more than just technical skills to help underserved communities become more self-sufficient. The IEEE member from Kigali, Rwanda, participated in installing portable sinks in nearby rural markets to curb the spread of COVID-19 and…

29 Jul 23

This Machine Could Keep Moore’s Law on Track

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Over the last half-century, we’ve come to think of Moore’s Law—the roughly biennial doubling of the number of transistors in a given area of silicon, the gains that drive computing forward—as something that just happens, as though it were a natural, inevitable process, akin to evolution or aging. The reality,…

29 Jul 23

Franklin’s Franklins Were Freakishly UnFakeable

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

To make something hard to fake you can use exotic materials or clever tricks. Benjamin Franklin, a printer by vocation, a scientist by avocation, leaned on cleverness, developing measures that are still in use.Those black arts have now yielded to the latest analytical instruments, as described in the Publications of…

29 Jul 23

Political Backlash Ramps Up Digital Privacy Laws

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but tech ramifications sometimes turn around on a shorter timetable. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision—alongside subsequent state-level prosecutions for abortions—provoked a pro-privacy backlash now wending its way through administrations and legislatures. At the same…

28 Jul 23

Video Friday: Spot Tripping

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.IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, SOUTH KOREAIROS 2023: 1–5…

28 Jul 23

The Long and Mostly Short of China’s Newest GPT

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Who said all large-language models (LLMs) necessarily need to be large? In China’s case, LLMs are currently downsizing in their size and number of parameters. According to sources, this is because the country is now focusing on enabling Chinese startups and smaller entities to build their own generative AI applications.…

27 Jul 23

The Soviet-Era, Z80-based Galaksija Dared to Be Different

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Eastern European Cold War–era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia’s Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of…

27 Jul 23

The Invention That Let Fiber Optics Span the Globe

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Plenty of big stories from the year 1985 had their moment in the sun and are now all but forgotten: New Coke, “We Are the World,” the rise of desktop publishing. But one at-the-time obscure invention from that year has long eclipsed the frothy headlines of its time, because it…

26 Jul 23

Why Cyberwarfare Is Overhyped

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

David Schneider: Hi, I’m David Schneider for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future podcast. Before we launch into this episode, I’d like to let listeners know that the cost of membership in IEEE is currently 50% off for the rest of the year. Giving you access to perks, including Spectrum magazine…

Who Really Invented the Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery?

This Rwandan Engineer is Learning How to Manage Humanitarian Projects

This Machine Could Keep Moore’s Law on Track

Franklin’s Franklins Were Freakishly UnFakeable

Political Backlash Ramps Up Digital Privacy Laws

Video Friday: Spot Tripping

The Long and Mostly Short of China’s Newest GPT

The Soviet-Era, Z80-based Galaksija Dared to Be Different

The Invention That Let Fiber Optics Span the Globe

Why Cyberwarfare Is Overhyped

Google won two major awards at MWC Barcelona 2025.

Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode

This MRI Can Run on Batteries

The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore’s Law