Type:departments

26 Nov 23

Build Your Own Hi-fi Ear Defenders

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Many of us have gotten used to being able to dampen unwanted sound, thanks to the noise-cancellation technology found in, for example, Apple’s AirPods Pro earbuds. But this tech gets you only so far: Noise cancellation works just for relatively low frequencies, and the overall hearing protection that earbuds can…

21 Nov 23

Imagineer Morgan Pope Uses Electromagnetism to Spark Emotions

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Most people probably think of robots as cold and calculating, but for Morgan Pope they can be a tool for generating emotions.As a research scientist at Disney Research in Glendale, Calif., Pope designs robots for the entertainment giant’s theme parks. But working as an Imagineer, as Disney’s researchers are known,…

30 Oct 23

A Dual-CPU Computer You Can Rewire With Software

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

When the home computer revolution arrived, it filled my childhood with fascination and inspired me to study computer engineering. I wanted to design a microcomputer to my own specifications. But at school I was never taught how a complete computer system was put together. Instead we studied various subsystems and…

21 Oct 23

A Brief History of the Office Cubicle

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

In 1964, the office cubicle was born. For that you can thank Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller furniture company. Four years earlier, he had proposed a radical alternative to the office bullpen: the Action Office. He envisioned it as a holistic and integrated system designed to increase…

16 Oct 23

From Hockey Enforcer to High-Flying eVTOL CEO

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Kyle Clark, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of Beta Technologies, is not quite your typical tech entrepreneur. For one thing, he’s a former professional ice hockey player. Then, too, many afternoons you won’t find him behind a desk at the company’s headquarters near the airport in Burlington, Vt. In fact,…

01 Oct 23

The Marimba Virtuoso’s Desktop Planetarium

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

On 21 April 1962, the Seattle World’s Fair opened to the public. Included in its many exhibits on modern science and the progressive future was this electric desktop orrery. Much like the traditional clockwork orreries of centuries past, this unit showed the motions of the planets and other celestial objects,…

02 Sep 23

Taking the Measure of the Earthquake That Destroyed Tokyo

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

At 11:58 am on Saturday, 1 September 1923, the Kanto region of Japan started to shake. The earthquake began with a violent horizontal back-and-forth motion, followed by two vertical jolts, and then another horizontal shock even stronger than the first. The intensity of the tremor damaged the seismometer that took…

22 Aug 23

The Power Engineer Electrifying John Deere’s Tractors, Trucks, and More

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

For Brij Singh, electrifying John Deere’s heavy-duty vehicles reflects his past. Singh grew up on a farm in India, and is committed to bettering agriculture’s future. John Deere, headquartered in Moline, Ill., is a leader in agricultural, construction, forestry, and turf-care machinery. Singh, a power-electronics engineer, has been working to…

31 Jul 23

Boston Dynamics’ Founder on the Future of Robotics

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

When Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, he wasn’t even sure it was going to be a robotics company—he thought it might become a modeling and simulation company instead. Now, of course, Boston Dynamics is the authority in legged robots, with its Atlas biped and Spot quadruped. But as…

30 Jul 23

The Cold War Arms Race Over Prosthetic Arms

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

In 1961, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, broke his hip and wound up in Massachusetts General Hospital. Wiener’s bad luck turned into fruitful conversations with his orthopedic surgeon, Melvin Glimcher. Those talks in turn led to a collaboration and an invention: the Boston Arm, an early myoelectric prosthesis. The…