IEEE Spectrum

Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlin

The IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc)’s Research Collaboration Pitch Session initiative is proving to be a catalyst for meaningful engagement between academic researchers and industry innovators. Launched last year, the program connects promising researchers with industry leaders who can offer them funding, mentorship, and connections to bring interesting ideas closer to real-world deployment.Rather than relying on chance encounters at conferences, the pitch sessions create a focused environm

A comprehensive review of how spectrum congestion, dynamic sharing, and cognitive radio systems are reshaping RF coexistence testing for military and commercial applications.What Attendees will LearnWhy spectrum congestion threatens wireless reliability — Explore how over 30 billion connected devices, more than 4,000 allocation changes worldwide, and the expansion from 11 to over 80 cellular bands are intensifying contention for finite RF spectrum resources.How real-world coexistence failures af

This sponsored article is brought to you by Applied Materials.At pivotal moments in history, progress has required more than individual brilliance. The most consequential breakthroughs — such as those achieved under the Human Genome Project — required a new operating paradigm: Concentrate the world’s best talent around a single mission, establish a common platform, share critical infrastructure, and collapse feedback loops. When stakes are high and timelines are compressed, sequential and siloed

Given how integral the Internet has become to everyday tasks such as shopping, paying bills, and holding virtual meetings, it’s interesting that nearly 30 percent of the global population still has no access to it. More than 2 billion people are still offline, according to a report released in November by the International Telecommunication Union.More and more people are being connected, though, thanks to IEEE Future Networks’ Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) and similar programs. Since 2021, th

This sponsored article is brought to you by Ampace.As AI workloads grow to gigascale levels, the global data center industry has hit a hidden physical wall. The real bottleneck is no longer just the thermal limit of the chip or the capacity of the cooling system — it is the dynamic resilience of the power chain.Modern AI computing clusters, driven by massive GPU clusters, generate high-frequency, abrupt, and synchronized spikey pulse loads. As rack densities soar beyond 100 kW, these fluctuation

A comprehensive guide to error vector magnitude (EVM), the primary metric for quantifying modulation accuracy in Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G NR systems.What Attendees will LearnWhat error vector magnitude is and how it is calculated — Understand EVM as the distance between ideal and measured constellation points, learn the difference between peak and RMS normalization, and see how EVM is expressed in both percentage and decibel formats.How digital modulation works and why it matters — Explore the fundame

When Ana Inês Inácio goes to work at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in The Hague, she thinks about signals most people never notice: radio waves moving between satellites, sensors, and future wireless networks.The integrated circuits the research scientist designs lay the foundation for next-generation RF sensor systems critical to advancing radar technologies.Ana Inês InácioEMPLOYER Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, TNOTITLE ScientistI

Cybersecurity consultants have never been more in demand. Information security analyst roles are projected to grow nearly 30 percent between now and 2034, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than 15 million cybercrime incidents occurred worldwide in 2024, Statista reported.Data breaches are costly and pose direct safety risks. Statista reported that more than US $10 trillion is spent annually repairing the damage caused by cybercrime, most commonly phishing, spoofing, extortio

A guide to ten technological components — from THz communications and AI/ML to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces — poised to define 6G wireless networks.What Attendees will LearnWhich frequencies 6G will use — Understand why THz bands (above 100 GHz) and the7–24 GHz range are under consideration, what challenges CMOS technology faces at sub-THz frequencies, and how new semiconductor approaches aim to close the output-power gap for future link budgets.How AI/ML and joint communications and sens

I first met Robert Woo in 2011, during his third time walking in a powered exoskeleton. The architect had been paralyzed in a construction accident four years earlier, but he was determined to get back on his feet. Watching him clunk across a rehab room in an exoskeleton prototype, the technology felt astonishing. I had the same reaction when reporting on early brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which enabled paralyzed people to move robotic arms or communicate by thought alone. Both types of bio

“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, asks me as we sit in an outdoor café near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia. It’s a fair question. I’m a journalist from the United States. I’d just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, suitcase still stowed in my rental car.I’m here to see three intriguing new energy projects under development in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s strong public resistance to renewable energy, and

More than 30 years ago, in the mountain village of Mbem in northwest Cameroon, the moon and stars in the night sky were the only light young Jude Numfor knew after the sunset. Electricity had not yet reached his rural community.“There was one person in the village with a petrol generator and a small television,” Numfor says. “When he turned it on, all the children would run to his house and peep through the window.”That memory became the spark for Numfor’s mission: to bring electricity to rural

Transforming a newly discovered software vulnerability into a cyberattack used to take months. Today—as the recent headlines over Anthropic’s Project Glasswing have shown—generative AI can do the job in minutes, often for less than a dollar of cloud computing time.But while large language models present a real cyber-threat, they also provide an opportunity to reinforce cyberdefenses. Anthropic reports its Claude Mythos preview model has already helped defenders preemptively discover over a thous

This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics.This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity, which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and th

Laboratory or in-field measurements are often considered the gold standard for certain aspects of power system design; however, measurement approaches always have limitations. Simulation can help overcome some of these limitations, including speeding up the design process, reducing design costs, and assessing situations that are often not feasible to measure directly. In this presentation, we will discuss two examples from the power system industry. The first case we will discuss involves corona

When it comes to AI models, size matters.Even though some artificial-intelligence experts warn that scaling up large language models (LLMs) is hitting diminishing performance returns, companies are still coming out with ever larger AI tools. Meta’s latest Llama release had a staggering 2 trillion parameters that define the model.As models grow in size, their capabilities increase. But so do the energy demands and the time it takes to run the models, which increases their carbon footprint. To mit

Many of the world’s most advanced electronic systems—including Internet routers, wireless base stations, medical imaging scanners, and some artificial intelligence tools—depend on field-programmable gate arrays. Computer chips with internal hardware circuits, the FPGAs can be reconfigured after manufacturing.On 12 March, an IEEE Milestone plaque recognizing the first FPGA was dedicated at the Advanced Micro Devices campus in San Jose, Calif., the former Xilinx headquarters and the birthplace of

It started with word, cave, and storytelling,A line scratched on stone walls:“Meet me when the young moon rises.”The first protocol for connection.Coyote tales, forbidden scripts,Medieval texts hidden from flame.What lived in Aristotle’s lost Poetics II?Was it God who laughed last, or we who made God laugh?Letters carried by doves, telepathic waves.Then Nikola Tesla conjured radio,electromagnetic pulses across the void,the founding signal of our networked age.Wiener dreamed in feedback loops.Sha

Electric vehicles, whether they’re cars on the road or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, are built around similar electric motors. But there are vital differences including component costs, mass, and redundancy.Jon Wagner spent five years as the senior director of battery engineering for Tesla before joining California-based eVTOL developer Joby Aviation in 2017. He spoke with IEEE Spectrum about how engineering differs between cars and aircraft.​Jon Wagner Jon Wagner lead