The crew has come: caravan of trucks stationed on the street, unstacking cones and digging ditches, deft and efficient. Here in our yards, long years of earth have been hefted by hand and heaped up on tarps. A pneumatic mole emerges from the trailer, and a heavy hose is hauled into place. With a pop, the pumping compressor wakes with startling strength. The strata are threaded, pierced by the pounding power that forges a buried boulevard. This burrow will convey packets with payloads, pulses ...| IEEE Spectrum
When I left Los Alamos National Laboratory to start a company 11 years ago, I thought my team was ready. We had developed a new class of quantum dots—nanoscale particles of light-emitting semiconductor material that can be used in displays, solar cells, and more. Our technology was safer, more stable, and less expensive than existing quantum-dot materials. The technical advantages were real, but I quickly learned that no amount of scientific merit guarantees market success. For many tech-st...| IEEE Spectrum
The future of wireless communication is today being sketched out in the skies and in space. A new generation of intelligent aerospace platforms—drones, airships, and satellites—will be part of tomorrow’s 6G networks, acting as, in effect, base stations in the sky. They’re expected to roll out in the early 2030s. Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, are amid the vanguard of innovators now imagining next-gen telecom netwo...| IEEE Spectrum
Millions of people worldwide have reason to be thankful that Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist decided not to practice medicine. Although qualified as a doctor, he chose to invent medical equipment instead. In 1949, while working at Elema-Schonander (later Siemens-Elema), in Stockholm, he applied for a patent for the Mingograph, the first inkjet printer. Its movable nozzle deposited an electrostatically controlled jet of ink droplets on a spool of paper. Rune Elmqvist qualified to be a physician...| IEEE Spectrum
In July, a University of Michigan computer engineering professor put out a new idea for measuring the efficiency of a processor design. Todd Austin’s LEAN metric received both praise and skepticism, but even the critics understood the rationale: A lot of silicon is devoted to things that are not actually doing computing. For example, more than 95 percent of an Nvidia Blackwell GPU is designated for other tasks, Austin told IEEE Spectrum. It’s not like these parts aren’t doing important ...| IEEE Spectrum