spectrum.ieee.org

Night is falling on Cerro Pachón.Stray clouds reflect the last few rays of golden light as the sun dips below the horizon. I focus my camera across the summit to the westernmost peak of the mountain. Silhouetted within a dying blaze of red and orange light looms the sphinxlike shape of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.“Not bad,” says William O’Mullane, the observatory’s deputy project manager, amateur photographer, and master of understatement. We watch as the sky fades through reds and purples to a deep, velvety black. It’s my first night in Chile. For O’Mullane, and hundre

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.RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELESETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVAIAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!I once had a manager at Meta who kept flip-flopping. We’d have our one-on-one meetings to align on the priorities, and whether I should focus on new features or fix user

The newly designed IEEE website makes it easier than ever to learn about the organization and its offerings. IEEE incorporated feedback from members and site visitors to create its modern look and feel.Throughout the site, the work of IEEE and its members is prominently highlighted to show how they are creating a better world and driving engineering forward.“The new website is more visual, with video and other media to engage all visitors. It also showcases our global community’s commitment as a public charity advancing technology for the benefit of humanity,” says

By analyzing neural signals, a brain-computer interface (BCI) can now almost instantaneously synthesize the speech of a man who lost use of his voice due to a neurodegenerative disease, a new study finds.The researchers caution it will still be a long time before such a device, which could restore speech to paralyzed patients, will find use in everyday communication. Still, the hope is this work “will lead to a pathway for improving these systems further—for example, through technology transfer to industry,” says Maitreyee Wairagkar, a project scientist at the University of California Davis’s Neuroprosthetics Lab.A major potential application for

Although she is just now starting her career as a tech professional, Mayra Yucely Beb Caal has already overcome towering obstacles. The IEEE member sees her life as an example for other young people, demonstrating that they can succeed despite disadvantages they face due to their gender, ethnicity, language, or economic background.Born in Cobán, the capital of Alta Verapaz in northern Guatemala, she grew up in a community far removed from the world of technology. But she attributes her success to having been steeped in the region’s cultural richness and her people’s unshakable resilience. The daughter of a single mother who was a schoolteacher, Caal says she s

For roughly three decades, the JPEG has been the World Wide Web’s primary image format. But it wasn’t the one the Web started with. In fact, the first mainstream graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, didn’t initially support inline JPEG files—just inline GIFs, along with a couple of other formats forgotten to history. However, the JPEG had many advantages over the format it quickly usurped.

In August 2001, an anonymous guest posted on the forum at Airliners.net, a popular aviation website. “How Long Will Pilots Be Needed?” they wondered, observing that “20 years or so down the road” technology could be so advanced that planes would fly themselves. “So would it really be useful for a person to go to college now and be an airline pilot if a few years down the road they will be phased out by technology?”Twenty-four years later, the basic technology required to make aircraft fly themselves exists, as evidenced by the fact that most commercial flights are flown largely on autopilo

Vikram Koka stumbled upon Apache Airflow in late 2019. He was working in the Internet of Things industry and searching for a solution to orchestrate sensor data using software. Airflow seemed to be a perfect fit, but Koka noticed the open-source project’s stagnant state. Thus began a journey to breathe a second life into this dying software.Airflow was the brainchild of Airbnb. The company created the system to

The percentage of women in the semiconductor industry is stubbornly low. According to a report released in April, 51 percent of companies report having less than 20 percent of their technical roles filled by women. At the same time, fewer of these companies were publicly committed to equal opportunity measures in 2024 than the year prior, the same report found.This lack of support comes at the same time that major workforce shortages are expected, says