Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/">https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161518">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161518</a></p> <p>Points: 100</p> <p># Comments: 30</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/ai-debt-hypescalers-capex-capital-spending-hidden-borrowing-bond-issuance/">https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/ai-debt-hypescalers-capex-capital-spending-hidden-borrowing-bond-issuance/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160699</a></p> <p>Points: 82</p> <p># Comments: 61</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://status.digdir.no/incidents/d7hvqmf2yr3l">https://status.digdir.no/incidents/d7hvqmf2yr3l</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160631">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160631</a></p> <p>Points: 70</p> <p># Comments: 46</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real">https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160437">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160437</a></p> <p>Points: 74</p> <p># Comments: 82</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://github.com/SwagSoftware/KisakCOD">https://github.com/SwagSoftware/KisakCOD</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159970">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159970</a></p> <p>Points: 17</p> <p># Comments: 1</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/01/zx-spectrum-system-tour-sound/">https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/01/zx-spectrum-system-tour-sound/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159676">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159676</a></p> <p>Points: 19</p> <p># Comments: 1</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/billable-usage-api/">https://blog.cloudflare.com/billable-usage-api/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158714">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158714</a></p> <p>Points: 34</p> <p># Comments: 5</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/smaller-faster-safer-models/">https://blog.cloudflare.com/smaller-faster-safer-models/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158581">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158581</a></p> <p>Points: 93</p> <p># Comments: 24</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase">https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158474">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158474</a></p> <p>Points: 105</p> <p># Comments: 29</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://hamvocke.com/blog/task-runners/">https://hamvocke.com/blog/task-runners/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158287">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158287</a></p> <p>Points: 52</p> <p># Comments: 16</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://github.com/MikeLuu99/searxng-rust">https://github.com/MikeLuu99/searxng-rust</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158141">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158141</a></p> <p>Points: 52</p> <p># Comments: 18</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Hi HN, we’re Bence and Ryan, founders of Hoplite (<a href="https://hoplite.sh">https://hoplite.sh</a>). Hoplite lets you deploy coding agents in the cloud, with a suite of tools that makes it incredibly easy to QA features. During onboarding, we port over your local setup - sessions, memories, MCP servers, and get your projects ready to run in the cloud.<p>Here’s a demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/bnyktZ_9pjE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/bnyktZ_9pjE</a><p>We got here after pivoting away from the idea we applied to YC with; AI for retail investing. It ultimately wasn’t a product that we ourselves would use, nor served a customer base that we felt connected to. In reflecting on what we really wanted to do, we realised that we loved talking to founders and developers, and were really opinionated about the specific area of cloud agents. We tried out all the existing solutions, and didn’t find one that A) took good advantage of being in the cloud, and B) was performant and felt good to use.<p>We’re building a product that we feel reflects what mainstream development will look like in 6-12 months. As models improve, developers will end up reviewing less and less code, and will instead focus on reviewing the product output. That means evaluating new user flows, visually verifying that new features look good, that the API works as expected, that the CLI works on Windows, etc. And doing it while running hundreds of agents concurrently.<p>On the agent side, we’ve created a custom harness. We spent a lot of time deciding on whether we should use an off the shelf solution like Codex/Claude Code, but ultimately wanted the independence and freedom that came with building it in house. It also means that we can test out completely new features without relying on Anthropic and OpenAI to catch up.<p>Everything is hosted on AWS, with the exception of: Temporal for durable workflows, Modal for sandboxes, and Planetscale for our database. Our infra decisions were driven by a strong belief that agents are becoming a tier 0 piece of infrastructure, and they need the reliability and security to match that.<p>You can try it now for free with the code ‘HACKERNEWS’ - we’ve included $100 in free credits, plus you can connect your Codex subscription and use OpenAI models via it. You can see some more details around our pricing at <a href="https://hoplite.sh/pricing">https://hoplite.sh/pricing</a>.<p>At the moment we’re focusing on optimising two key experiences: onboarding and previews, and would love to hear your feedback on them. And if you find that the agent's performance in certain tasks doesn’t match your expectations, please let us know!</p> <hr> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157997">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157997</a></p> <p>Points: 40</p> <p># Comments: 46</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/">https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157930">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157930</a></p> <p>Points: 344</p> <p># Comments: 625</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Hi HN! We’re Theodore and Louis, founders of Armature (YC P26). We reconstruct the entire session behind the MCP tool calls you receive, including what the user asked their agent to do and what the agent thought.<p>You wrap your MCP in 3 lines of code (our SDK is available in Typescript, Python and Go) and start seeing in your dashboard: - All sessions reconstructed: it’s like reading the real conversation the user had inside Claude or ChatGPT! - A ranking of your MCP most popular use cases, built from sessions clustering - The most frequent issues your users’ agents encounter so you can fix them.<p>Here is a quick demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/ZFlvquhyNMQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ZFlvquhyNMQ</a><p>The story behind this is that we initially launched Armature as a standalone testing tool (<a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QQc-armature-making-your-app-finally-usable-by-ai-agents">https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QQc-armature-making-you...</a>) that could naturally be used through an MCP itself. We quickly realized we had no idea how our users were using Armature MCP and if they were satisfied with it or frustrated. It’s something we had also experienced in our previous companies: Louis built MCPs exposed to millions of users and Theo was a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir before joining a Datadog spin-off as Founding Engineer. Both testing and product analytics had always been real pains when exposing a product to agents but we always thought there wasn’t much we could do about analytics because the conversation lived in our users’ AI client.<p>Then it struck us: what if we asked the agents why they were making this or that tool call? And what’s the user's intent or potential frustration? So we started experimenting with MCP instrumentation and the use-cases actually surprised us! Many of our first customers had implemented workarounds for their CI to trigger new tests or for their coding agents to fetch the results efficiently. Even though we talked to our first users regularly, they had never shared this feedback with us. We then built automations to automatically cluster use-cases, identify issues frequently encountered and let our own coding agents fix them. When our CTO friends heard about this, they wanted to try it for themselves so we gave them access to a cloned version of our internal product and they started sharing feedback like they never did on our “real” product!<p>That’s when we decided to start working seriously on MCP Analytics as a product. At first we were afraid of degrading MCP performance so we iterated until we reached the exact same success rate as without our instrumentation (89.17 % vs 89.15 % pass rate out of 870 runs). Then privacy was an obvious constraint so we applied the same methods we had learned from working with banking data or building sensitive data scanning in logs. Today, redaction runs client-side before reaching our servers. There are still a lot of things we haven’t fully figured out: not all fields are equally filled by all models, session fingerprinting for serverless / stateless MCPs isn’t perfect, and use-case clustering remains to be optimized.<p>But we are finally launching our analytics product to everyone, self-serve at <a href="https://armature.tech">https://armature.tech</a> with a set-up that takes less than 5 minutes and a generous free tier.<p>And now we are working on fully closing the loop, bringing evals back in our product so we can: identify top workflows and issues -> recommend fixes and improvements -> test fixes at scale on the same workflows run by users, across all harnesses and models -> open PRs to ship fixes directly. The evals can be generated automatically from the session analytics so you can catch every regression and can test every improvement’s real impact across all models and harnesses before shipping it.<p>Here’s an example to make it more concrete: 10 days ago, a marketing automation platform which has had early access to what we built for weeks identified thanks to MCP Analytics that users were frustrated not being able to change their target audience after campaign creation. So they shipped the feature and tested it successfully locally with Claude Code on Fable 5. Then a few days later when preparing their new MCP public release, they ran a suite of evals on Armature and realized that small models could hallucinate audience_ids which would lead their MCP to send the campaign to ALL their contacts by default (which could obviously lead to disasters in prod). This is the kind of story that makes what we are building feel so helpful!<p>Now, the most useful feedback for us would be to know what’s still missing in our product so you can feel you are now in full control of the “Agent Experience”. And if you run an MCP in production we’d also love to know: what do you do today to know if agents succeed and if the users behind them are happy?</p> <hr> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157807">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157807</a></p> <p>Points: 32</p> <p># Comments: 1</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://note.com/hirorohi03/n/n047a8c5f7f8b?hl=en">https://note.com/hirorohi03/n/n047a8c5f7f8b?hl=en</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157645">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157645</a></p> <p>Points: 22</p> <p># Comments: 7</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source">https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111</a></p> <p>Points: 435</p> <p># Comments: 157</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://clickhouse.com/blog/andy-pavlo-joins-clickhouse">https://clickhouse.com/blog/andy-pavlo-joins-clickhouse</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156011">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156011</a></p> <p>Points: 237</p> <p># Comments: 49</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://blog.comfy.org/p/minimax-h3-day-0-support-in-comfyui">https://blog.comfy.org/p/minimax-h3-day-0-support-in-comfyui</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155629">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155629</a></p> <p>Points: 228</p> <p># Comments: 71</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://dmarcguard.io/blog/spf-record-syntax/">https://dmarcguard.io/blog/spf-record-syntax/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155626">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155626</a></p> <p>Points: 45</p> <p># Comments: 11</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Article URL: <a href="https://research.jfrog.com/post/sqlite-critical-cves-or-llm-slops/">https://research.jfrog.com/post/sqlite-critical-cves-or-llm-slops/</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154332">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154332</a></p> <p>Points: 685</p> <p># Comments: 337</p>

Aug 3, 2026

Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse's companion star.

Aug 3, 2026

The orbiting observatory in minifigure scale.

Aug 3, 2026

Top scores increased by 5x.

Aug 3, 2026

At $25,305, you won't find many new cars for less. But you get what you pay for.

Aug 3, 2026

A Louisiana launch site would offer several significant advantages.

Aug 3, 2026

Trump's DOJ says citizens should no longer be able to enforce environmental laws.

Aug 3, 2026

Automotive lights are better than they've ever been, but there's a trade-off.

Aug 1, 2026

"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."

Aug 1, 2026

Christopher Nolan's impressionistic remix of Homer's epic poem finds the man behind the myth.

Aug 1, 2026

Reddit may still be considering ending its licensing deal with Google.

Aug 1, 2026

Autonomous vehicle giant disturbs residents' sleep.

Aug 1, 2026

A removable chip lets hackers inspect their badge—and keep using it after Defcon.

Aug 1, 2026

Tracking smells in turbulent air takes a keen sense of direction and sharp memory.

Jul 31, 2026

Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes.

Jul 31, 2026

The term "Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome" was coined in 1981, based on cases in four women.

Jul 31, 2026

Someone in Cuba or Iran can keep installing APKs with no new restrictions, but devs will suffer.

Jul 31, 2026

Reddit advances lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of conspiring with web scraper.

Jul 31, 2026

Had the hacks used conventional methods, someone would likely go to prison.

Jul 31, 2026

“What on earth is Google doing?” Misinformation fears spur walk-back of AI tool.

Jul 31, 2026

LemonLime’s CEO got “carried away” with tattoo gimmick.

Aug 3, 2026

Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS...

Aug 3, 2026

With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H.

Aug 3, 2026

zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng...

Aug 3, 2026

GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop...

Aug 3, 2026

NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes...

Aug 3, 2026

It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-ssytem used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare...

Aug 3, 2026

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland...

Aug 3, 2026

Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier...

Aug 3, 2026

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations...

Aug 3, 2026

Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates...

Aug 3, 2026

Queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window is adding support for the Realtek RTL8261C and RTL8261D 10 Gigabit PHYs that launched last year...

Aug 3, 2026

It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release...

Aug 2, 2026

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time...

Aug 2, 2026

Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel...

Aug 2, 2026

Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...

Aug 2, 2026

Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base...

Aug 2, 2026

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6...

Aug 2, 2026

Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems...

Aug 2, 2026

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use...

Aug 1, 2026

NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system...

Aug 1, 2026

Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July...

Aug 1, 2026

Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project...

Aug 1, 2026

Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel...

Aug 1, 2026

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions...

Aug 1, 2026

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling...

Aug 1, 2026

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc...

Aug 1, 2026

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors...

Jul 31, 2026

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture...

Jul 31, 2026

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI...

Jul 31, 2026

Shotcut 26.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editing solution...

Jul 31, 2026

In addition to the Nouveau kernel driver unblocking Vulkan Video H.264 support for the Mesa NVK driver, another feature change on the way is this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver finally preparing to enable atomic mode-setting by default...

Jul 30, 2026

With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer's certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I had run some graphics benchmarks to see how Nouveau+NVK was performing for this Razer Blade RZ09-0582 with the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU.

Aug 3, 2026

Google is rolling out an update that will finally allow you to connect your Fitbit workouts, steps, vitals, and other data to Apple Health, as reported earlier by 9to5Mac. With Google Health's 5.05 update, you can now tap your profile icon, select "Partner apps," and choose Apple Health to link your data directly. Previously, you [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Samsung makes a variety of TVs and computer monitors, but if want both and you’re limited on space, you might want to consider the M80F. This capable 32-inch 4K panel combines features commonly found on both types of screens, and Amazon and B&#38;H Photo both have it discounted to $349.99, where it’s usually $400 or [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

The European Union has ushered in some additional rules that aim to make it easier for people to identify chatbots and AI deepfakes online. The new transparency obligations under the bloc's landmark AI Act came into effect on August 2nd, requiring companies to disclose when people are interacting with AI models, and if content has [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

The Kindle Scribe is worth considering if you’re heading back to school, as its large 10.2-inch screen can display textbooks and ebooks, or let you jot down handwritten notes during class. Now through August 8th, the first-gen model (with a Premium Pen) is down to just $149.99 with 16GB of storage in refurbished condition at [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Building on its recently announced plans to bring original Xbox games to PC, Microsoft is also planning to let developers bring their Xbox 360 games to PC as well, according to a leaked document, seen by The Verge, that was sent to developers recently. Xbox 360 games will be able to run on the next-gen [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Today, I’m talking with Toni Schneider, who is the brand new CEO of the social platform Bluesky — he formally took over after a short stint as interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do on Decoder, because a couple years ago, we had Bluesky’s prior CEO, Jay Graber, on [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

After its 1.0 launch last month, Palworld is coming to iOS and Android with a new open-world MMORPG launching later this year, Polygon reports. Garena, the developer behind the new game, says in its announcement that Palworld Online "reimagines the depth, freedom, and scale of the original PC survival creature-collecting title for mobile." The core [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is joining The Odyssey in IMAX theaters after both movies led the biggest weekend in box office history. On Monday, IMAX announced that Spider-Man: Brand New Day will be available in select digital IMAX locations across North America starting Thursday, August 6th. The news comes as The Odyssey's exclusive three-weekend run [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Next to buying RAM, finding a fast, high-capacity NVMe SSD at a reasonable price has been a challenge during RAMageddon. I don’t want to say it’s getting easier, but one of Samsung’s latest SSDs is cheaper than it has sold for since February 2026. That’s something, right? Amazon has the heatsink-less version of the Samsung [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

Lenovo is expected to release some of the first Googlebook models later this year, and leaked images have now given us a good idea of what they might look like. Leaked press images shared by Digital Citizen and Android Headlines include a laptop and a 2-in-1 tablet, all of which feature Googlebook branding on the [&#8230;]

Aug 3, 2026

The risk of more debris hitting the moon is on the rise as the space race heats up.

Aug 3, 2026

Smart mowers are an expensive alternative to old-fashioned yard work, but they’re finally good enough to consider if you’d rather sip an iced tea and watch a robot tame your lawn.

Aug 3, 2026

We’ve come a long way since exclusively $1,000+ OLED gaming monitors. Alienware’s latest display brings the price down to a shocking $350, though it comes with some important compromises.

Aug 3, 2026

The communication-free form of breaking up has become ubiquitous. “I no longer had to bear her energy,” a man who ghosted his partner of four years tells WIRED.

Aug 3, 2026

Whether you want an audio player that’ll grow with your kid or one that your toddler can operate independently, I have a recommendation for you.

Aug 3, 2026

I tested modern locks, lights, climate controls, and more in a historic home that I very much wanted to keep historic.

Aug 3, 2026

Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

Aug 3, 2026

Your next drive-thru order might be taken by a bot. And you might not even notice.

Aug 3, 2026

The $100 earbuds look and sound better than earbuds nearly twice the price—as long as you can stomach just average noise canceling.

Aug 3, 2026

Steve Eimers, also known as the “Guardrail Guy,” is done calling out license plate readers after two that appeared in his videos were vandalized.

Aug 2, 2026

Keep your logins locked down with our favorite password management apps for PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, and web browsers.

Aug 2, 2026

From how galaxies form to the beginnings of the universe, the images from the space telescope are giving cosmologists new data to explore—and theories to build out.

Aug 2, 2026

These portable vacuums make quick work of snack crumbs, tracked-in dirt, pet hair, and the mysterious debris beneath your seats.

Aug 2, 2026

Everything you need to know about the solar eclipse and lunar eclipse that will occur in August 2026.

Aug 2, 2026

Your kid’s little lunch hauler takes a brutal beating every day. These are the backbacks our own kids have tried and loved.

Aug 2, 2026

As more big companies invest in glasses that record audio and video and pack AI on board, privacy concerns are only getting louder.

Aug 2, 2026

New EU rules stipulate that people must be told when they’re interacting with AI or looking at AI-generated or -edited content, leading to fear of “disclosure fatigue.”

Aug 2, 2026

AboFlah talks about his new goals, streaming for charity, and when it’s time to log off.

Aug 1, 2026

Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy, WIRED-tested seats.

Aug 1, 2026

Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy, WIRED-tested seats.

Aug 3, 2026

Before you go spend money on new headphones, try these adjustments. You can probably improve the sound on the ones you have.

Aug 3, 2026

This modern-day Game Boy Advance SP remake starts at $65, but Anbernic is offering early bird pricing.

Aug 3, 2026

Like Sony, Xbox may be laying the groundwork for an all-digital future.

Aug 3, 2026

AirTags are great, but there are competing trackers that offer handy features and unique form factors.

Aug 3, 2026

Google&#39;s AI assistant can &#34;use your logged-in accounts and saved passwords to handle tedious web errands.&#34;

Aug 3, 2026

The feature is a must-have, but some modern headphones and earbuds still don&#39;t offer it.

Aug 3, 2026

Samsung says it&#39;s banning smart TV apps that expose users&#39; internet connections.

Aug 3, 2026

It&#39;s safe to say the wireless earbuds space is pretty saturated. We&#39;ve tested and reviewed dozens of models; these are our top picks.

Aug 3, 2026

Deciding between a smartwatch or a smart ring? Here&#39;s what to know.

Aug 3, 2026

There are several steps you can take to prevent your phone from getting dangerously hot.

Aug 3, 2026

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra&#39;s new processor, brighter screens and chassis tweaks are nice, but the updates don't do enough to earn the 'ultra' tag.

Aug 3, 2026

Your Apple Watch has lots of options that will allow you to make it your own.

Aug 3, 2026

The European Union has announced that new AI rules are now enforceable across the bloc.

Aug 3, 2026

Not only did MacBook Air prices recently go up, but you couldn&#39;t get one today even if you wanted to.

Aug 2, 2026

The entry-level price for an Xbox now starts at 499.99€/£429.99.

Aug 2, 2026

And will Sony continue to support the PS5 once the PS6 is released?

Aug 2, 2026

If you want the best view of the 2026 solar eclipse, you&#39;ll need to travel to Spain or Iceland.

Aug 2, 2026

Chromebooks aren&#39;t limited to only apps you can get on the Play Store.

Aug 2, 2026

As USB-C becomes the standard across most devices, it&#39;s time to go through that drawer full of USB adapters and toss those you no longer need.

Aug 2, 2026

Struggling with audio dropout or finnicky pairing? Ensure these common Bluetooth speaker problems aren&#39;t getting in the way of your auditory delights.

Aug 3, 2026

<p>John MacFarlane has published a <a href="https://pandoc.org/twenty-years-of-pandoc.html">lengthy retrospective</a> to commemorate twenty years of the <a href="https://pandoc.org/">Pandoc</a> document converter.</p> <blockquote class="bq"> <p>On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the <a href="https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/Haskell.md">most popular program written in Haskell</a>; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools like <a href="https://quarto.org/">Quarto</a> and <a href="https://jupyter.org/">Jupyter Notebook</a>; that it would be installed on millions of computers around the world.</p> <p>How did this happen? I want to take advantage of pandoc's birthday to tell the story of the project, as best I can remember it.</p> </blockquote> <p></p>

Aug 3, 2026

For those of us with a long memory: John Goerzen has <a href="https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase">announced</a> the release of C-Kermit&#160;11, the first release of this file-transfer utility in 15&#160;years. <p> <blockquote class="bq"> As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn't matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not desired now; we are used to byte-identical binary transfers, and the defaults caused confusion and even some rare instances of data corruption. So I started making a few patches last year. </blockquote> <p> See <a href="https://github.com/OpenKermit/ckermit/releases/tag/v11.0.506">the changelog</a> for details on the work that has been done. <p> Most of us probably haven't thought about C-Kermit in years (if ever), but there was a time when it was an essential tool for moving files between machines.

Aug 3, 2026

The <a href="https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/fuse/">Filesystem in Userspace</a> (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out of the kernel. The FUSE server can <a href="https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/filesystems/fuse-io-uring.html">use</a> the <a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/io_uring.7.html">io_uring</a> facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single, large buffer size that is excessive for small <span class="nobreak">I/O</span> operations. He led a discussion on that topic in the filesystem track of the 2026 <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lsfmmbpf/">Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit</a> in Zagreb, Croatia.

Aug 3, 2026

The JFrog blog <a href="https://research.jfrog.com/post/sqlite-critical-cves-or-llm-slops/">examines some reported vulnerabilities in SQLite</a>, some of which made their way into high-profile vulnerability databases, that turned out to be entirely fabricated by LLMs. <p> <blockquote class="bq"> These LLM slop CVEs can cause organizations to waste time investigating and patching vulnerabilities that do not actually exist, as well as polluting vulnerability databases. In environments where Critical vulnerabilities are automatically prioritized or tickets are opened based on vulnerability scores, such fabricated CVEs can turn into a real burden. <p> In environments where AI is used to automate vulnerability triage and remediation this becomes even more concerning. An AI agent that encounters a fabricated CVE may attempt to locate the vulnerable function, generate a patch, or recommend changes based on code that does not even exist. Instead of helping security teams remediate real vulnerabilities, it can lead them down a completely wrong path, potentially introducing unnecessary changes and wasting time. </blockquote> <p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086901/">7.1.6</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086903/">6.18.42</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086904/">6.12.101</a>, and <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086905/">6.6.148</a> stable kernels. Each contains hundreds of patches&mdash;the 7.1.6 kernel has more than 700&mdash;with fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.</p> <p></p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The release of <a href="https://netbsd.org/">NetBSD</a> 11.0, the 19th major version of the operating system, has been <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086899/">announced</a>. There are many changes and enhancements since the 10.1 release, including a new port to RISC-V, better support for Linux system calls in <a href="https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.0/compat_linux.8"><tt>compat_linux()</tt></a>, as well as improvements to the <a href="https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-11.x-BRANCH/npf.7">NPF</a> firewall.</p> <blockquote class="bq"> <p>As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this.</p> </blockquote> <p>See the full <a href="https://netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html">release notes</a> for links to the binary distributions and links to the full change logs.</p> <p>

Aug 3, 2026

Security updates have been issued by <b>AlmaLinux</b> (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, kernel, kernel-rt, openssh, osbuild-composer, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-DBI, perl:5.32, pipewire, python-pillow, qemu-kvm, unbound, and vim), <b>Debian</b> (chromium, incus, kernel, kissfft, libgd2, libmodbus, libssh, node-tar, php8.4, poppler, python-authlib, sslh, and starlette), <b>Fedora</b> (borgbackup, coturn, curl, exim, fuse-overlayfs, gh, GitPython, goaccess, lemonldap-ng, libgit2, nextcloud, nsd, php, postgresql16, python3.12, rabbitmq-server, rust-libgit2-sys, and xen), <b>Mageia</b> (bluez, firmware, kernel, kmod, wireless-regdb), <b>Oracle</b> (buildah, compat-libtiff3, dovecot, fence-agents, firefox, gimp, glibc, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libgcrypt, libtiff, libXfont2, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, openssh, openssl, PackageKit, pipewire, python-pillow, rest, sssd, vim, and yelp), <b>SUSE</b> (bind, chromium, dnsdist, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gio-branding-upstream, google-guest-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, GraphicsMagick, ignition, ImageMagick, keybase-client, kronosnet, libblkid-devel, libntpc1, libpng16, nano, openssh, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, openvpn, PackageKit, perl-mojolicious, php8, python-nltk, python313-asteval, python313-certifi, python313-GitPython, python313-huggingface-hub, rsyslog, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, traefik2, valkey, warewulf4, webkit2gtk3, and yq), and <b>Ubuntu</b> (linux-intel-iotg).

Aug 3, 2026

The <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086726/">7.2-rc6</a> kernel prepatch is out for testing. Quoth Linus: "<q>Hmm. This rc is huge. Even by the "new normal" standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count.</q>" There were 537 non-merge commits applied between 7.2-rc5 and 7.2-rc6.

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The <a href="https://servo.org/">Servo</a> web-browser engine project has published an <a href="https://servo.org/blog/2026/07/31/june-in-servo/">update</a> about all of the changes that landed in June 2026, along with <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/releases/tag/0.4.0">version 0.4.0</a> of the Servo Tech Demo. This release includes a record 558 commits, <a href="https://servo.org/blog/2026/07/31/june-in-servo/#real-world-compat">better layout correctness for web sites</a>, improved WebGPU support, <a href="https://servo.org/blog/2026/07/31/june-in-servo/#for-users-and-developers">enhancements for users</a> who are using the <a href="https://book.servo.org/trying/getting-servoshell.html">servoshell</a> test browser, and many <a href="https://servo.org/blog/2026/07/31/june-in-servo/#performance-and-stability">performance and stability</a> fixes.</p> <p></p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p> Song Liu believes that the way that programmers assemble complex BPF programs will be changing rapidly in the future. At a session of the 2026 <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lsfmmbpf/"> Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit</a>, he shared his thoughts on what that change could look like, though he did not have any concrete proposals for what, if anything, the BPF maintainers should do. He anticipates an ecosystem of Rust BPF packages developing, which is significant because BPF does not really have a package manager at the moment. </p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The Arch Linux DevOps team has <a href="https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/DRDEU3JUSC72CB265XHXPFA3DFSLXPBP/">announced</a> that adoption of orphaned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) has been disabled due to "<q>the current influx of malicious package adoptions and follow-up commits made via the AUR</q>". Michael Taggart has posted <a href="https://discourse.ifin.network/t/new-aur-attack-prompts-adoption-lock/698?">a brief analysis</a> of the malware being added to a <a href="https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/P4WIRHTFNH2YZWQHGBAKQWX5YOAFIDLY/">long list of packages</a> in this round of attacks. The payload <a href="https://gist.github.com/ysf/57850cdee152da066ac51c07a452e883">appears to be</a> an remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes commands over the Tor network and attempts to upload a wide range of user data.</p> <p>The project had <a href="https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/4JRS73YVTE7JUYHHE3ZDUIHXYHXZ3YQQ/">suspended new account registration</a> in June. That followed <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1077619/">a campaign</a> in which an attacker or attackers created new accounts to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates to them that would install malware on user systems. AUR registration was <a href="https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/TT3OCFFNM6SBMUBKIVTHTKA6UZJNMXIJ/">reopened</a> on July&#160;13 after the DevOps team added some minor, and apparently ineffective, restrictions on creating new accounts.</p> <p></p>

Jul 31, 2026

Security updates have been issued by <b>AlmaLinux</b> (kernel, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, openssh, and vim), <b>Debian</b> (gsasl and ruby-rack), <b>Fedora</b> (dokuwiki, lego, libnbd, nasm, pack, unbound, and valkey), <b>Mageia</b> (389-ds-base, libxfont2, nghttp2, and perl-DBI), <b>SUSE</b> (apptainer, bind, ffmpeg-7, freerdp, google-osconfig-agent, graphicsmagick, helm, ImageMagick, java-17-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, keybase-client, kubernetes1.34-apiserver, kubernetes1.35-apiserver, kubernetes1.36-apiserver, kubevirt1.8-container-disk, libarchive, logcli, net-tools, openssl-3, PackageKit, perl-Net-DNS, prometheus-ha_cluster_exporter, python-dulwich, python-sqlparse, python-urwid, python3-pyOpenSSL, python313, python3, runc, s2n, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, and valkey), and <b>Ubuntu</b> (libinput, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, openssl, python2.7, python3.5, and ruby-sinatra).

Jul 30, 2026

Linux provides a system call (<a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mkdir.2.html"><tt>mkdir()</tt></a>) to create a directory, and <a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/open.2.html">a few variants of <tt>open()</tt></a> that can open a directory. There is, however, no system call in Linux that can create and open a directory in a single, race-free call. Jori Koolstra has been working on remedying that situation, most recently by repurposing a set of <tt>open()</tt> flags that currently return an error. There are, however, concerns that show just how hard it can be to create user-space interfaces that do not present traps for application developers.

Jul 30, 2026

<p>Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086227/">6.18.41</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086228/">6.12.100</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086229/">6.6.147</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086230/">6.1.180</a>, <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086231/">5.15.213</a>, and <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086233/">5.10.262</a> stable kernels.</p> <p>Each of these kernels contains a single fix for a <a href="https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/commit/?id=081d2ff9592751aa400828237f17c108e4e1f513">use-after-free vulnerability</a> (<a href="https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-64560">CVE-2026-64560</a>). Users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.</p> <p></p>

Jul 30, 2026

Security updates have been issued by <b>AlmaLinux</b> (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libtiff, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, and rest), <b>Debian</b> (expat and nss), <b>Fedora</b> (libssh, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, nodejs24, perl-HTTP-Date, proftpd, squid, unbound, and wordpress), <b>Oracle</b> (c-ares, edk2, freerdp, go-fdo-server, libreswan, mariadb-connector-c, and nginx), <b>SUSE</b> (alloy, apache-commons-lang3, google-guice, maven, maven-resolver, xmvn, apache-sshd, apptainer, avahi, distribution, glib2, go1.26-openssl, go1.25-openssl, go1.24-openssl, go1.23-openssl, go1.22-openssl, go1.26, go1.25, go1.24, go1.23, go1.22, go1.21, gstreamer-plugins-bad, helm, ImageMagick, java-17-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, liboqs, oqs-provider, libssh, nginx, nm-configurator, nmap, openssl-3, openvpn, PackageKit, perl, perl-DBI, perl-HTTP-Date, perl-XML-Bare, python-msgpack-python, python-sh, python-ujson, python-urllib3, runc, samba, sssd, wget, wpa_supplicant, and xen), and <b>Ubuntu</b> (linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-7.0 and linux-nvidia-6.17).

Aug 3, 2026

Agents need more than just a container to scale. We're introducing @cloudflare/computer, an agent runtime that dynamically orchestrates between fast, efficient isolates and full Linux containers to give every agent a computer of its own.

Aug 3, 2026

Cloudflare Workers now support inbound TCP connections via Spectrum, allowing direct socket forwarding to Durable Objects and Containers. Developers can run full-duplex gRPC applications or leverage automatic gRPC-to-gRPC-web translation directly within Workers.

Aug 3, 2026

Cloudflare has launched a new Billable Usage API for accounts, giving developers and FinOps teams single-endpoint programmatic visibility into cost and usage across all self-serve products. Built around the FOCUS specification, track spend seamlessly alongside the rest of your cloud stack.

Aug 3, 2026

Serving frontier models like Kimi and GLM means fighting for GPU memory. Here's how we quantize KV caches, compress model weights, and add integrity checks to serve them faster, cheaper, and safely.

Aug 3, 2026

One coding agent can write a Python Worker and another can write a JavaScript Worker. At runtime, those Workers can exchange references to live objects and call their methods without defining APIs, schemas, or serialization code

Aug 2, 2026

Agents Week explores how cloud infrastructure must evolve to serve autonomous agents rather than human browsers. Join us as we unpack the storage, execution, and security primitives needed for an agent-native web.

Jul 31, 2026

Last year we made every Cloudflare server a Media over QUIC (MoQ) relay. Now the new provisioning API lets you create your own isolated relay and control who can publish and who can only watch.

Jul 30, 2026

We moved cdnjs, serving 9 billion requests a day, entirely onto Cloudflare's Developer Platform. That means we’re running one of the Internet's busiest open-source CDNs on our own building blocks, and we pushed Workflows and Workers limits higher for everyone.

Jul 29, 2026

Cloudflare now supports post-quantum (PQ) authentication when connecting to customer origin servers via Authenticated Origin Pulls and Custom Origin Trust Store. This is the first step towards providing PQ authentication for all Cloudflare products.

Jul 28, 2026

Cloudflare Radar tracked Internet disruptions driven by natural disasters, government-mandated shutdowns, and DNSSEC key rollovers over the last quarter. This post analyzes traffic telemetry to explain how these events impacted global connectivity.

Jul 27, 2026

pvcli is a curl-like tool designed to simplify the testing of complex privacy protocols like OHTTP.

Jul 24, 2026

By doing in-depth testing, we found nearly 70% of BGP paths experience ORIGIN attribute rewrites by transit providers seeking traffic advantages. We examine the global impact of this practice and argue for deprecating ORIGIN in route selection.

Jul 23, 2026

Perhaps you’ve seen something that should sail out of cache get dragged back to the origin by a stray Set-Cookie or Cache-Control, headers that can be difficult to change on the origin itself. Cache Response Rules is the fix, applied at the right time.

Jul 21, 2026

We analyzed global HTTP traffic to explore how kickoff times, streaming habits, and hydration breaks reshaped online activity worldwide. From late-night traffic surges to halftime browsing spikes, here is how the world connected during the global tournament.

Jul 20, 2026

Cloudflare Internal DNS brings authoritative and recursive DNS for private networks to the same global network and control plane that runs Cloudflare's Zero Trust, networking, and public DNS.

Jul 17, 2026

Cloudflare has deployed two WAF rules in response to high-severity vulnerabilities disclosed to us by the WordPress security team. The new rules protect all Cloudflare customers using affected WordPress versions, but customers should still update immediately to a patched release

Jul 14, 2026

When a failed DNSSEC key rollover took down the .al TLD, we deployed a Negative Trust Anchor to restore resolution. This time, though, clients didn't have to take our word for it: 1.1.1.1 returned EDE 33, a new DNS error code that signals directly in the response that DNSSEC validation was bypassed.

Jul 13, 2026

Precursor, our new continuous behavioral validation engine for bot management, offers visibility into how humans and bots actually interact across the full user journey. By turning session-level behavior into bot detection signals, it identifies advanced automation with higher precision — while reducing friction for legitimate users.

Jul 10, 2026

Smart Tiered Cache allows for precise upper tier selection for origins hosted on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud with customer-provided cloud region hints.

Jul 9, 2026

NIST is advancing nine new post-quantum signature algorithms as potential candidates for future standardization. We take a closer look at all of them, and argue that while they are in the works and show great potential, we should use ML-DSA for now — the best currently available.

Aug 3, 2026

After a months-long investigation, the ethics committee recommended censure for Edwards because of "persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers."

Aug 3, 2026

Prosecutors dropped their case against David Hearn on Friday, blaming Reflecting Pool damage on a "botched installation" rather than vandalism. That has implications for other people who were charged.

Aug 3, 2026

For years, many Cubans hoping to leave the island looked to the United States. Now, with legal pathways largely closed, a growing number are heading to Brazil instead.

Aug 3, 2026

Wildfires in Spokane have destroyed hundreds of homes and led to evacuation orders for 60,000 people.

Aug 3, 2026

They are the first reported deaths linked to a massive outbreak of the intestinal illness that began in May.

Aug 3, 2026

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown says nearly half of the city's neighborhoods have either been evacuated or are at risk as the fires remain uncontained. <br><br>

Aug 3, 2026

Pochettino came on in 2024 to right the ship ahead of this year's World Cup, in which he led the team to a record three wins and helped ignite enthusiasm in millions of fans before a round of 16 exit.

Aug 3, 2026

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche rescinds President Trump's anti-weaponization fund ahead of his confirmation hearing. And, the president calls off strikes on Iran over a potential deal.

Aug 3, 2026

An FDA advisory panel recently voted to green-light some popular peptides. The decision brought enormous attention to the market for these products — and concerns about the unregulated supply.

Aug 3, 2026

Tens of millions of Americans have criminal records that can be barriers to employment. An AI-powered app is helping those eligible to expunge their records at a pace not seen before.

Aug 3, 2026

<p>WASHINGTON—Promoting the unfounded assertion in an effort to improve his polling, President Donald Trump baselessly claimed during a White House press conference Monday that he was a viral 40-pound tabby cat named “Daddy Cinnamon.” “Yes, that’s right, folks—I’m the adorable, adorable fluffy furball who has been crawling all over your social media feeds,” the commander-in-chief [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/trump-baselessly-claims-he-is-viral-40-pound-tabby-cat-named-daddy-cinnamon/">Trump Baselessly Claims He Is Viral 40-Pound Tabby Cat Named Daddy Cinnamon</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>FREDERICKTOWN, MO—In a move many residents of this tight-knit community say jeopardizes the beloved scenic hideaway, a multinational make-out conglomerate announced Tuesday that it had purchased the small town&#8217;s treasured make-out point. &#8220;Generations of us have enjoyed driving out to this secluded little perch for sucking face, and now this giant corporation wants to make it some [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/small-towns-make-out-point-purchased-by-multinational-make-out-conglomerate/">Small Town’s Make-Out Point Purchased By Multinational Make-Out Conglomerate</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/rep-max-miller-i-refuse-to-resign-over-what-my-wife-made-me-do/">Rep. Max Miller: ‘I Refuse To Resign Over What My Wife Made Me Do’</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The FCC targeted China by banning the import of foreign-made humanoid robots, citing cybersecurity and national security concerns. What do you think?</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/u-s-bans-foreign-made-humanoid-robots/">U.S. Bans Foreign-Made Humanoid Robots</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Many U.S.-based players have reportedly stopped purchasing Powerball tickets in spite of a growing jackpot, believing the odds of winning have plummeted amid the multistate lottery game’s recent expansion into the U.K. The Onion examines the key facts and figures behind Powerball. 1.2 Average number of years until winners miserable again 26 Brood size of [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/powerball-by-the-numbers/">Powerball By The Numbers</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>BURBANK, CA—In a bold and shameless effort to expand their growing reach in the film industry, power-mad Marvel Studios executives claimed Friday that A Night At The Roxbury was part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “The Eurodance-loving crime fighters are an iconic superhero duo who have long been a fixture of the MCU, delighting our audiences [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/power-mad-marvel-claims-night-at-the-roxbury-part-of-mcu/">Power-Mad Marvel Claims ‘Night At The Roxbury’ Part Of MCU</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>WASHINGTON—Pledging to do everything in his power to ensure the mental and physical needs of his troops were being fulfilled, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that the United States had officially instated a military wife draft.&#160; Hegseth told reporters that given the “abysmal” numbers of Americans who voluntarily enlisted to wed U.S. soldiers, he [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/u-s-instates-military-wife-draft/">U.S. Instates Military Wife Draft</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>You’re always talking about joining, so let’s see how truly full of shit you are. Reference #63248</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/near-rock-climbing-gym/">Near Rock Climbing Gym</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 1, 2026

<p>Several schools across the U.S. are deploying pepper spray-dispensing drones in an effort to combat school shootings, an approach inspired by the success of drones in Ukraine’s war effort. What do you think?</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/schools-deploy-pepper-spray-drones-to-combat-shootings/">Schools Deploy Pepper Spray Drones To Combat Shootings</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>WASHINGTON—Saying the convenience of the quick but nutritious entrees could not be beat, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed viewers of his new cooking show Friday how they could create easy weeknight meals using ingredients already in their own bodies. &#8220;You don&#8217;t have to have a full pantry or a stocked [&#8230;]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-cooking-show-features-easy-weeknight-meals-using-ingredients-already-in-own-body/">RFK Jr. Cooking Show Features Easy Weeknight Meals Using Ingredients Already In Own Body</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/chicagoans-over-25-urged-to-shelter-in-place-until-lollapalooza-over/">Chicagoans Over 25 Urged To Shelter In Place Until Lollapalooza Over</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The post <a href="https://theonion.com/jared-leto-denies-sexual-assault-allegations-will-affect-career/">Jared Leto Denies Sexual Assault Allegations Will Affect Career</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theonion.com">The Onion</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

Jacob Tsimerman won a Fields medal last month – now he is leaving mathematics to work on AI safety

Aug 3, 2026

Ten conundrums that stumped human mathematicians for years have been cracked by OpenAI's Astra model, continuing a hot streak of AI-driven breakthroughs that are shaking up the field

Aug 3, 2026

AI chatbots can describe reality in words, but don’t truly understand cause and effect in the real world. Now, a fresh kind of machine intelligence that does just that is emerging

Aug 3, 2026

A beach umbrella might protect you from sunburn, but when it comes to keeping you cool, it makes surprisingly little difference

Aug 3, 2026

Beef-liver supplements are said to be more effective at raising iron levels than standard tablets, but is it true? Columnist Alice Klein looks into the evidence behind the claims

Aug 1, 2026

Fascist empires and deadly sea monsters are on offer in the science fiction out this month, says Alison Flood

Jul 31, 2026

Paradoxically, suppressing wildfires has also made European countries more vulnerable to huge blazes like those seen in France and Spain this week. With global warming also amplifying the danger, some experts are calling for a change of strategy

Jul 31, 2026

Global warming may make it too hot for malaria-carrying mosquitoes to survive in parts of Africa, but could also shift the problem to less affected areas

Jul 31, 2026

Protein is everywhere, but studies – mostly in non-human animals – suggest that limiting our intake could extend our lifespan

Jul 31, 2026

Surgery that aims to enhance the clearance of Alzheimer's-associated proteins from the brain has been banned in China, but only after thousands of people had the procedure

Aug 3, 2026

A research team at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully demonstrated an AI modeling approach that accurately and rapidly predicts how reactions between solid materials unfold over time. It is the first predictive model that accounts for how atoms travel through materials during solid-state reactions. Importantly, its predictions provide practical insights into the best recipes for making advanced materials.

Aug 3, 2026

3D bioprinting allows scientists to build custom tissue structures for medicine, but printing soft tissues like the human brain remains a major challenge. The strong pushing forces required to squeeze biological materials through tiny printer nozzles often crush and damage sensitive cells, leading to low survival rates and weak printed structures.

Aug 3, 2026

Symbioses between plants and fungi are essential for most plants. Fungal structures known as mycorrhizae extend the area from which plants can draw water and nutrients from the soil. In return, plants supply the fungi with carbohydrates produced through photosynthesis. Although the importance of this symbiosis has been known for decades, researchers have not previously been able to study the underground network in its natural structure.

Aug 3, 2026

A new Vera C. Rubin Observatory image featuring hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies in and around the COSMOS field marks the observatory's first LSST Camera image and catalog release for science.

Aug 3, 2026

Plant biologists and engineers have extended their studies to the skies to track airborne pollen once it leaves a crop. In a new study, published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, researchers established an accurate methodology for tracking, measuring and forecasting pollen dispersal of genetically engineered switchgrass at both ground and atmospheric levels.

Aug 3, 2026

Digital security currently relies on difficult equations to protect data. For example, when you use a credit card online, the information is locked inside a math problem that would take a modern computer thousands of years to solve. However, if someone builds a powerful enough computer, that security breaks.

Aug 3, 2026

Deep in the world's oceans, large male sperm whales emit slow, low-frequency clicks with the highest source levels of any animal communication sounds. These slow clicks are not the echolocation clicks the whales use to locate prey, but loud, low-frequency communication signals.

Aug 3, 2026

Why is recycling waste or switching off the lights sometimes perceived as more effective for the climate than giving up air travel? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) surveyed nearly 3,000 people and identified key psychological mechanisms underlying these misperceptions. Their findings pave the way for more effective communication strategies that encourage behaviors with the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study is published in Nature Sustainability.

Aug 3, 2026

Salty water flowing through Antarctica's Blood Falls contains a distinct community of marine-specific microorganisms, providing evidence that the brine system beneath the glacier has a marine origin, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience. The findings offer new insights into how microbial communities can persist through major environmental transitions.

Aug 3, 2026

Digital technologies could strengthen food security in developing countries, but their impact will be limited unless governments address distrust, weak collaboration and institutional inefficiencies, according to a study focusing on Mauritius published in the International Journal of Agriculture Innovation, Technology and Globalisation.

Aug 3, 2026

Researchers at Flinders University have discovered an unexpected way light can control tiny electronic structures inside advanced materials, a development that could help pave the way for more energy-efficient memory devices, sensors and future computing technologies.

Aug 3, 2026

In a billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel and expand to become a red giant. Earth's oceans and atmosphere will be burned away, and Earth will likely be engulfed by the sun altogether. The sun will then shrink to a dim white dwarf, and all light and warmth in the solar system will diminish. In a hundred trillion years, the galaxy's ability to produce stars will be exhausted, and everything will turn dark. However, there's a way for life to escape this fate—and what's more, we wouldn't need to leave the planet to do it. We just need to build some safeguards.

Aug 3, 2026

If you've ever been under a dark sky in the early morning before dawn, you may have seen a faint glow, almost like a column of light rising from the east. It's sometimes known as the false dawn because it appears before true dawn. It can also appear in the west after sunset, though it typically isn't as noticeable. The glow is caused by dust in the inner solar system. It is a diffuse plane of tiny particles that aligns with the plane of the inner planets. Since the planets move through the zodiac constellations, so does this plane of dust, which is why it is also known as the zodiacal light.

Aug 3, 2026

It is six months since the main road into the village of Torcross, in South Devon, collapsed after a series of storms caused extensive damage to the community's sea defenses. Residents are still coming to terms with the devastation and isolation caused by the storms and awaiting the results of a £20 million investment that will see huge quantities of rock placed on the beach at Slapton Sands to bolster those defenses.

Aug 3, 2026

Researchers at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering have developed a new approach to nanoscale 3D printing that improves both speed and fidelity, overcoming a challenge that has limited the technology's broader use in manufacturing.

Aug 3, 2026

A research team led by Professor Hyoyoung Lee of the Department of Chemistry at Sungkyunkwan University has developed a new catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into ethanol with high selectivity. The study, titled "Atomic-scale Cu–Zn synergy directs asymmetric C–C coupling for ethanol-selective CO2 electroreduction," was published in Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy.

Aug 3, 2026

El Niño continues to intensify steadily and is expected to dominate global climate patterns in the August to October 2026 season, increasing the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the world and driving significant shifts in rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Aug 3, 2026

A new study provides quantitative data on cranial vault thickness in Homo antecessor, based on the analysis of three parietal fragments recovered from the Gran Dolina site in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain.

Aug 3, 2026

An international research team led by Assistant Professor Ryuji Takasaki of the Faculty of Biosphere-Geosphere Science at Okayama University of Science has published a paper proposing a new hypothesis on the evolutionary history of dinosaur digestive systems by focusing on gastroliths—stones found within dinosaur abdominal cavities. By examining the degree of wear on these gastroliths, the team sheds light on dinosaur digestion strategies. The findings are published in the journal Paleobiology.

Aug 3, 2026

A study from the University of Manchester into the effects of polymer cross-contamination on the outcome of mechanically recycling plastics has found that the presence of contaminants radically alters degradation mechanisms.

Aug 3, 2026

Ants live in highly organized colonies and cooperate daily to tackle a wide range of problems. Their striking group behaviors have fascinated biologists for centuries and even inspired the development of various artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Aug 3, 2026

So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, most exist on their own.

Aug 3, 2026

Admissions applications, discussion posts, grades, and activity logs are among the most common signals educators use to gauge whether students will thrive in an online program. But two new Georgia Tech studies suggest those measures tell only part of the story.

Aug 3, 2026

Roll back the tape of Earth's history, and geologists and astrobiologists remain perplexed about the environmental conditions on early Earth. That's because conventional pathways for understanding Earth's history have been lost to time owing to the planet's active geology and atmospheric weathering.

Aug 3, 2026

Cyanobacterial blooms, like the ones that occur in Lake Geneva, are rapid, dense growths of photosynthetic bacteria in fresh and marine waters that can threaten the health of swimmers and their pets.

Aug 3, 2026

When a hurricane roars toward land, forecasters try to predict how high sea levels will rise to help coastal communities prepare for the worst impacts.

Aug 3, 2026

Students who open a personal social media account earlier in adolescence appear to perform worse on later standardized tests, according to a study in Nature Human Behaviour based on 5,227 Italian students. The authors speculate that these differences may be attributable to excessive social media engagement and disruptions to students' attention.

Aug 3, 2026

Imagine trying to swallow a sip of water while your face feels stuffed with congestion, your sense of taste is dulled and your body is floating 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

Aug 3, 2026

A microscopic predator may offer a new way to protect some of the Caribbean's most endangered corals. Georgia Tech researchers found that tiny predatory bacteria can halt the spread of a destructive coral disease by hunting and consuming pathogens responsible for the infection.

Aug 3, 2026

The interaction between X-rays and matter can be actively controlled, according to an international research team led by the University of Hamburg and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory that has succeeded in producing bright X-ray images with significantly less damage. In an article published in Nature Communications, the researchers report using ultrafast pulses that partially reverse the damage they generate.

Aug 3, 2026

AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how AI might change the rest of math. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-legendary-erdos-problems-are-falling-to-ai-20260803/" target="_blank">Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>

Jul 31, 2026

The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reasoning-right-for-the-wrong-reasons-20260731/" target="_blank">Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>

Jul 29, 2026

New calculations seem to have put a 25-year-old particle physics puzzle to rest. But they’ve also created a clash with other experimental results. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-solve-a-muon-mystery-now-old-results-dont-add-up-20260729/" target="_blank">Physicists Solve a Big Quantum Mystery. Now, Old Results Don’t Add Up.</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>

Jul 27, 2026

An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow’s gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-way-that-a-cows-inner-world-shapes-earths-atmosphere-20260727/" target="_blank">A New Way That a Cow’s Inner World Shapes Earth’s Atmosphere</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>

Jul 23, 2026

One of the most contested issues in astrophysics is our understanding of the Universe’s expansion. Adam Riess discusses why there is disagreement and what might resolve it. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-fast-is-the-universe-really-expanding-20260723/" target="_blank">How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>

Aug 3, 2026

A co-op game for friends with attention spans.

Aug 3, 2026

The international spirit of baseball and friendship might frown on the method, though.

Aug 3, 2026

"I love that world," Navarrette said.

Aug 3, 2026

The feature is expected to get a "gradual" launch between 2027 and 2028.

Aug 3, 2026

Affordable AND performant.

Aug 3, 2026

It's still one of the best gaming laptops money can buy, but the massive price tag throws me for a loop.

Aug 3, 2026

This could be an important testing ground for the panel technology.

Aug 3, 2026

Fill out our 15-minute survey about your gaming and reading habits, and you could be rewarded.

Aug 3, 2026

Dragon scale-ing difficulty.

Aug 3, 2026

How soon is now?

Aug 3, 2026

Stick to proximity chat: robbing the game of its creative problem solving takes away a lot of the fun.

Aug 3, 2026

I've only just heard of it, but I'm now afraid of being put in Noctua's torture-test rig.

Aug 3, 2026

And it even kinda works with Rocket League.

Aug 3, 2026

And I don't even know if it's worth the original price.

Aug 3, 2026

Worlds collide.

Aug 3, 2026

Disappointing, but not completely surprising.

Aug 3, 2026

All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending August 2.

Aug 3, 2026

Press X.

Aug 2, 2026

At this point, I think I trust the process.

Aug 2, 2026

I love builds.

Aug 2, 2026

Next stop: the Peace Garden State.

Aug 2, 2026

Daddy's home.

Aug 2, 2026

ShiftUp's marketing tactic has backfired.

Aug 2, 2026

Dungeons, dice, and bear sex await.

Aug 2, 2026

The creator of KSP talks us through what's on his PC, from Full Throttle to Old School Runescape.

Aug 2, 2026

The zombie survival sim has also gone up in price.

Aug 2, 2026

Terminator too.

Aug 2, 2026

Bethesda takes a different approach to marketing its Switch 2 launch.

Aug 2, 2026

I'm not like all the other gith.

Aug 1, 2026

I did not enjoy it. It was solely a professional obligation.

Aug 1, 2026

Bigger isn't always better. Except for sometimes when it is.

Aug 1, 2026

We've all been there.

Aug 1, 2026

It would be nice if somebody did something, for once.

Aug 1, 2026

A riddle for the ages.

Aug 1, 2026

Grok, who are these people that live in my house?

Aug 1, 2026

Feeling Sil-y.

Aug 1, 2026

Knocking boots with companions has become an RPG tradition, but does it really add anything?

Aug 1, 2026

Dust off the old wagon.

Aug 1, 2026

Hear me out, then hear me out 1,000 more times.

Aug 1, 2026

"Courage is a consistent factor of most hit titles."

Aug 1, 2026

"There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine."

Aug 1, 2026

Do you also turn it off immediately, like I do?

Aug 1, 2026

Don't like AI? Then you're a domestic terrorist, apparently.

Aug 1, 2026

A squirrel with a rifle is the least interesting thing about it.

Aug 1, 2026

Back when Sony still liked discs *and* publishing games on the PC.

Jul 31, 2026

Plus a bot that can chase you underwater, a mech that can knock down walls, and a teacherbot gets kicked out of class.

Jul 31, 2026

Technically, it shed its Web3 functionality in May, but it didn't seem to help much.

Jul 31, 2026

We're finally free.

Jul 31, 2026

The Game Industry Hardship Fund bundle is live now on Itch.io.

Jul 31, 2026

Enjoying the high-kicks and low-brows of a timeless FPS.

Aug 3, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/1960s-color-photograph-of-a-white-woman-waiting-as-a-middle-aged-white-male-doctor-uses-a-stylus-to-navigate-her-health-record.png?id=67567697&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/><br/><br/><p>Most hospitals and health care providers use <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/debate-on-the-value-of-electronic-health-records-continues" target="_self">electronic health records</a> instead of paper charts to note patient vaccinations, diagnoses, and procedures. <a href="https://www.athenahealth.com/patient-login" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">AthenaOne</a>, <a href="https://www.epic.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Epic</a>, and <a href="https://www.oracle.com/health/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Oracle Health</a> are some of the systems employed around the world. Many patients can access their electronic medical records from home.</p><p>The platforms exist thanks to pioneering efforts such as the <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/89482.89511" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Medical Information System</a> (MIS-I). The first hospital-wide computer system, it was developed in the 1960s by <a href="https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lockheed Martin</a> (then known as Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.) in partnership with <a href="https://www.elcaminohealth.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">El Camino Hospital</a>, in Mountain View, Calif. Doctors and nurses used MIS-I (pronounced <em><em>miss-ONE</em></em>) to admit patients, order lab work and imaging, schedule follow-up appointments, and issue hospital bills, according to a 1973 article published by <a href="https://www.datamation.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>Datamation</em></em></a>.</p><p>Although many people now know how to type on a keyboard, in the 1960s, most did not. Therefore, MIS-I included a light pen, which worked like a stylus for today’s touchscreens.</p><p>MIS-I was recognized as an <a href="https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Main_Page" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Milestone</a> during a ceremony on 14 May at El Camino Hospital. The <a href="https://ieeescv.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section</a> sponsored the Milestone.</p><p>“The medical information system was more than a technological breakthrough; it was proof of what can happen when clinicians, engineers, administrators, and community leaders unite around a common goal: improving care for patients,” <a href="https://www.elcaminohealth.org/about-us/hospital-leadership/executive-team/dan-woods" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dan Woods</a> said at the event. He is chief executive of <a href="https://www.elcaminohealth.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">El Camino Health</a>, the nonprofit organization that maintains the hospital.</p><p>“This pioneering work helped establish the foundation for the modern medical informatics industry,” Woods said. “The legacy of Lockheed’s innovation continues to benefit patients and health care providers around the world, making this achievement truly worthy of lasting recognition.”</p><h2>Bringing technology into clinical care</h2><p>Prior to Lockheed’s effort, health records remained paper-based. They often were stored in dedicated rooms within the hospital. Files were kept in heavy-duty manila folders organized on mechanized open-shelf filing systems, revolving rotary files, or locked steel filing cabinets, according to <a href="https://www.eojohnson.com/blog/digitizing-medical-records" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">EO Johnson Business Technologies</a>. The process of retrieving a patient’s medical history was cumbersome and could hamper decision-making in a life-or-death situation. Paper records were prone to human error, according to an <a href="https://www.ehrinpractice.com/problem-with-paper-charting.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">EHR in Practice article</a>. In addition, upkeep could be costly due to administrative expenses such as transcribing doctors’ notes, storing patient charts, adding medical codes, and managing insurance claims.</p><p>Companies and universities including <a href="https://www.ge.com/about-us" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">General Electric</a>, <a href="https://www.ibm.com/us-en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IBM</a>, and <a href="https://www.harvard.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Harvard</a> began exploring how to use computers to improve clinical care. They developed several systems for hospital laboratories to track test orders and results, as explained in the <a href="https://ethw.org/Milestones:Pioneering_Medical_Information_System,_1965-1974" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Milestone webpage</a>.</p><p>In 1964 Lockheed was looking to diversify its portfolio, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/melville-hodge-90a48b77/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Melville Hodge</a>, who helped lead the MIS development, said at the dedication ceremony. The company decided to apply its expertise to health care, and later that year this focus-area became part of a new information systems division. Hodge, who at the time oversaw multiple R&D efforts, became the driving force behind the MIS program.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Black and white photograph of a chunky personal computer equipped with a wired stylus. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ff8a2974b1c211dcaa29cde6c70634d0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="d546e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-photograph-of-a-chunky-personal-computer-equipped-with-a-wired-stylus.jpg?id=67567929&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption..." style="max-width: 100%;">MIS-I displayed patient information on a 14-inch television purchased from a department store. Below that monitor was a keyboard and a light pen.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..." style="max-width: 100%;">Ian Thomson/Computer History Museum</small></p><p>In 1966 Lockheed secured a contract with the <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mayo Clinic</a>, in Rochester, Minn., to assess its computer system needs and those of its two associated hospitals, Hodge wrote in a <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/89482.89511?__cf_chl_f_tk=YAYS1CZzw_BiF4084G0DyBxWAHbqikN4Cnyqu1hCdRw-1783374112-1.0.1.1-KgW02NfZmVfomnfAz39gE3zIMevbVxCvM_SEJujlutA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">paper detailing MIS history</a>.</p><p>He and a small team of engineers worked with Mayo Clinic physicians for two years to build the prototype of what would become MIS-I.</p><p>The system displayed patient information on a 14-inch television purchased from a department store. Below that monitor was a keyboard, and to its right was a printer. Doctors and nurses would swipe their ID badge to access the system, then use the keyboard to put information into the patient’s file or send a request to a pharmacy or laboratory. They also could print documents.</p><p>But one problem kept cropping up: Most doctors didn’t know how to type. The computer mouse was still in its infancy, and Hodge suspected it would not solve the problem, according to a video shown at the dedication ceremony. Instead, he “borrowed technology from a then-secret satellite program,” he said.</p><p>That technology was the light pen, which was used with <a href="https://ethw.org/Milestones:Whirlwind_Computer,_1944-59" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT’s Whirlwind Computer</a> in the 1950s.</p><p>“The insight that physicians could not and would not learn to type, combined with the innovative solution of light pen interaction, transformed an impossible dream into practical reality,” the Milestone proposers wrote.</p><p>To display text, the system used matrix programming, a 2D data structure consisting of rows and columns. Using the light pen, a doctor or nurse would select text from a list of general categories on the monitor. The options included the patient’s personal and medical information, family medical history, current illness, and physical exam findings, according to a 1968 article in the medical journal <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>JAMA</em></em></a>. The computer would display the requested information or list the next steps to complete tasks such as sending a prescription to a pharmacy. The keyboard remained part of the setup because it could allow users to input new information and update patient records.</p><p>To further develop the system, they submitted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now split into the Departments of <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Health and Human Services</a> and <a href="https://www.ed.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Education</a>) to secure additional funding, but it was rejected.</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/02/obituaries/herschel-j-brown-88-a-leader-at-lockheed.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Herschel Brown</a>, Lockheed’s executive vice president, and <a href="https://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/2004/2004_01_28.obits.shtml" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kenneth Larkin</a>, its director of information systems, decided to fund its commercial development, Hodge wrote.</p><p>When the company’s contract with the Mayo Clinic ended, the Lockheed team returned to Sunnyvale, California to refine, test, and deploy the system at El Camino Hospital.</p><p>“I admire <a href="https://obits.cleveland.com/person/R.-Edwin-Hawkins-30037082" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ed Hawkins</a>, who was its first administrator, for having the courage to take on this kind of project while running a hospital that was only four years old at the time,” Hodge said at the dedication ceremony.</p><h2>Making MIS-I a commercial success</h2><p>Starting in 1968, early prototypes were installed in the hospital’s M.D. lounges and nursing station at El Camino Hospital. The organizations worked to configure the system so it met the hospital’s needs.</p><p>By 1969, a number of monitors had been installed, including in admissions, pharmacy, and radiology. The information from all the connected machines was stored in a data center housed in a separate location outside the hospital.</p><p>In 1971 Lockheed encountered difficulties with its <a href="https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1529718/c-5-abc-galaxy-and-c-5m-super-galaxy/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">C-5A</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-1011_TriStar" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">L-1011</a> aircraft programs, according to Hodge. The company was forced to curtail discretionary new business programs including MIS-I. The program was sold to <a href="https://www.technicon.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Technicon</a> of Tarrytown, N.Y., a leader in clinical laboratory automation.</p><p>The medical information system business operated independently as a subsidiary unit, and the transition marked the beginning of MIS-I’s commercial expansion.</p><p>That same year, MIS-I went live for hospital-wide use. Physicians’ orders were communicated to other departments, test results and radiology reports were retrieved, and nursing care planning and documentation were available, according to the <em><em>Journal of Nursing Scholarship</em></em>. MIS-I supported most information handling for nurses, physicians, and other medical personnel in the hospital.</p><p>But the change was not welcomed by all, according to the video about the technology. Nurses tended to praise the system, but many doctors had a hard time transitioning from paper to computers. They complained they were “spending more time fighting a machine” than interacting with their patients, according to the video. Some even retired to avoid learning the system. But nurses fought to keep it, emphasizing to doctors how much it improved patient care.</p><p>In 1974 El Camino Hospital held a vote of medical staff to determine whether to keep the system or return to paper-based records. About 60 percent of doctors and more than 90 percent of nurses voted in favor of keeping it, according to the Milestone webpage.</p><p class="pull-quote">“The medical information system was more than a technological breakthrough; it was proof of what can happen when clinicians, engineers, administrators, and community leaders unite around a common goal: improving care for patients.” <strong>—Dan Woods, El Camino Health CEO</strong></p><p>In 1975 nonprofit <a href="https://www.battelle.org/" target="_blank">Battelle</a> of Columbus, Ohio, evaluated how well the system was working for El Camino Hospital. It <a href="https://ethw-images.s3.us-east-va.perf.cloud.ovh.us/ieee/4/4f/Technicon_19751219_ECH_Battelle.pdf" target="_blank">found that MIS-I</a> reduced the time nursing staff spent on clerical tasks, improved communications among departments, and facilitated better planning of patient care. The survey also showed that more readily available, complete, and accurate information was being used to administer care and monitor patient progress, according to the <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/65873/0000065873-97-000006.txt" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">filings</a>.</p><p>By 1993, the technology was installed in more than 200 hospitals in the United States, Canada, and Europe, according to the Milestone entry.</p><p>El Camino Hospital used MIS-I for 34 years, until its decommissioning in 2005. It was initially replaced by <a href="https://www.biospace.com/b-eclipsys-sunrise-clinical-manager-tm-b-3-5-xa-tm-activated-by-b-cottage-health-system-b-santa-barbara" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Eclipsys Sunrise XA</a> and then ultimately by Epic.</p><h2>Honoring an IEEE Milestone</h2><p>The dedication ceremony brought together IEEE leaders, hospital staff, and government representatives. Hodge and his family also attended. IEEE President-Elect <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/2026-ieee-president-elect-gostin" target="_self">Jill Gostin</a> made a presentation about IEEE, and Brian Berg of the IEEE History Committee discussed the organization’s Milestone program.</p><p>Hodge participated in a Q&A session with <a href="https://www.elcaminohealth.org/about-us/hospital-leadership/executive-team/debbi-muro" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Deb Muro</a>, chief information officer of El Camino Health. He told a story about the early days of MIS-I that he said he will never forget. During a hospital board meeting at which physicians were complaining about the system, an announcement was made over the hospital’s public address system that MIS-I wasn’t working.</p><p>“I had to ignore it to survive,” Hodge said, laughing. “As physicians got more used to it, and with a phenomenal poking from the nurses, doctors who wouldn’t use it were forced to.”</p><p>A bronze plaque recognizing the MIS-I as an IEEE Milestone has been installed in the lobby of the hospital in Mountain View. The plaque reads:</p><p><em>From 1965 to 1974, the first hospital-wide computerized medical information system was created by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in partnership with El Camino Hospital. Innovative light-pen terminals enabled physicians and staff across all departments to efficiently and accurately access patient data and enter work orders. By providing immediate feedback and seamless communication, it reduced costs and errors, improved safety and outcomes, and led the way to modern medical and clinical informatics.</em></p><p>Reviewed by the <a href="https://history.ieee.org/about/ieee-history-committee/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE History Committee</a> and approved by the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Board of Directors</a>, IEEE Milestones recognize outstanding technical developments around the world that are at least 25 years old. The Milestone program is administered by the <a href="https://history.ieee.org/about/ieee-history-center/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE History</a> and Heritage group.</p><p>To learn more about historical figures in engineering, IEEE Milestones, and IEEE History Center programs and events, check out <em><em>The Institute</em></em>’s <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/ieee-history" target="_self">IEEE Tech History collection</a>. <em><em>IEEE</em></em> <em><em>Spectrum</em></em> also covers aspects of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/tech-history/" target="_self">tech history</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/cfd-contour-plot-of-flow-velocity-in-a-complex-mechanical-housing-cross-section.png?id=67522155&width=980"/><br/><br/><p><em>This article is brought to you by <a href="https://www.comsol.com" target="_blank">COMSOL</a>.</em></p><p>In pursuit of improved range, greater reliability, and faster charging, electric vehicles are driving the demand for high-voltage electronics. Other applications driving this demand include wind farms, data centers, and server farms, to name a few. As the interest for high-voltage electronics increases, the risks associated with their sudden failure must be considered. </p><p>Much of what causes high-voltage equipment to malfunction can be linked to the conditions of the climate in which it operates. Specifically, condensation on electronic surfaces caused by humidity can lead to corrosion, which can result in stray leak current and dendrite shorting during Electrochemical Migration (ECM). </p><p>Predicting, mitigating, and helping proactively design to account for corrosion is the focus of the <a href="https://celcorr.dtu.dk/" target="_blank">Centre for Electronic Corrosion (CELCORR)</a> research group at the <a href="https://www.dtu.dk/english" target="_blank">Technical University of Denmark (DTU)</a>. The group’s researchers are working with industry partners to develop models and simulation apps that will help in building robust electronics designs. Their goal is to develop knowledge that can be used for manufacturing electronics to withstand humid operating conditions.</p><h2>Electronic Failure: “It’s Not the Heat; It is the Humidity”</h2><p>Automotive electrification and renewable energy systems rely on electronics at all stages of the energy chain. When these electronics, such as the example PCB in Figure 1, are exposed to the effects of moisture, they can become potential failure points.</p><p> “Anywhere you are producing, converting, transporting, and using energy, you need these high-power electronic systems that get affected by the humidity,” explained <a href="https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/persons/rajan-ambat/" target="_blank">Dr. Rajan Ambat</a>, DTU professor and manager of CELCORR. Ambient moisture can seep into the devices and machines that require these electronics and cause unexpected functional issues through corrosion. When these electronics are involved in particularly high-voltage applications (such as wind farms, data centers, electric vehicles, and server farms), failure due to humidity exposure can even lead to fire.</p><p>“There might be a situation where somebody installs a solar panel near the seashore or in an area with high humidity, and within a short period of time, a conducive condition forms inside the electronics that results in a failure,” Ambat said. “This is why we need to understand exactly how the conducive condition of condensation is created, when the condition is created, and how the system is failing.”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Heatmap of electrolyte potential and tangential current density on a metal plate" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e93a191d5911faa67541c2d4ee4964df" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="9f056" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/heatmap-of-electrolyte-potential-and-tangential-current-density-on-a-metal-plate.png?id=67522194&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Figure 1. The electrolyte potential and current density distributions on a PCB surface (with pinholes).</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">CELCORR/DTU</small></p><p><span>Identifying corrosion as the underlying cause of some electronic failures is still a challenge. “Fifty percent of failures in electronics are currently branded with an unidentified root cause,” Ambat explained. “When engineers open up the system, they do not realize that the failure was due to corrosion, because moisture disappears without leaving any sign of corrosion unless there is ECM dendrite formation.” </span></p><p><span>This lack of awareness was a strong motivator for CELCORR, which turned to multiphysics simulation as a supplementary tool to help its partner organizations to better predict humidity-related issues at the design stage.</span></p><h2>Modeling Moisture and Measuring Parameter Changes in PCBs</h2><p>CELCORR believes the best way to identify and avoid electronic failures is to build more effective designs that better prevent corrosion from developing or can withstand a higher humidity load. Its research team applies its expertise in modeling to generate simulation apps that will help partner industries to evaluate safe designs for humidity robustness.</p><p>“We are at the intersection of materials science and the electronics industry. We work as a bridge between materials and electronics disciplines, using both kinds of language,” Dr. Anish Rao Lakkaraju, a postdoctoral researcher at CELCORR, explained.</p><p>To understand potential design issues, Ambat emphasized the importance of virtually breaking down systems to identify where problems may arise. “We need simulation software to analyze potential uses of designs and whether new designs are good or bad,” Ambat said.</p><p class="pull-quote"><span>Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are using simulation apps to predict corrosion and design electronics proactively to mitigate or withstand its effects.</span></p><p><span>Using the COMSOL Multiphysics</span><span> software for investigation, the CELCORR research team together with other research partners (Aalborg University) built an example model with a simple PCB geometry that matched both its test circuit boards as well as the design of a device used by one of its partner companies. The team then added a water film layer on top to act as the relative humidity. From there, the team could introduce variation. </span><span>“We change the layout, geometry, distance between electrodes, thickness of the water film, and conductivity of the water film depending on the conditions,” Ambat said.</span></p><p>Ambat and his team generate data on the effect of these variations and can identify which has the greatest impact on the device’s performance and whether any alterations can improve the device’s anticorrosion robustness. “We assume there is condensation forming on the electronic surfaces (Figure 2) and compute the electrochemical leak current for different design elements,” Ambat said. “The value of the computed electrochemical current between the parts will give us an indication of whether the PCB will be affected or not.”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Finite-element contour map of tangential electrolyte current density in a cell housing" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ccb9635dd389dfed1512e6ba97b5ec58" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="150b7" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/finite-element-contour-map-of-tangential-electrolyte-current-density-in-a-cell-housing.png?id=67522196&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Figure 2. A 10-µm water film condensation effect on an example PCB.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">CELCORR/DTU</small></p><p><span>Altering the design elements and solving the model equations again and again allows the team to better understand what makes a design effective. “Now, we are at the current form of the model, and we are quite happy with where the physics are at this point,” Lakkaraju said. This modeling, however, was just the first part of CELCORR’s overarching goal of illuminating the destructive potential of corrosion in electronics and the best ways to avoid it.</span></p><h2>Using Simulation Apps to Test Real-World Designs</h2><p>To open up and ease access to these models, CELCORR used the Application Builder in COMSOL Multiphysics to create simulation applications for the members of the industrial consortium. Built with a simple 3D circuit board geometry with two oppositely biased electrodes and a water layer to replicate corrosion-causing moisture, the apps provide a pared-back, straightforward interface where users can vary model inputs. “We focused on fundamental aspects,” Lakkaraju said. “We boiled down our partners’ overarching concerns to create two apps with very simple geometries and the simplistic stuff that can be varied over multiple parameters.”</p><p>The simple simulation apps shown in Figures 3 and 4 are designed to show companies how the distance between the electrodes and the thickness of the moisture layer affect the leak current through the water film depending on different parameters. By analyzing multiple design elements and parameters, users can determine the relative benefits of certain design elements on the humidity robustness. “The apps we have built have really helped because they give the electronics engineers a plug-and-play sort of approach,” Lakkaraju explained.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="COMSOL simulation of electrode surface current density with 3D and 2D heatmap views" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="047f8706395c84f3e9c65ce1a612f617" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="8261f" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/comsol-simulation-of-electrode-surface-current-density-with-3d-and-2d-heatmap-views.png?id=67522370&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Figure 3. The UI of CELCORR’s standalone app showing the inputs that users can alter.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">CELCORR/DTU</small></p><p>“By using this app [Figure 3], companies have unlimited freedom to work with these sorts of variables,” Lakkaraju added. “This would be quite difficult to recreate in real life with physical design and testing, and the companies we work with are quite happy with the level of accuracy the app can provide.”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="3D simulation of electrolyte current density streamlines around rectangular electrodes" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="111d33b63e68a49b211f68f24d3bbad6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="004f9" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/3d-simulation-of-electrolyte-current-density-streamlines-around-rectangular-electrodes.png?id=67522279&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Figure 4. The UI of one of the simulation apps showing a streamline plot with inputs such as the cathode voltage and blockage length.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">CELCORR/DTU</small></p><h2>Looking Forward: Complex, High-Voltage Modeling</h2><p>Alongside its collaboration with the industry consortium, CELCORR is also working toward improving the world’s general understanding of corrosion’s impact on electronics. To do this, Ambat and his team are undertaking multiple projects, including actively adding greater complexity to their models. In a tertiary current distribution model they are building, the team is drilling down into each of the basic inputs used in a secondary current distribution model, zooming in to examine the effects of the set of even more detailed inputs each basic input comprises.</p><p>“The next point is to study what each of these detailed inputs does,” Lakkaraju said. In particular, the team is examining mass transport properties and the chemical reactions’ rate constants.</p><p>In addition to these ongoing studies, CELCORR is expanding the scope of its research to investigate corrosion in high-power, high-voltage systems. Thanks to a 2024 grant from the Grundfos Foundation, CELCORR was able to establish the Centre for Climate Robust Electronics Design (CRED). The center’s lab facilities and expertise are being developed to address the humidity-robustness requirements of today’s high-voltage and high-power electronic equipment. “Using CELCORR’s uniquely deep understanding of materials and corrosion, we are equipped to find the root cause and provide knowledge for environmentally robust designs,” said Ambat.</p><p>For all of its investigation, CELCORR continues to rely on the agility of the COMSOL Multiphysics software. As Lakkaraju explained, “It is really quite nice how a model can be adapted to a variety of combinations of materials, geometries, and parameters and how the software allows you to keep building on from there.”</p>

Aug 2, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/color-photo-of-a-reel-to-reel-tape-recorder-with-a-black-case-and-multiple-knobs-and-switches.jpg?id=67529056&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/><br/><br/><p><span><span>A German engineer wanted a cheaper cigarette. The popular crooner Bing Crosby wanted a vacation. Satisfying both desires inadvertently led to the invention of the laugh track. Along the way there were Nazis, spoils of war, and more than one accidental encounter. Tying together this quirky history is the Magnetophon.</span></span></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe height="110px" id="noa-web-audio-player" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=q5m19e&id=https://spectrum.ieee.org/magnetophon-laugh-track?draft=1&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=1b1b1c&playColor=1b1b1c&progressBgColor=F5F5F5&progressBorderColor=bdbbbb&titleColor=1b1b1c&timeColor=1b1b1c&speedColor=1b1b1c&noaLinkColor=556B7D&noaLinkHighlightColor=FF4B00&feedbackButton=true" style="border: none" width="100%"></iframe></div><h2>What Was the Magnetophon?</h2><p>The Magnetophon was a high-fidelity reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. The hit of the Berlin Radio Show when it debuted in 1935, it was developed by the German electronics manufacturer AEG. The magnetic tape was produced by I.G. Farben (now known as BASF).</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Black and white photo of a balding white man with a mustache and pince nez. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fee79c5be482631695e594cdcde68ac2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="9a787" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-photo-of-a-balding-white-man-with-a-mustache-and-pince-nez.jpg?id=67529068&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">German inventor Fritz Pfleumer came up with the idea of recording sound on magnetized paper tape coated with metal.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">ullstein bild/Getty Images</small></p><p><span>The tale of that tape runs through German inventor Fritz Pfleumer. In the early 1920s, Pfleumer was working on industrial paper products in Dresden. At the time, fancy cigarettes had gold leaf to decorate the tip. Cheaper manufacturers achieved a similar effect using colored paper, but the dye could stain smokers’ lips, and no one wanted that. Pfleumer devised a less expensive process using powdered bronze to simulate the gold band.</span></p><p>Pfleumer didn’t work in the recording industry, but he was familiar with the technology of electromechanical recording, which was done on metal wire—a 1898 invention of the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. Pfleumer thought he could do something similar with paper by replacing his powdered bronze with a magnetized material. He patented his “sounding paper” in 1928 and also invented an audio tape recorder to go with it. The sound quality wasn’t great, and the paper tore easily, but it was the start of a promising idea. Two points in its favor: The paper could be sliced, allowing edits, and it could be erased and re-recorded over.</p><p>Pfleumer knew he needed to partner with a larger company to commercialize his idea, and so he signed a contract with AEG in 1932. Hermann Bücher, chairman of the AEG board of directors, took a personal interest in the project, helping shepherd it to completion. Although AEG originally planned on developing both a recorder and the tape, it didn’t take long for Bücher to reach out to his friend Wilhelm Gaus, managing director at I.G. Farben. AEG developed the hardware, while I.G. Farben worked on the tape.</p><p>The two teams dubbed their product the Magnetophon, or magnetic phonograph, and planned on launching it at the 1934 Berlin Radio Show to compete directly with machines that recorded on steel tape or wire. But the product wasn’t quite ready. Two days before the show, they canceled the debut. </p><p>A year later, the bugs had been worked out. The Magnetophon’s introduction at the 1935 show was a resounding success. AEG fielded inquiries for many variations on the recorder, including one that combined the recorder with a telephone, a player for prerecorded music, and a special version to add artificial reverberation for recording open-air concerts. Over the next three years, AEG developed several iterations, resulting in the Magnetophon K4 in 1938, its first commercially successful tape recorder.</p><p>The K4 eliminated the hiss and distortion that magnetic recordings previously suffered from by incorporating AC bias, which added a high-frequency signal, typically around 40 to 150 kilohertz, to the recording. Inaudible to the human ear, the signal reduced distortion, especially when recording quieter passages. The fidelity of the Magnetophon was such that radio listeners couldn’t distinguish between live broadcasts and prerecorded performances.</p><h2>The Magnetophon During and After the War</h2><p><span>This is where the Nazis come in. Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, understood the power of radio. The Magnetophon became a powerful tool for both political messaging and military strategy. Because the device could record and play back sound at the same quality as a live radio broadcast, it allowed Hitler’s recorded speeches to be aired from one radio station while the dictator was in another part of the country. This made it more difficult for the Allies to pinpoint his location.</span></p><p class="ieee-inbody-related">RELATED: <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-the-third-reichs-radio" target="_self">Inside the Third Reich’s Radio</a></p><p>Meanwhile, World War II disrupted the exchange of technical information and prevented Americans from learning about the Magnetophon until after the war. At least, that’s the shorthand version of this history I kept running across during my preliminary research for this column.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Smiling World War II-era U.S. Army officer in uniform and cap, shown in black and white." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2c91f2cb389c68ef6748bc171bc9c707" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="c5823" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-world-war-ii-era-u-s-army-officer-in-uniform-and-cap-shown-in-black-and-white.jpg?id=67529142&width=980"/> </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="1945 U.S. military certificate authorizing captured German Morse code recorder equipment" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ecd04a9aa352281974ba3443200e4a76" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="b23ec" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/1945-u-s-military-certificate-authorizing-captured-german-morse-code-recorder-equipment.jpg?id=67529141&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">During World War II, U.S. Army Signal Corps engineer Jack Mullin [top] came across the Magnetophon. After the war, he got approval [bottom] to ship two of the disassembled machines and reels of magnetic tape back to the U.S.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Top: Pavek Museum; Bottom: Richard L. Hess/The Mullin Family Collection/<a href="https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt5k4036nc_aspace_ref162_6i6" target="_blank">Archive of Recorded Sound/Stanford University</a></small></p><p>But then I read Friedrich K. Engel’s account in the book <em><em>Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years</em></em>, which provides a wealth of detail about the Magnetophon. Among other things, Engel notes that the AEG affiliate in Schenectady, N.Y., received a Magnetophon in November 1937, well before the United States entered the war, and AEG engineers demonstrated it for their colleagues at nearby General Electric. The GE engineers dismissed the technology out of hand, though, and so Americans had to wait until after the war for the Magnetophon to be reintroduced.</p><p>We have electrical engineer <a href="https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/summer-2006/the-man-behind-the-sound/" target="_blank">John T. “Jack” Mullin</a> to thank for that reintroduction. Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, stationed in the United Kingdom and Paris during the war, and he liked listening to the radio. He realized that “live” orchestral broadcasts coming from Germany in the middle of the night, when no musicians would have actually been in the studio, lacked the telltale hiss and crackle of prerecorded music. Clearly, German engineers had recording technology far superior to the Americans’. </p><p> Sent to Germany at the war’s end, Mullin eventually came across that technology at a radio station, and in 1945 when he returned home to California, he shipped two disassembled Magnetophons, a case of tape, schematic drawings, and the determination to change the U.S. recording industry. </p><h2>Bing Crosby Championed the Magnetophon</h2><p>Enter Bing Crosby. In the 1940s, Crosby was perhaps the most popular performer on the radio. But he was tired of performing two weekly shows three hours apart (one for each coast). He wanted to prerecord his performances and take a break. He sent in his lawyers to talk to executives at NBC, which aired his program. The audio recording technology at the time used vinyl or shellac transcription discs, but radio listeners could hear the pops and hisses and knew it wasn’t live. NBC refused Crosby’s request, and so Crosby took a year off from radio and then signed with the upstart network ABC, which was willing to let him record his shows for later airing. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Black and white photo of two men in suits facing each other and standing in front of radio equipment. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="456a8312c136ef58d642fe66032eca3c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="7da70" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-photo-of-two-men-in-suits-facing-each-other-and-standing-in-front-of-radio-equipment.jpg?id=67529105&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Radio producer Murdo MacKenzie [right] arranged for Jack Mullin [left] to demonstrate the Magnetophon to Bing Crosby in 1946.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Pavek Museum</small></p><p>Serendipitously, Mullin had begun demoing the Magnetophon in California. In October 1946, Crosby’s technical producer, Murdo MacKenzie, heard about the demonstrations and arranged one for Crosby at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood. Crosby was delighted and promptly invested US $50,000 (about $800,000 today) in Ampex, the company working with Mullin to engineer an American version of the Magnetophon. Mullin became Crosby’s chief engineer. 3M developed the magnetic tape.</p><p>In 1947, Crosby became the first major radio star in the United States to prerecord performances. Much of the success was due to the recording equipment, but Mullin was also an excellent editor. Crosby and his team would record multiple takes, and Mullin would deftly splice together the best to create a seamless performance.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Black and white photo of a smiling man in a suit and hat sitting next to a reel to reel tape recorder." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="51792aecb456a95cdbdb670621fdcb1b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="745e9" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-photo-of-a-smiling-man-in-a-suit-and-hat-sitting-next-to-a-reel-to-reel-tape-recorder.jpg?id=67529086&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">After seeing a demo of the Magnetophon, Bing Crosby invested $50,000 in Ampex, which developed a U.S. version of the tape recorder. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Cinematic/Alamy</small></p><p>One day a guest told a joke that was uproariously funny, but a little too spicy for radio. Even though the joke couldn’t be aired, the audience’s laughter was worth keeping. Soon, the producers created a whole catalog of different laugh tracks. If a joke didn’t land, it didn’t matter. The editor could just add a laugh in postproduction, from polite titters to hearty guffaws.</p><p>According to Crosby’s daughter Mary, Bing didn’t have a problem with this type of editing. The live audience was immaterial as long as the jokes were funny. But according to Mullin’s daughter, Eve Mullin Collier, the manipulation didn’t sit well with <em><em>her</em></em> father. He disliked the inauthenticity of the moment, of editing joy.</p><p>The history of technology is filled with such episodes of unintended consequences. Mullin admired the Magnetophon precisely because it could faithfully record a performance, an event, a moment in time. He worked tirelessly to refine the machine for the benefit of radio audiences everywhere. And so I understand why its appropriation for capturing canned reactions and manipulating reality must have rankled. He championed the technology, but ultimately it moved beyond his control. </p><p><em><em>Part of a </em></em><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/collections/past-forward/" target="_self"><em><em>continuing series</em></em></a><em> </em><em><em>looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.</em></em></p><p><em><em>An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2026 print issue as “Birth of the Laugh Track.”</em></em></p><h3>References</h3><br/><p>Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza, curator at the <a href="https://pavekmuseum.org/" target="_blank">Pavek Museum of Electronic Communication</a>, in St. Louis Park, Minn., first told me about the Magnetophon and its link to the laugh track. The machine pictured at top is on display at the Pavek, and is one of the two that Jack Mullin brought back from Germany and then rebuilt.</p><p>For significantly more technical detail on the development of the Magnetophon, magnetic tape, and its reinvention in America, check out Chapter 5, “The Introduction of the Magnetophon,” by Friedrich K. Engel, and Chapter 6, “Building on the Magnetophon,” by Beverley R. Gooch, in <a href="https://archive.org/details/magneticrecordin00eric" target="_blank"><em>Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years</em></a> (IEEE Press, 1998).</p><p>Radiolab interviewed Mary Crosby and Eve Mullin Collier as part of the show “<a href="https://radiolab.org/podcast/mixtape-jack-and-bing/transcript" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mixtape: Jack and Bing</a>,” which includes many archival recordings as it tells the story of the development of the laugh track.</p><p>There is a 2006 documentary on Jack Mullin titled <em>Sound Man: WWII to MP3</em>, but I was unable to view it.</p>

Aug 1, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-greenish-yellow-waxwing-bird-sitting-on-a-twig-eating-a-berry.jpg?id=67541842&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>When I started at <em><em>Spectrum</em></em> 25 years ago, a senior editor suggested that I find a “rabbi,” by which he meant someone who could mentor me in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions. </p><p>I didn’t find one right away. Then in 2005 we decided to do a special report, focusing on the challenges of enterprise software development. I suggested we invite IEEE Life Senior Member <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/robert-n-charette" target="_self">Robert N. Charette</a>, a self-described risk ecologist, prolific book author, and leading authority on risk management and software engineering, to explore in our pages the myriad reasons software projects fail. His seminal article “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-software-fails" target="_self">Why Software Fails</a>” is still read in university engineering classes today. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Older white man with a white beard and glasses." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="37a735d53f7a52f5fb654540dfd5f024" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="946ad" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/older-white-man-with-a-white-beard-and-glasses.jpg?id=67541843&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IEEE Life Senior Member Robert N. Charette is one of IEEE Spectrum’s most prolific authors.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Robert N. Charette</small></p><p>It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I had found my rabbi, one who shared my love of writing. We settled into a rhythm that would last more than 20 years, talking on Friday mornings about a range of topics including the growing ubiquity of software in our lives. </p><p>So when I became <em><em>Spectrum</em></em>’s website editor in 2007, he was the first contributor I tapped to start a regular blog (remember those?). The<em><em> Risk Factor</em></em> was born and over the course of more than 10 years and 1,750 posts, Bob chronicled hundreds of software debacles, culminating in “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-lessons-from-a-decade-of-it-failures" target="_self">Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures</a>,” which won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Infographics in 2016. Ironically, yet predictably, those infographics were created in a software package that is no longer supported and thus are lost to the bits of time.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Blue heron with a fish in its beak." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3c28540208ed1e6beda3f245eb07a9d4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="560cc" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/blue-heron-with-a-fish-in-its-beak.jpg?id=67541851&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">“I like the expression on the fish just before it’s going to be swallowed by the heron.”</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Robert N. Charette</small></p><p>Bob, however, was not a one-trick pony. In between his full-time job running his two management consultancies and raising a future biochemist and a future civil engineer, his daughters Maura and Megan, he also wrote many deeply reported and insightful articles. These include last year’s “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/electronic-health-records" target="_self">The Doctor Will See Your Electronic Health Record Now</a>,” the eye-opening 12-part series and e-book <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-transition-explained-ebook" target="_self"><em><em>The EV Transition Explained</em></em></a>, and my personal favorite “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/automated-to-death" target="_self">Automated to Death</a>,” about the deadly consequences of the automation paradox as manifested by the cyberphysical systems that pilot planes, trains, and automobiles. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Juvenile bald eagle over water, yellow talons extended as it prepares to snag a fish." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="59fb0851070219f49af30d572b876bc7" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="93b22" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/juvenile-bald-eagle-over-water-yellow-talons-extended-as-it-prepares-to-snag-a-fish.jpg?id=67541848&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">“The young bald eagle I photographed in September 2024 had bands that I could read which identified it as a female born in May 2024, near Lexington Park, St. Mary’s County, Maryland, about 65 miles away from where I live.”</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Robert N. Charette</small></p><p>His main goal all along has been to make software visible, as he told me one Friday in July. “Software is all around us, but we don’t recognize it at all,” he said. “I really wanted my stories to help people better understand complex software systems. You can’t see software, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it. You may feel the consequences of software failure, but you never see the reason itself.”</p><p>When he told me that he was hanging up his hat as a contributing editor to focus on nature photography and to write a handful of fictional trilogies, including one entitled “The STEM Murders” featuring an engineer-turned-detective and <em><em>his</em></em> rabbi, I asked him which of his <em><em>Spectrum</em></em> articles had the biggest impact. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Humming bird feeding from a long red flower." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="66a9ecd4251fb7cd155942daf87afc00" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="c1933" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/humming-bird-feeding-from-a-long-red-flower.jpg?id=67541845&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">“The hummingbird I caught with the yellow of a road curb behind it.”</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Robert N. Charette</small></p><p>He singled out the 2013 feature “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth" target="_self">The STEM Crisis Is a Myth</a>.” “<em><em>Spectrum</em></em> gave me a platform to question the assumption that we needed more STEM graduates. Until then, people didn’t really realize how much of the STEM crisis was a mythology that was perpetuated by employers and the academic community and was foisted on the IEEE community,” he said.</p><p>Charette made a career of questioning assumptions. The best way to mitigate risk, he told me as our Friday chat drew to a close, is to be careful making assumptions in the first place. “My main risk maxim is assumptions made are risks accepted.”</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/conceptual-illustration-of-a-stack-of-papers-impaled-onto-a-pencil-that-someone-is-using-to-mark-off-a-checkbox.jpg?id=67547233&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>Given a rising number of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-research-integrity-process" target="_self">publishing misconduct allegations</a>, <a href="https://www.ieee.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE</a> in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEEE volunteers write new policies.</p><p>Here are some highlights of the team’s activities last year. </p><h2>New detection tools</h2><p>IEEE conducted a pilot program in 2024 to integrate tools from the <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers</a> (STM) <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/what-we-do/strategic-areas/research-integrity/integrity-hub/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Integrity Hub</a> into the peer-review workflow of <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>IEEE Access</em></em></a>. The multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal publishes research results across all IEEE fields of interest.</p><p>STM created the hub so scholarly publishers could access a suite of integrated, commercial, third-party research integrity tools as well as those developed by <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/what-we-do/core-services/stm-solutions/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">STM Solutions</a>. The tools help the publishing group avoid printing problematic content upon manuscript receipt, rather than reacting postpublication.</p><p>The new features include the <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/stm-integrity-hub-incorporates-clear-skies-papermill-alarm-screening-tool/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Clear Skies Papermill Alarm</a>, which helps identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts at submission. Another is an integration with the <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/integrity-hub-continues-to-gain-momentum-with-inclusion-of-pubpeer-database-in-screening-tool/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PubPeer database</a>, which allows users to check whether references in a manuscript have received previous PubPeer comments or have been retracted—both of which can indicate quality or integrity issues. The <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/stm-integrity-hub-launches-new-research-integrity-tool/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">duplicate submissions detector</a> can determine whether the same manuscript has been submitted to multiple journals by different publishers, often a sign of academic “paper mill” activity.</p><p>Following the success of the pilot, IEEE began working last year to expand the services to all its periodicals. It is anticipated that all IEEE periodicals will be included in the Integrity Hub screening by the end of this year.</p><h2>Raising visibility</h2><p>The team participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It also renewed membership in groups including the <a href="https://publicationethics.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Committee on Publication Ethics</a>, and the team continued its work sponsoring and presenting at conferences.</p><p>At a panel presentation during the <a href="https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/annual-meeting-2025" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Council of Science Editors annual meeting</a> last year, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sulicz/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amanda Sulicz</a>, manager of IEEE Research Integrity, participated in the Research Integrity Investigation panel session<em><em>.</em></em> She also presented at the Standardization of Publishing Integrity Norms and Corrective Actions poster session during the <a href="https://customer.sspnet.org/SSP/ssp/AM25/Home.aspx?hkey=ea26b5cc-0f12-4dc2-9401-f3be2e8148bf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Society for Scholarly Publishing</a>’s annual meeting, held 28 to 30 May 2025.</p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/luigi-longobardi-38390819/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Luigi Longobardi</a>, the IEEE Publishing Ethics and Conduct director, gave a presentation at the Communication and Collaboration With Institutions session during <a href="https://stm-assoc.org/events/stm-innovation-integrity-days-2025/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">STM Innovation and Integrity Days</a>, which took place 9 and 10 December.</p><p>IEEE was a sponsor of the <a href="https://sites.northwestern.edu/ncri2025/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Conference on Research Integrity</a>, held 20 to 22 May 2025, and the <a href="https://peerreviewcongress.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication</a>, held 3 to 5 September.</p><h2>Ethics reports</h2><p>The team is responsible for tracking <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/proposed-ieee-code-of-ethics-revisions" target="_self">ethics-related</a> complaints for all IEEE publications, including articles published in periodicals and conference proceedings. When complaints regarding an article’s integrity are received, either via email at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">[email protected]</a> or the anonymous <a href="https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/20410/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ethics reporting line</a>, the team works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, investigate the complaint, and resolve the matter.</p><p>Last year 591 cases were opened, a 56 percent increase over 2024. Of the 591 reports, 317 were closed and 274 are still under investigation. Of the complaints, 88 percent were research-related, including issues with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and falsification of—or unauthorized use of—data. The other 12 percent involved alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and conference organizers.</p><p>The complexity of the reported cases has expanded. An increasing number of the complaints deal with more than one article or complicated situations such as editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation.</p><h2>Conference publications</h2><p>For the second consecutive year, the team participated in the joint <a href="https://events.ieee.org/ieee-conferences-committee/rosters-charters/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Publication Services and Products Board/IEEE Conferences Committee’s ad hoc committee on conference publication quality</a>. The committee is tasked with analyzing and reviewing problematic conference papers and enhancing quality screening of articles prior to publication to detect integrity issues such as plagiarism and tortured phrases. The committee also updates educational modules on organizing and managing conferences.</p><p>As part of the review process, the committee focused on conference articles that contained tortured phrases, which are nonstandard English expressions that are imprecise or erroneous and give the impression of technical jargon.</p><p>Many of the articles reviewed by the ad hoc committee were identified by the <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04895" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Problematic Paper Screener</a>, a free online tool that uses application programming interfaces to screen papers published online for potentially problematic content, such as tortured phrases, machine-generated content (<a href="https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">SCIgen</a> or <a href="https://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mathgen</a>, for example), or references to retracted content.</p><p>The ad hoc committee was responsible for reviewing and recommending the retraction of more than 1,700 problematic conference articles last year. </p><h2>Case studies</h2><p>From the cases the team reviewed, IEEE learned valuable information to help update its publishing policies and best practices.</p><p>Here are examples of two anonymized cases reported to the team last year.</p><h3>Case Study 1</h3><br/><p><strong>Updated Policies</strong></p><p>Occasionally, a misconduct case is so complicated that it requires an update to the <a href="https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/opsmanual.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PSPB Operations Manual</a>.</p><p>In this particular case, Coauthor 1 reported to the Publishing Ethics Team that the work was reused in an IEEE publication without proper credit. The new work also listed two coauthors not part of the original document. Coauthor 1 also reported the case to their university’s research integrity officer (RIO) for additional investigation.</p><p>Initially, adjudicating the case proved challenging because under the PSPB policies at the time, the issue would have been classified as a multiple publication, which typically results only in a warning for the authors of the new work.</p><p>With the assistance of the RIO, it was determined that the methodological and theoretical portions of the paper were previously derived in the university’s lab; therefore, the contributions of the two new authors were not substantial enough to warrant authorship.</p><p>After deliberations by the IEEE Publishing Conduct Committee and eventually the IEEE Document Working Group, which is responsible for updates to the Operations Manual, <a href="https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/Investigating-misconduct" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE PSPB Policy 8.2.4</a> was updated to clarify policies regarding the adjudication process for reuse of material and the proper crediting of coauthors when material has been reused.</p><h3></h3><br/><div class="horizontal-rule"></div><h3>Case Study 2</h3><br/><p><strong>Faked Reviewers</strong></p><p>Using the screening tools and data available to IEEE periodical editors, an editor in chief was alerted to suspicious reviewer activity. Specifically, two of the reviewers assigned to an article submitted the exact same review text. The editor contacted the handling editor to inform them of the irregularities and also contacted the two reviewers, asking them to verify that they were, in fact, the ones who submitted the reviewer report. Out of an abundance of caution, a new editor was assigned to the article, and new reviewers were selected while the investigation continued.</p><p>The investigation concluded that the original handling editor created and submitted both reviews in question. Following the recommendations provided to the PSPB vice president by the periodical’s Society and Publishing Conduct Committee, the handling editor was banned from publishing with IEEE and serving in an editorial capacity. </p>

Jul 30, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-inverted-pyramidal-antenna-sits-atop-a-metal-box-with-a-feed-running-to-a-nearby-laptop.png?id=67528383&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C371%2C0%2C371"/><br/><br/><p>If you’re wondering what dark matter is, you’re not alone. Astronomers don’t know. But they’ve determined that this invisible material must be far more abundant than the stars and nebulas that they can see. They’ve surmised as much from observing the gravitational effects of all this perplexing dark stuff, launching a decades-long campaign to understand its nature.</p><p>I recently learned that it is possible to sense the presence of dark matter using a small radio telescope such as the Discovery Dish<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/software-defined-radio" target="_self"> covered in these pages</a> last year. The trick is to know what observations to collect and how to analyze them. I’ll sketch that out below, but first let me describe the homemade radio telescope I put together for this project.</p><p>It’s a pyramidal-horn antenna, not unlike <a href="https://www.radio-astronomy.org/pdf/70th%20AnniversaryDiscNeutralH_David%20Ewen.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the horn antenna first used in 1951</a> to detect the 1,420.4-megahertz radio emissions from interstellar clouds of neutral hydrogen in space. These emissions hold the key to confirming the presence of dark matter because such clouds can be found all over the galaxy, and their motions reflect what’s happening in different parts of the Milky Way.</p><p>I used an <a href="https://hornantennacalculator.blogspot.com/p/calculator.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">online calculator</a> to help me design my antenna, adopting dimensions I knew I could achieve using a US $25 <a href="https://www.acehardware.com/departments/building-supplies/roofs-and-gutters/roof-flashings/5172184?x429=true&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20155429886&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIi8ai2aejlQMVF1tHAR0slhjnEAQYAiABEgL8_vD_BwE" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">10-by-2-foot roll of roof flashing</a> and an emptied one-gallon paint-thinner can. (Next time, I’ll just buy an empty F-style can.)</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="The major components of the radio telescope." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="81560265bb5c209e498dc0245e2600a3" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="8128e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-major-components-of-the-radio-telescope.png?id=67528495&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The horn antenna is made from tape, an empty paint-thinner can, and a roll of metal roof flashing [bottom row]. Signals are picked up with a low-noise amplifier [top middle] and passed to a software-defined radio receiver [top left].</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">James Provost</small></p><p>Construction of the antenna itself was similar to that of the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/track-the-movement-of-the-milky-way-with-this-diy-radio-telescope" target="_self">slightly smaller horn antenna I described in these pages in 2019</a>. I made my new antenna bigger, though, because I needed better angular resolution, allowing me to scan smaller regions of the sky.</p><p>To pick up the emissions from interstellar hydrogen, I used Nooelec’s $45 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nooelec-SAWbird-H1-Applications-Frequency/dp/B07XPV9RX2" target="_blank">SAWBird+ H1</a>, a device that combines two low-noise amplifiers with a standing-acoustic-wave filter centered on 1,420 MHz, in combination with a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SDR-V4-RTL2832U-Software-Defined-Receiver/dp/B0GWVMVZ7R" target="_blank">RTL-SDR V4 dongle</a>. So it’s not too hard to put together the hardware needed to measure signals from hydrogen clouds. But how do you pull the signature of dark matter out of those signals?</p><p>The answer is that you use such measurements to gauge the speed at which clouds located at different distances from the center of the Milky Way are moving in their orbits.</p><p class="pull-quote"><span>You just have to show that the speed at which material orbits the center of the galaxy doesn’t fall off with distance.</span></p><p>You might think that these clouds circle around the galactic center in the same way that planets orbit the sun or satellites orbit the Earth, with objects close in orbiting faster than those farther out. Mercury, for example, zips around the sun at 47.4 kilometers per second, whereas Neptune lumbers along at a leisurely 5.4 km/s.</p><p>The Milky Way contains a central bulge of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole. So at first blush, the mass of the galaxy appears to be concentrated near its center. If that were the case, stars and clouds of other material would orbit more slowly as their distance from the center increases. If, however, there were enormous amounts of invisible matter present throughout the galaxy, you wouldn’t expect orbital velocities to diminish in this way.</p><h2>How Do You Measure the Speed of Interstellar Clouds?</h2><p>So to detect dark matter, you just have to show that the speed at which material orbits the center of the galaxy doesn’t fall off with distance. And radio observations are the easiest way to do that, because you can gauge speeds by measuring how much the signal from hydrogen clouds is shifted by the Doppler effect.</p><p>By pointing your radio telescope at different parts of the sky, you pick up emissions from clouds located at various distances from the galactic center. The frequency offset of these emissions from 1,420 MHz reflects the speed of approach or recession of those clouds relative to Earth.</p><p>You need measurements from the plane of the galaxy, at galactic longitudes between 0 and 90 degrees (a galactic longitude of 0 degrees points directly toward the center of the galaxy and 180 degrees directly away from it). Applying some high school trigonometry lets you convert these figures into orbital speeds around the galactic center, a technique known as the <a href="https://physicsopenlab.org/2020/09/08/measurement-of-the-milky-way-rotation/" target="_blank">tangent-point method</a>.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A diagram showing the geometrical arrangement of an observation of a cloud close to the center of the galaxy, and a chart showing a relatively flat black trace with red circles corresponding to distance far from the center lying on the trace. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0422cfc123bc397da63900d3a060f892" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="1f7af" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-diagram-showing-the-geometrical-arrangement-of-an-observation-of-a-cloud-close-to-the-center-of-the-galaxy-and-a-chart-showin.png?id=67528723&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">In any group of clouds, the one with the highest velocity as seen from Earth will be the one lying closest to a tangent point along its orbit around the galaxy. This allows its distance from the galactic center to be determined through trigonometry [top]. The bottom graph shows the astronomical community’s measurements for velocities around the galactic center [in black], with the author’s results plotted in filled and open red circles.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">James Provost</small></p><p>Experiments aiming my horn antenna at an <a href="https://www.inmarsat.com/" target="_blank">Inmarsat</a> geostationary satellite revealed that the angular resolution of my little radio telescope is about 20 degrees. So with the help of the planetarium program <a href="https://stellarium.org/" target="_blank">Stellarium</a>, I pointed my antenna in the plane of the galaxy at galactic longitudes of about 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, and 90 degrees, spacing things out in an effort to make each set of measurements largely independent.</p><p>I used the <a href="https://airspy.com/download/" target="_blank">SDR#</a> software with a plug-in called <a href="https://www.astronomy.me.uk/latest-version-of-if-average-plug-in-for-sdr-sharp-software" target="_blank">IF Average</a> to read the raw measurements coming in from the antenna. This plug-in stacks up data received over a few minutes, allowing a weak signal to build up and produce a clean radio spectrum that shows the 1,420-MHz line. In reality, it looks more like a bump, or even a set of bumps due to Doppler shifted emissions from multiple clouds, located at different distances from the galactic center. Fortunately, you only have to care about the cloud that’s receding the fastest—the one with the largest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift" target="_blank">redshift</a>, in astronomer-speak.</p><p>I used Microsoft Excel to analyze the shapes of radio spectra I gathered, modeling them as the sums of individual bell-shaped contributions from different clouds. That allowed me to estimate the largest redshift for each galactic longitude I probed. Then, again using Excel, I applied formulas that transformed those six redshift values into six pairs of orbital velocities and distances from the galactic center.</p><p>The plot of my results matched reasonably <span>well with a recent paper, “<a href="https://www.ioa.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~sofue/papers/sofcomp/2025-pasj-Inner-Rot-Curve-MilkyWay.pdf" target="_blank">The</a> </span><span><a href="https://www.ioa.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~sofue/papers/sofcomp/2025-pasj-Inner-Rot-Curve-MilkyWay.pdf">Inner Rotation Curve of the Milky Way</a>,” </span><span>in </span><em>Publications of the Astronomical Socie</em><em>ty of Japan</em><span>.</span><span> Two innermost points did show anomalously low orbital velocities. Another shot at curve fitting in Excel brought these results closer to expectations, but they were still somewhat off.</span></p><p>In any case, the orbital velocities I estimated did not diminish with distance from the galactic center—quite the opposite. <em><em>Something</em></em> out there is putting its stamp on how the Milky Way turns. And that basic observation is what allows me to say that, with the help of some roof flashing and a paint-thinner can, I’ve been able to detect dark matter from my backyard.</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-aerial-photo-shows-utility-lines-stretching-across-a-river.jpg?id=67106655&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/><br/><br/><p><strong>In February 2024, a young</strong> man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous community <a href="https://www.facebook.com/fortalbany/" target="_blank">Fort Albany First Nation</a> in northeastern Ontario. Kataquapit used Facebook to alert the community’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/202000479846725/" target="_blank">search-and-rescue squad</a>, who jumped onto their snowmobiles and drove into the night. Before dawn, they returned with the dazed man, who told rescuers he’d given up until wolves nudged his hypothermic body. “The wolves told him to wake up,” Kataquapit says. “I really believe they saved his life.”</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe height="110px" id="noa-web-audio-player" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=q5m19e&id=https://spectrum.ieee.org/indigenous-fiber-network?draft=1&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=1b1b1c&playColor=1b1b1c&progressBgColor=F5F5F5&progressBorderColor=bdbbbb&titleColor=1b1b1c&timeColor=1b1b1c&speedColor=1b1b1c&noaLinkColor=556B7D&noaLinkHighlightColor=FF4B00&feedbackButton=true" style="border: none" width="100%"></iframe></div><p>A fiber-optic network also played a key role.</p><p>Not long before the young man’s mishap, the indigenous-owned <a href="https://www.wjbtnetwork.com/" target="_blank">Western James Bay Telecom Network</a> (WJBTN) had built its own fiber-to-the-home network in this remote Cree community, some 975 kilometers north of Toronto. Before the network, the rescue squad relied on a few handheld radios to pass information along. This time, a Facebook message to the full list of volunteers triggered the search.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="An aerial photo shows a grid of residential streets surrounded by forest. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3bb142b10c86b8f4714d789fc0f4afcc" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="4048d" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-aerial-photo-shows-a-grid-of-residential-streets-surrounded-by-forest.jpg?id=67101631&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">An aerial view shows the remote community of Fort Albany in northern Ontario.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Gavin John </small></p><p>Building Canada’s first fully Indigenous-owned-and-operated fiber-optic network was an uphill battle for <a href="https://www.internetsociety.org/author/nakogee/" target="_blank">Brian Nakogee</a>, WJBTN’s finance officer, who had to secure capital from agencies less familiar with the challenges of remote northern life. For the people of Fort Albany First Nation, accessing many vital supplies and services means traveling about 500 km to the regional city of Timmins. By land, the trip is possible for only a few weeks each winter, when the swampy tundra freezes hard enough to construct a temporary road. “The southern way of doing things is very different than how we here in remote areas piece things together,” says Nakogee.</p><p>Telecommunications giants long saw little profit in serving the subarctic coast of James Bay. But even as satellite internet started to become available in remote communities, WJBTN staff saw the value in building and owning its own hard-wired internet service instead of relying on outside companies. Today, the nonprofit operates one of the fastest networks in Canada, while keeping both infrastructure ownership and revenue within the First Nations communities it serves.</p><p>WJBTN is part of a broader movement among Indigenous and remote communities <a href="https://firstmile.ca/about/" target="_blank">seeking more control</a> over their telecommunications infrastructure. In the United States, <a href="https://communitynetworks.org/content/tribal-broadband-networks" target="_blank">30 tribes</a> now operate fiber-to-the-home networks, many launched during COVID. Canada has since created a dedicated <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications/news/2026/03/backgrounder-crtc-making-it-easier-to-connect-indigenous-communities-to-high-speed-internet-and-cellphone-services.html" target="_blank">Indigenous broadband</a> funding stream. And as more communities <a href="https://tribalbroadbandbootcamp.org/" target="_blank">pursue the expertise</a> and funding to build their own networks, WJBTN’s experience offers a blueprint for what locally owned connectivity can look like in some of the hardest places to serve.</p><h2>How a Power Line Became a Broadband Backbone</h2><p>While many towns in North America were connecting to optical fiber in the early 2000s, the subarctic communities were left out.</p><p>The residents of Fort Albany saw the earliest sign of improvement in 2008. That’s when their locally owned power company, <a href="https://fivenations.ca/" target="_blank">Five Nations Energy Inc.</a> (FNEI), strung fiber-optic cable on the utility poles that were delivering electricity from the dusty railway town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moosonee" target="_blank">Moosonee</a>, 135 km away across the peat bogs. On the shore of the Moose River, Moosonee is the last stop for Ontario’s telecommunications providers. Its only link to the province’s highways is a 5-hour train ride that shuttles passengers, freight, and vehicles through the Boreal forest.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Person in gray cap and maroon hoodie looking thoughtfully to the side" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4bda963cfb2cceedb3827bb3f6a37fac" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="264ca" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/person-in-gray-cap-and-maroon-hoodie-looking-thoughtfully-to-the-side.jpg?id=67101714&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="A photo that shows the screen of a cellphone displaying the words \u201cFort Albany Search & Rescue.\u201d " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2e219d32f60f9bca3aa4e7f36bfb5fb9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="f84cc" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-that-shows-the-screen-of-a-cellphone-displaying-the-words-u201cfort-albany-search-rescue-u201d.jpg?id=67101713&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Elizabeth Kataquapit [top], former chief of Fort Albany First Nation, says high-speed internet has transformed her community. Search & Rescue volunteers now coordinate emergency responses through a Facebook group [bottom]. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Gavin John </small></p><p>Soon after, regional Cree leaders formed WJBTN to provide high-speed telecommunications in Moosonee and the three Indigenous communities to the north. WJBTN would lease the fiber-optic backbone from the power company, with just 1 gigabit per second of total capacity for the entire population of about 6,000 people.</p><p>But the new fiber backbone did not mean fast internet for residents. One of WJBTN’s first commercial clients was a telecom company called <a href="https://www.xittel.net/en/residential.aspx" target="_blank">Xittel</a>, which used microwave links and local access points to beam wireless internet to homes across each town. It wasn’t what subscribers were hoping for. This system frustrated users with delays, glitches, and strict data caps. Kataquapit calls it a “turtle.”</p><p>Everybody complained about the wireless. Xittel advertised a 10 megabit-per-second connection, but speed tests consistently showed 3 Mb/s for both uploads and downloads. And customers paid dearly if they ever exceeded their data limit. “You were billed close to CA $7 per megabit,” Nakogee recalls.</p><p>WJBTN’s dream had always been to connect everyone’s home to fiber optic and make it affordable. Without a technical team, roads, or any major funding, the company just had to figure out how.</p><h2>Designing a Fiber Network for the James Bay Coast</h2><p>When Nakogee joined WJBTN in 2014, the telecom company was still in its infancy. It was “a department huddled in the corner, trying to latch onto the services of FNEI,” he says.</p><p>Nakogee was asked to prepare a proposal to deliver 40 Mb/s fiber connections to each of the roughly 1,000 homes and businesses spread across 300 km of the James Bay coast. Back then, WJBTN operated on revenue from its early commercial and institutional customers—including Xittel, local government offices, hospitals, air navigation facilities, and family service centers that were connected to the first few strands of fiber. To make a residential fiber network possible, WJBTN first had to build both revenue and trust within the communities it hoped to serve; it had to convince people that the small new organization would follow through on its plan.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A photo shows a man holding a laptop and sitting in an office in front of a large computer monitor. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="174fede9c8ae817a4d30e059335779ca" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="4e74d" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-shows-a-man-holding-a-laptop-and-sitting-in-an-office-in-front-of-a-large-computer-monitor.jpg?id=67101840&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">WJBTN finance officer Brian Nakogee played a key role in financing and planning the community-owned fiber network.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..."> Gavin John </small></p><p>Nakogee especially needed support from Moosonee and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attawapiskat_First_Nation" target="_blank">Attawapiskat</a>, the communities at the start and the end of the line. “They’re the bread that holds this sandwich together,” he says. Through years of diplomacy, the budget grew enough to support a business proposal for a fiber-to-the-home network. Together with engineer Dirk MacLeod, in 2015 Nakogee began hashing out the details of a bare-bones version of the system. The plan required both upgrading the network’s long-distance fiber backbone—<a href="https://www.ceragon.com/what-is-backhaul" target="_blank">known in telecom as the backhaul</a>—while also building the local infrastructure that would connect individual homes to the internet.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A man in an office points to something on a large piece of paper spread before him. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c41b88371b627a5cb03c129420f92a60" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="6e8fd" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-an-office-points-to-something-on-a-large-piece-of-paper-spread-before-him.jpg?id=67101809&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Andrew MacLeod, WJBTN’s field project manager, reviews a map of the fiber network.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Gavin John</small></p><p>The first step was upgrading the network’s backhaul using newer “<a href="https://www.ciena.com/insights/what-is/what-is-coherent-optics" target="_blank">coherent optics</a>” technology, which can transmit much larger amounts of data over long distances, explains Dirk’s brother, Andrew MacLeod, another network engineer, who joined as a consultant. Using equipment from telecom supplier <a href="https://www.nokia.com/optical-networks/" target="_blank">Infinera</a>, the new backhaul would deliver 100 Gb/s to distribution points in each town, with redundancy in case a fiber line failed.</p><p>Next came the challenge of connecting individual homes. Rather than extend a direct line from the central office for every customer, the engineers designed the network around a telecom architecture called <a href="https://www.gpon.com/" target="_blank">GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network)</a>, which reduced the fiber needed to connect each customer to the network. Fiber from the backbone would run to networking equipment at each town’s electrical substation, where passive optical splitters would distribute the connection among many households without requiring powered equipment at every junction. In remote communities where maintenance and repair are difficult, reducing the amount of active infrastructure was a necessity.</p><p>The total estimated cost was <a href="https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/press-release/fibre-to-the-home-service-launched-in-fort-albany-first-nation-5392514" target="_blank">CA $4.7 million</a>, or CA $4,700 per household. By comparison, the <a href="https://fiberbroadband.org/" target="_blank">Fiber Broadband Association</a> estimates that urban fiber-to-home construction in the United States costs the equivalent of about <a href="https://dgtlinfra.com/fiber-optic-network-construction-process-costs/" target="_blank">CA $1,400 to CA $1,800 per household</a>—a stark contrast in expense.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A man in an orange baseball hat stands next to a boat with an outboard motor in front of a house. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9a47f01f51af3ee6644d82bfd1fccb6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="11d28" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-an-orange-baseball-hat-stands-next-to-a-boat-with-an-outboard-motor-in-front-of-a-house.jpg?id=67101804&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Fort Albany resident Thomas Scott says high-speed internet has improved his work as a mental health counselor.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..."> Gavin John </small></p><p>A radio broadcast in 2018 heralded the good news: The fiber-to-home construction project was a go. Fort Albany mental health counselor Thomas Scott says he “couldn’t wait.” People seeking guidance for addiction or grief typically called him on landlines, and it was hard to help them over the phone without seeing their faces. Businesses, too, rejoiced—including the Kataquapit family store, which relied on the phone system for transactions.</p><h2>Testing and Deploying a Remote Fiber Network</h2><p>Winning approval for the project was one thing; building it across hundreds of kilometers of remote subarctic terrain was another.</p><p>Dirk MacLeod started with a schematic documenting the GPS position of every house, pole, and length of cable that would ultimately form the network. When WJBTN hired Montreal-based <a href="https://www.fonex.com/" target="_blank">Fonex Data Systems</a> to upgrade the backhaul, the detailed plan made it easy for contractor Tasso Varvarikos to design the deployment. Still, tuning the optical system to operate reliably across transmission lines stretching hundreds of kilometers required extra care. “Once you go up north, there’s no fiber store,” he says,</p><p>To minimize surprises in the field, Varvarikos traveled to telecom supplier Infinera’s laboratory in Stockholm, where he and other engineers assembled and tested the network before shipping it to the installation site. The Stockholm lab gave the team access to testing tools and technical specialists who helped configure the system before deployment in the remote fly-in communities. Using Infinera’s simulation software, Varvarikos says he and his colleagues “kicked the crap out of it in the lab” until the network performed reliably.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A map of northern Ontario shows the location of Moosonee, Fort Albany, Kashechewan, and Attawapiskat along the western shore of James Bay. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="29f26f9821ed714d8817dea41fab4b5a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="5ccaa" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-map-of-northern-ontario-shows-the-location-of-moosonee-fort-albany-kashechewan-and-attawapiskat-along-the-western-shore-of.png?id=67107300&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The Western James Bay Telecom Network connects remote communities along the western shore of James Bay in northern Ontario.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Chris Philpot</small></p><p>Finally, in the spring of 2019, it was time to pack up and head to the sites. First, more than two pallets’ worth of Infinera equipment were squeezed onto two charter aircraft in Timmins. Bush pilots, unfazed by the stringent logistics, made sure that one box reached Moosonee; the other one, Attawapiskat. Varvarikos says they packed extra fiber-optic transceivers, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_cable" target="_blank">patch cables</a>, tools, and “the kitchen sink and then an extra sink just in case.” By May, the team was ready to install the new backhaul—a months-long process that necessarily preceded household connections. Once the equipment was in place, the engineers tested the network to make sure the systems in each community could communicate reliably and that data moved correctly across the backbone.</p><p>During the switchover to the new system, the MacLeod brothers worked from substations in different communities along the coast while Varvarikos coordinated from Fort Albany. Communicating over a spotty phone line, they started moving connections from the old network to the upgraded backhaul, carefully reconnecting cables and verifying that traffic still flowed correctly between communities. Within days, the anchor customers—including hospitals, schools, and air-navigation systems—were hardwired to a 100-Gb/s backbone.</p><p>However, households were still relying on the slow legacy network. WJBTN’s next step was flying huge reels of fiber-optic cable into the remote communities at enormous cost. Nakogee recalls cutting predetermined lengths of cable, then repackaging it onto spools to load onto cargo aircraft. The backbone was finally in place; now WJBTN had to bring fiber to every home.</p><h2>Training a Local Fiber Crew</h2><p>Then, in a turn of events that rocked the communities, lead engineer Dirk MacLeod had a heart attack and died in July 2019. “My chest was ripped open,” Nakogee says. The grieving company shut down for the summer.</p><p>WJBTN had intended to spend three summers training local crews from each community’s power company to maintain and manage the network. After MacLeod’s death, one line worker quietly took it upon himself to finish extending fiber to distribution points in Fort Albany. The team made a plan to begin connecting homes the following spring.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A photo shows the streets of a town with utility poles carrying many wires. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="729b1891208338dd9c36c10cd569ea76" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="ef672" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-shows-the-streets-of-a-town-with-utility-poles-carrying-many-wires.jpg?id=67101770&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Utility poles carry power and fiber-optic lines through Fort Albany First Nation.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Gavin John</small></p><p>Then <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/covid-19" target="_blank">COVID</a> hit. Fearful and with limited medical facilities, the communities closed themselves off. Nobody was allowed in.</p><p>“COVID really screwed things up,” says Andrew MacLeod. People were screaming for better internet, he recalls, but they wouldn’t let outsiders in. So instead of training local crews and building each town’s network simultaneously as planned, WJBTN made a tantalizing offer: The first community to allow MacLeod in would have its fiber-to-the-home network completed first. Fort Albany jumped on it.</p><p>Peyton Reuben, a recent computer systems graduate in Fort Albany, was seeking a new job when his cousin mentioned that there was a “fiber guy” in town. Reuben’s coursework covered coding and how routers and ISPs communicate—a distant relative to Andrew MacLeod’s hands-on infrastructure work.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Person in glasses looks up, smiling, outside on a sunny day near small houses." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6f60d29f1d933e5cc6b19b1cc9de5974" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="62e81" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/person-in-glasses-looks-up-smiling-outside-on-a-sunny-day-near-small-houses.jpg?id=67102051&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="A photo shows a man standing on a street and looking up at a utility pole. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4aed2b4861b56293b9e7cd2a66fef110" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="b20c2" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-shows-a-man-standing-on-a-street-and-looking-up-at-a-utility-pole.jpg?id=67102049&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">WJBTN network coordinator Peyton Reuben looks up at the overhead fiber network in Fort Albany [top]. A splice enclosure joins fiber-optic cables at a distribution point [bottom]. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Gavin John</small></p><p>“They were looking for helpers to splice fiber,” says Reuben, something he knew nothing about. Nonetheless, he started work the day he met MacLeod and got a crash course in building an <a href="https://www.ppc-online.com/blog/key-factors-to-consider-with-aerial-fiber-deployments" target="_blank">aerial fiber network</a>, running cables from utility poles into neighborhood connection boxes that ultimately served individual homes. The fun part was reaching every pole in every neighborhood in a town crisscrossed by tributaries of the Albany River. “We didn’t have a bucket truck, so we had to climb up the poles,” says Reuben. “It was quite the experience, going through thick brush and thigh-deep water.”</p><p>The hard part was splicing the fiber—fusing together hair-thin glass strands that connected homes to the larger network. Inside each connection box, distribution fibers had to be joined to cables leading to individual houses, one strand at a time—around 150 in each box. Reuben’s first attempt “looked like a plate of spaghetti,” says MacLeod. More splicing waited back at the substation, where optical splitters connected neighborhood lines to the town’s central GPON equipment. “It took me four times as long as Andrew to complete a splice tray back then,” says Reuben.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A photo shows a bucket truck with a man in the bucket approaching the top of a utility pole. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a6e26d30d7e4c82d433a1b8ec94ae904" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="ffee6" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-shows-a-bucket-truck-with-a-man-in-the-bucket-approaching-the-top-of-a-utility-pole.jpg?id=67101766&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A worker installs a new fiber-optic line for the Western James Bay Telecom Network.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Gavin John</small></p><p>Slowly but surely, every building in Fort Albany saw a strand of fiber drop from overhead and come through a box drilled into the wall, ready to connect to a router. By springtime, aerial cables linked every house—and future building sites—to the substation. Reuben calls it “a spider web that goes everywhere across town.”</p><p>Without much fanfare, on a night in April 2022, WJBTN <a href="https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/press-release/fibre-to-the-home-service-launched-in-fort-albany-first-nation-5392514" target="_blank">flipped the switch in Fort Albany</a>. The next morning, Kataquapit woke up to a different world. With 250 Mb/s download and 30 Mb/s upload speeds, she found herself just a click away from her children in faraway cities.</p><h2>Why Not Starlink?</h2><p>MacLeod and Reuben continued working up the coast, splicing cables and adding connection boxes. As COVID eased, they hired more local help, and the power company lent a hand with bucket trucks. “We were working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says MacLeod. “Guys were sitting in the heat, in bucket trucks, learning on the fly how to do splicing.” By late 2022, the network reached every home.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Hand adjusting fiber-optic cables in a labeled network equipment panel" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="bc6869baf62c2f0fbc1fd0d068d9fd86" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="4d079" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/hand-adjusting-fiber-optic-cables-in-a-labeled-network-equipment-panel.jpg?id=67102064&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Network server rack with labeled fiber optic cables and glowing status LEDs" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="af5ddba498dd226b1492f0b9bfba6ed2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="4f928" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/network-server-rack-with-labeled-fiber-optic-cables-and-glowing-status-leds.jpg?id=67102061&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Weathered wooden cable reels with exposed black wire, yellow wall and person in background" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="54b6fded93ea343559c95bab634de409" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="a203f" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/weathered-wooden-cable-reels-with-exposed-black-wire-yellow-wall-and-person-in-background.jpg?id=67102053&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Fiber-optic cables and networking equipment inside the Fort Albany substation distribute internet service throughout the community [top, middle]. Large spools of fiber-optic cable were flown in to connect homes [bottom]. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Gavin John</small></p><p>Around that time, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/starlink" target="_blank">Starlink</a>’s satellite internet service was becoming widely available. Many of WJBTN’s potential clients asked why they shouldn’t just purchase that instead of a fiber-optic connection that involved drilling into their homes. But speed tests comparing Xittel, Starlink, and the new WJBTN connections showed a major difference in latency: In applications like video calls, Xittel and Starlink’s round-trip signal delays became painfully obvious. Unlike satellite systems, fiber networks don’t need to send signals hundreds of kilometers into orbit and back. That gave WJBTN a significant performance advantage.</p><p>MacLeod recalls a conversation with one line worker who wanted to turn to Starlink. “We told him our latency is so much better,” MacLeod says, explaining that ISPs measure performance by both bandwidth and latency. From Attawapiskat, a data packet traveling over WJBTN’s fiber network reached Toronto in 20 milliseconds. Comparable satellite connections took <a href="https://www.satelliteinternet.com/resources/what-is-internet-latency/" target="_blank">closer to 60 milliseconds</a>. And Xittel’s latency was much worse, at several hundred milliseconds. (Since then, WJBTN has reduced latency further, to about 12 milliseconds.)</p><p>The team’s success has bolstered other Indigenous broadband companies. WJBTN representatives have shared their experiences at <a href="https://indigenousconnectivity.org/indigenous-connectivity-summit/" target="_blank">Indigenous Connectivity Summits</a> since 2017, and how-to workshops have sprung up <a href="https://indigenousconnectivity.org/icw/" target="_blank">across Canada</a> (and <a href="https://tribalbroadbandbootcamp.org/" target="_blank">the United States</a>). And Canada has since created a dedicated broadband funding stream for Indigenous communities. Within Fonex Data Systems, the company hired to do the backbone work, the WJBTN implementation is now considered the model for a successful installation in a remote location.</p><p>Nakogee says ownership remains the key advantage. Unlike earlier telecom providers that leased infrastructure or delivered service wirelessly, WJBTN owns the backbone fiber, the right-of-way, and the poles carrying the network. That makes it far harder for outside telecom companies to displace the service. “That’s our secret weapon,” he says.</p><p>Fundamentally, it’s about sovereignty. By controlling the infrastructure that carries internet traffic, the communities can govern and maintain the network according to their own priorities rather than the financial goals of distant providers.</p><h2>How Fiber Changed Daily Life</h2><p>Shortly after the fiber network was installed, <a href="https://www.timminstoday.com/local-news/fort-albany-elects-first-woman-chief-5901868" target="_blank">Elizabeth Kataquapit became chief</a> of Fort Albany First Nation. During her term as chief, she kicked the community’s digital era into full gear, encouraging individuals who couldn’t attend community meetings in person to join over Zoom.</p><p>Counselor Scott now conducts grief and addiction sessions both in person and via video calls and can connect immediately in a crisis even if he’s away. And as a search-and-rescue volunteer, he responded to the Facebook message when the young man got lost in a winter snowstorm on James Bay. “If we were a half hour later, the person would have [been] gone,” says Scott.</p><p>Broadband has also changed everyday life in quieter ways. Residents run small businesses from their homes. Telehealth links patients to specialists in southern cities. More people are working remotely and taking classes online. “Quality of life is so much better,” Reuben says.</p><p>But the network has also brought to these northern communities the more isolating side of fast internet. Community members stream more movies and play more video games, and they meet face-to-face less frequently. Standing beside an enormous canoe in his front yard, Scott explains that while he’s grateful for Fort Albany’s new connection to the outside world, he’s equally intent on preserving close connections within the community. Today, he says, as he starts loading fishing nets into the canoe, “I’m taking the kids out after school to harvest whitefish.” <span class="ieee-end-mark"></span></p><p><em>This article appears in the August 2026 print issue as “Wiring the North.”</em></p>

Jul 29, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-illustration-of-stylized-people-wearing-business-casual-clothing.jpg?id=59104110&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C232%2C0%2C233"/><br/><br/><p><em>This article is crossposted from </em>IEEE Spectrum<em>’s careers newsletter. <a href="https://engage.ieee.org/Career-Alert-Sign-Up.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Sign up now</em></a><em> to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, <em><em>written i<em>n partnership with tech career development company <a href="https://www.parsity.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Parsity</a> and </em></em></em>delivered to your inbox for free!</em></em></p><p><em><em></em></em><span>Scroll through LinkedIn right now and you may find the same advice repeated by well-meaning people: “In a market this rough, just be grateful anyone will hire you. Take the offer.”</span><br/></p><p>I could not disagree more.</p><p>Negotiating your offer is not ungrateful, and it isn’t greedy. Done well, it’s good for you and good for the company hiring you. I misunderstood this early in my career, and it cost me.</p><h2>I didn’t know it was an option</h2><p>When I got my first job in tech, I didn’t know negotiation was even on the table. The recruiter asked what salary I wanted, and I gave a number below the bottom of their range. They came back with the lowest number in their band—still more than I had asked for—and I was thrilled. I had no idea I’d left money on a table I couldn’t see.</p><p>Then I started teaching at a Bay Area coding bootcamp in the evenings. A coworker mentioned what he made and it was nearly double my salary for roughly the same work. My jaw dropped. </p><p>During that time, I began interviewing and got an offer. I handed in my resignation and my manager countered with an offer for nearly 30K more. That money had been there the whole time. At that moment, I realized my salary was a business decision, not a measure of my worth.</p><h2>What it looks like from the other side</h2><p>Years later, I became an engineering manager and saw the salary discussion from a different angle: A position would open. Many interviews later, we’d find someone we wanted, and HR would hand me a salary range to make an offer. I was encouraged to make an initial offer near the bottom to leave room for, you guessed it, negotiations.</p><p>Most applicants didn’t negotiate.</p><p>The first offer is rarely the ceiling. It’s usually the floor. Companies extend a reasonable number and quietly hope you say yes.</p><h2>It’s not all about the money</h2><p>Negotiating isn’t only about a bigger paycheck. (But who doesn’t want that?) </p><p>Let’s say you’re on the job market, maybe recently laid off, and a low offer comes in. You take it out of relief. Then you start, you like the team, and you quietly resent the number. Now you’re stuck with it, and you’ll probably leave that role inside a year or whenever the market improves.</p><p>Nobody wins there. You’re back on the market starting over, and the company loses someone good and pays more to replace you, when a fair number up front would have cost far less. </p><p>Paying you fairly is cheaper than starting over.</p><h2>How to actually do it</h2><p>People overcomplicate this. Once I have an offer, I say some version of this:</p><p>“Thank you so much for the offer, and I’m genuinely excited to join the team. I’m hoping we can come in around [10 to 20 percent higher than the original number]. Is there any wiggle room here?”</p><p>Then I stop talking and let them respond.</p><p>Why 10 to 20 percent and not double? The number you ask for is itself a signal. Ask for something wildly out of range and you’ve told them you never learned what the role pays, or that your expectations are miles from reality. That’s what makes a company walk away. A calibrated request reads as someone who knows their worth and did their homework.</p><p>You’ve probably heard a horror story about someone who asked for more and had the offer yanked. Any company that would pull an offer over a reasonable question about pay is telling you exactly how they’ll treat you once you’re inside.</p><p>If the salary can’t move, it isn’t the only lever. I’ve negotiated more remote days, a later start to drop my kids off, and a sign-on bonus when the base was locked. Most people negotiate none of these perks.</p><h2>You have more leverage than you think</h2><p>Negotiating can feel like something you can only do from a position of power. But if you’re in the final stages of an offer, you already have it. They want to hire you. They’ve spent weeks finding you. Now they’re hoping you say yes.</p><p>That’s true even if you were recently laid off. Even if it’s your first job. Even if the number already looks higher than you expected.</p><p>The game is being played whether or not you join in. Sit it out, and you’re not just leaving money on the table. You may be quietly shortening your own stay at a job you could have been happy in. So ask.</p><p><span>—Brian</span></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/technical-interview-ai-arms-race" target="_self">The AI Arms Race in Technical Interviews Is Escalating </a></h2><p>If you’ve been on the job market for a software engineering role recently, you’ve probably encountered—or used—AI tools in the hiring process. From application filters to live interview assistants, both applicants and employers are trying to use generative AI to their advantage. Can real, human skills still shine through in this new reality? </p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/technical-interview-ai-arms-race" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/graduate-student-nasas-robots-assembly" target="_self">This Graduate Student Equips NASA With Assembly Skills</a></h2><p>Sarah Downs, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University, has long been interested in robotics and dreamed of working with NASA. This year, she achieved that dream, collaborating with NASA and the U.S. Air Force on an algorithm that enables satellites to insert an antenna into the correct spot. </p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/graduate-student-nasas-robots-assembly" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-program-girls-india-stem" target="_self">IEEE Program Helps Girls in India See a Future in Stem</a></h2><p>Women make up only about 28 percent of the global STEM workforce, in part because of limited access to educational resources for preuniversity students—especially in areas like rural India. An IEEE initiative, the Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project launched to help expand opportunities and hands-on learning for young women. </p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-program-girls-india-stem" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p>

Jul 29, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-woman-in-nccu-eagles-jersey-stands-with-arms-crossed-in-front-of-red-mural.png?id=67527627&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills employers expect from new graduates. In response, universities are scrambling to launch new courses, research centers, and industry partnerships that prepare students for today’s workforce. But building a cutting-edge AI curriculum demands funding and access to industry networks, resources that remain unevenly distributed across higher education. </p><p>At North Carolina Central University, <a href="https://www.nccu.edu/employee/sday" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Siobahn Day Grady</a> is trying to change that equation.</p><p>In January 2025, Grady, an associate professor in the <a href="https://www.nccu.edu/slis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NCCU School of Library and Information Sciences</a>, launched the first AI research institute at a historically Black college or university, or HBCU. The <a href="https://www.nccu.edu/research/institutes-and-special-facilities/iaier" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research</a> (IAIER) aims in part to help students and faculty across the university develop the skills needed to navigate a labor market increasingly transformed by AI.</p><p>“There used to be a time where people could say, ‘I don’t do tech,’ or ‘That’s not for me,’” Grady says. “But we’re in a stage now where you do need digital skills. Now it’s evolving into AI literacy.” </p><p>The approach reflects a broader shift in how many universities are thinking about AI education. AI skills are no longer confined to computer science and engineering departments—and at NCCU, they can’t be. The university does not yet have a dedicated computer science program, though it is developing one alongside a new AI minor. </p><p>The challenge of providing these resources is especially acute for historically Black institutions. Although HBCUs account for roughly 3 percent of four-year institutions in the United States, they receive less than 1 percent of federal research and development funding, according to a <a href="https://tmcf.org/new-data-reveals-disproportionately-low-rd-funds-awarded-to-hbcus/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2025 report </a>by the Center for American Progress and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. The same report found that 17 of the 43 federal agencies that distributed research funding to universities in 2023 awarded no funding to HBCUs. </p><p>Yet less than two years since its launch, IAIER has emerged as a powerhouse for interdisciplinary AI education. Backed by a US $1 million <a href="https://google.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google.org</a> grant, the institute has engaged more than 2,800 students, faculty members, and community residents through research initiatives and training. Now the challenge is sustaining that momentum to keep up with rising demand.</p><p>“We have a guiding principle that we lead with on our campus,” Grady says. “AI is for everyone.”</p><h2>Why one research group wasn’t enough</h2><p>The mission to expand AI literacy grew out of Grady’s lifelong curiosity about technology. “I was born during a time [when] the internet did not exist,” she says. “Ever since the internet came to be, it’s changed our entire world.” </p><p>Grady was particularly drawn to the questions tech raises about privacy, identity, and human behavior. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s degrees in AI and information science, Grady pursued a Ph.D. in computer science at the <a href="https://www.ncat.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University</a> to dig into those questions. </p><p>Her <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/2d76e0ff1f4fadb5fe010f0d5fca858f/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dissertation</a> focused on authorship attribution in social media, using machine learning and natural-language processing to determine whether a person’s writing style could reveal their identity. “I’ve always been intrigued by how much data we give for free,” Grady says. That work introduced her to the power of AI systems to detect patterns hidden within large datasets. </p><p class="pull-quote"><span>“We have a guiding principle that we lead with on our campus: AI is for everyone.”</span></p><p>After completing her doctorate in 2018, Grady joined NCCU as an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences. There, she researched machine learning applications for health care and autonomous vehicles. In 2020, she launched the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research at NCCU, giving students opportunities to participate in hands-on projects and explore AI beyond the classroom.</p><p>Then in 2024, an opportunity emerged to apply for a Google grant, and Grady began thinking beyond a single research group. Rather than building another faculty lab, she envisioned an institute that could serve the entire university during the AI boom. “We wanted to capitalize on the moment and make sure we don’t get left behind,” Grady says. </p><p>Since receiving the $1 million grant, Grady and her team have built a university-wide AI initiative, launched new academic programs, organized conferences, secured external support, and created research opportunities.</p><p>“We’ve really operated like a startup,” Grady says. </p><h2>AI beyond computer science</h2><p>As part of the institute’s goal of integrating AI education across disciplines, all NCCU freshmen are <a href="https://www.nccu.edu/news/nccu-among-first-hbcus-require-ai-training-freshmen" target="_blank">required to complete an introductory AI course</a>, designed in partnership with <a href="https://skillsbuild.org/" target="_blank">IBM</a>, to build foundational prompting skills. The institute has also worked with faculty development teams to help instructors integrate AI into their teaching.</p><p>Research is another part of the strategy. IAIER has awarded seed grants of up to $10,000 to faculty members exploring AI applications across departments. <a href="https://www.nccu.edu/research/institutes-and-special-facilities/iaier/seed-grant-program/2025-2026-iaier-seed-grant-funding-awardees" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The first cohort</a> funded 11 projects spanning social work, digital archiving, health care, and information science. One project, for instance, is creating an AI lab where students in social work courses can practice client interactions through simulations. </p><p>“It’s really interesting to see the lens that our researchers take in trying to solve complex problems and also bring our students along with them,” Grady says.</p><p>The institute’s growth has been fueled by a mix of workforce training, interdisciplinary research, and, especially important, industry engagement. “Industry is where the advancements are really moving at that very fast rate,” Grady says, “not necessarily higher ed.”</p><p>To bridge that gap, IAIER hosts events that connect students and faculty with researchers, employers, and technology leaders. It has held sessions with companies including Deloitte, FICO, and Anthropic. Partnerships with Google and IBM let students gain recognized certificates and credentials. And last year, the institute hosted the first <a href="https://academy.openai.com/public/events/the-iaier-at-nccu-x-openai-academy-summit-hbcus-leading-the-future-ijyucx0rve?agenda_day=68484fd45114dd90aa5aa378&agenda_track=68484fd55114dd90aa5aa38d&agenda_stage=68484fd45114dd90aa5aa37e&agenda_filter_view=stage&agenda_view=list" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenAI Academy Summit</a> held at an HBCU, drawing 444 participants from more than 40 institutions. </p><h2>Sustaining the vision</h2><p>The institute’s rapid growth has created a new challenge: continuing its momentum.</p><p>“Funding right now is the biggest barrier for [IAIER] to remain sustainable,” Grady says. As interest in the institute continues to grow, demand for its programs is beginning to outpace its capacity. “People just want more,” she says.</p><p>The bottleneck reflects a broader tension across higher education. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026" target="_blank">AI is evolving quickly</a>, while developing new academic programs, training faculty, and building research capacity takes time. The uncertainty is compounded by a shifting political landscape. As a whole, U.S. universities are grappling with proposed <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/harvard-funding-cuts" target="_blank">cuts to federal research spending</a> and increased scrutiny of diversity-focused initiatives under the Trump administration. However, in September 2025, the administration also announced a $500 million one-time investment in HBCUs and higher-ed institutions chartered by Native American tribal governments. </p><p>Meanwhile, NCCU has continued to attract new investment. Last September, in a collaboration with Howard University and two other institutions, IAIER <a href="https://nsf.elsevierpure.com/en/projects/research-coordination-network-on-assessing-and-predicting-jobs-ou-2/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">received a nearly $500,000 award</a> through a <a href="https://www.aijobsrcn.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Science Foundation research coordination network program</a> to help define emerging AI jobs, identify in-demand skills, and inform future credentials and curricula. That work will continue this fall when IAIER opens its first dedicated physical space on campus, Grady says.</p><p>Over the next several years, Grady plans to expand academic programming, launch the university’s computer science major and its AI minor, increase faculty research opportunities, and integrate AI more deeply across campus operations. She also plans to deepen the institute’s collaborations with industry partners.</p><p>Beyond program expansion, Grady sees the institute’s long-term success as linked to building a model other universities can adapt. “We’re creating a framework that can help not only HBCUs,” she says, “but also help any university looking to do similar work.” </p>

Jul 29, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-painting-with-overlapping-concentric-shapes-in-blue-and-yellow.jpg?id=67163886&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday infrastructure–in some places. It helps write emails and software code, filters job applications, powers recommendation systems, and is increasingly being integrated into education, health care, finance, and public administration. Industry leaders talk about “AI for everyone,” while governments rush to publish national AI strategies and build sovereign compute.</p><p>Yet over the past decade, working on digital inclusion and digital literacy projects in regions from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-30808-6" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">I’ve seen the same pattern repeat</a>: Each new wave of “transformative” technology lands on a landscape already stratified by connectivity, skills, and institutional capacity. The current AI wave is no exception. If anything, it amplifies those underlying fractures.</p><p>Still, some countries are exploring ways of participating in AI development without directly replicating the frontier-model race dominated by the United States and China. Recent developments in South Africa and Indonesia illustrate both the possibilities and challenges. The stakes extend far beyond access to AI. Countries that remain primarily consumers rather than creators of AI risk losing opportunities to build local innovation ecosystems, strengthen public-sector capacity, and ensure that their own languages, cultures, and societal priorities are reflected in AI systems. In this sense, the AI divide is also becoming a divide in economic opportunity and technological influence.</p><h2>AI compute is clustering in a few places</h2><p>Recent analyses from Stanford University’s 2026 <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">AI Index report</a> that the United States alone hosts more than 5,000 data centers, over 10 times as many as any other single country. Because AI workloads are increasingly performed on cloud platforms rather than local infrastructure, this concentration of compute also becomes a concentration of dependency. According to <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/dptr2025-ai-foundations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">World Bank data</a>, in 2023 the United States accounted for roughly 87 percent of global exports of cloud computing and data-storage services.</p><p>For most countries, this means that <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/europe-tech-sovereignty-package" target="_self">AI development is not just technologically but commercially and geopolitically outsourced</a> and out of their control. The result is an AI ecosystem where a small number of states and firms host the computational engines that power globally deployed systems.</p><p>Systems trained, standardized, and governed within a narrow set of institutional and linguistic environments may struggle to serve a genuinely global public.</p><h2>Skills and AI literacy are deeply stratified</h2><p>Even where connectivity and cloud access exist, not everyone is equally positioned to make use of them. Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, only around <a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/bridging-the-ai-skills-gap_66d0702e-en.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">40 percent of adults possess more than basic digital problem-solving skills</a>, while advanced computational and AI-related competences remain concentrated among highly educated workers and technology-intensive sectors.</p><p>At the same time, governments are racing to integrate AI into education, often starting at higher levels of schooling. UNESCO <a href="https://www.unesco.org/ethics-ai/en/node/367" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">has reported</a> growing efforts worldwide to integrate AI into education, while support for AI literacy in primary and lower secondary education, as well as ethical training for educators, remains uneven. </p><p>Those with robust schooling, advanced digital skills, and stable connectivity are best positioned to treat AI as a tool to extend their capabilities. <a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/how-do-people-experience-new-technologies-and-generative-ai_49b8d10e-en/full-report.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Recent OECD survey data</a> show that participation in AI-related training remains strongly stratified by educational attainment: 36 percent of respondents with tertiary education reported undertaking AI-related training in the previous year, compared with just 18 percent of those with upper-secondary education. Those on the wrong side of the divide are more likely to experience AI as an opaque system acting upon them, from algorithmic welfare systems such as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/welfare-surveillance-system-violates-human-rights-dutch-court-rules" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dutch childcare benefits scandal</a> to AI-assisted hiring tools such as <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/world/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amazon’s discontinued AI recruiting system</a>, rather than as a technology they can actively interrogate or shape.</p><h2>Investment and governance: Who gets a seat at the table?</h2><p>The core agenda-setting power often remains with a narrow set of industry actors and a small group of technologically advanced states. Most other countries remain in a perpetual catch-up posture, adapting imported models, standards, and templates for “trustworthy AI” to their own contexts, and may have limited local capacity to assess trade-offs or propose alternatives. </p><p>In countries such as Indonesia and South Africa, communities generate data at massive scale yet still have little voice in how AI systems are designed, governed, or deployed. Their <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/indigenous-ai-voice-models-maori" target="_self">languages are underrepresented in training data</a>; their institutions are under-resourced in regulatory forums; their experiences rarely feature in benchmark datasets. For many countries in the global South, participation in AI still occurs largely through adapting imported systems rather than shaping how those systems are designed, governed, or deployed. </p><p>In South Africa, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies released a <a href="https://www.techpolicy.press/south-africa-has-ai-leverage-its-draft-policy-leaves-it-unused/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">draft national AI policy</a> in April 2026, proposing new oversight institutions. The department withdrew the draft days later after a journalist discovered that at least six of its academic citations did not exist, apparently AI-generated hallucinations. The minister called it <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-withdraws-ai-policy-due-fake-ai-generated-sources-2026-04-27/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">“an unacceptable lapse.</a>“ The episode sharply illustrates the gap between AI governance ambition and the institutional capacity needed to implement it, though the new AI panel the country has since constituted has a chance to use <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/south-africa-ai-policy" target="_self">South Africa’s unique leverage</a>.</p><p>Indonesia presents a case of deliberate, if constrained, public-sector agency. The National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) which now leads AI implementation under the national strategy, has built <a href="https://restofworld.org/2024/indonesia-ai-tools-brin-government-agency/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">practical AI tools aimed at underserved communities</a> rather than frontier capabilities, including an app that uses satellite data and machine learning to help artisanal fishermen locate schools of fish, multilingual language models trained on Indonesian and local languages such as Javanese and Sundanese, and <a href="https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/indonesia-s-upgraded-sahabat-ai-features-a-multilingual-chat-service" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">AI chatbots deployed in government services.</a> In August 2025, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs released <a href="https://govinsider.asia/intl-en/article/indonesia-unveils-national-ai-roadmap" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a national AI road map</a> with a target of training 100,000 AI-skilled workers annually. </p><p>The choice is not simply between “AI superpower” and “passive recipient.” </p><p>Regional cooperation may also become increasingly important. In 2024 African ministers adopted a Continental AI Strategy and African Digital Compact. Participants in the April 2025 <a href="https://dsup.substack.com/p/dsfsi-at-the-global-ai-summit-on" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Global AI Summit on Africa in Kigali</a> explored how regional coordination, <a href="https://www.news.uct.ac.za/news/audio/-article/2026-05-04-uct-researchers-develop-ai-model-for-11-south-african-languages" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">local-language AI models</a>, public universities, and <a href="https://scienceforafrica.foundation/media-center/open-research-proposals-adopted-east-africas-ai-declaration" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">open-source ecosystems</a> might <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/09/understanding-africas-ai-governance-landscape-insights-from-policy-practice-and-dialogue" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reduce long-term dependence on externally developed AI systems</a>.</p><h2>A different way to think about the AI divide</h2><p>None of this means that people should slow or abandon AI, nor that cloud concentration or venture capital are inherently bad. Instead, when we talk about an “AI revolution,” we should also ask who can shape it and who can merely adapt to it.</p><p>Digital-divide debates once focused on devices and connectivity, later expanding toward skills and outcomes. But the current AI wave adds another layer: disparities in who can meaningfully participate in deciding what AI is for, which problems it is meant to solve, and which social priorities it ultimately serves.</p><p>For engineers and policymakers, this raises difficult but necessary questions. Are they designing AI systems and infrastructures that broaden, rather than narrow, participation in shaping technological change? When governments roll out national AI strategies or integrate AI into public services, whose constraints, languages, and institutional realities are they including?</p><p>Many observers frame the current AI moment as <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026" target="_self">a competition</a>. But technological competition is never only about speed. It is also about who can influence the direction of change.</p><p>AI is already spreading globally. The deeper question is whether the technologists and policymakers responsible for it will ensure that meaningful participation in shaping that future will spread as well.</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-students-sit-together-at-a-classroom-table-talking-and-working-on-devices.jpg?id=67546488&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C157"/><br/><br/><p>In shaping her career, Peru native <a href="https://pe.linkedin.com/in/mariana-costa-checa-85876231" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mariana Costa</a> has asked herself a question: What can I do to make life better for women in Latin America?</p><p>The answer she landed on was training them for tech jobs.</p><h3>Mariana Costa</h3><br/><p><strong>Employer</strong> </p><p>Laboratoria</p><p><strong>Title</strong> </p><p>Co-founder and president</p><p><strong>Alma Maters</strong> </p><p>London School of Economics; Columbia </p><p>Such positions pay well and are in demand. And for too long, women across the region have been locked out of them, she says.</p><p>Costa is president of <a href="https://laboratoria.la/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Laboratoria</a>, a U.S.-registered nonprofit based in Miami that she helped found. Laboratoria has trained thousands of women in 11 Latin American countries for technology careers. She has built training centers in the countries and has placed graduates at major companies. Meanwhile, she has become one of the most recognized voices in the region on workforce equity and tech education for women.</p><p>IEEE recognized her work with its <a href="https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/recipient/mariana-costa/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">President’s Award</a> this year for her “distinguished leadership and contributions to the betterment of society.” Recipients of the award are selected by the IEEE president with the consent of the IEEE Board of Directors.</p><p>Costa says the recognition came as a surprise because she is not an engineer by training and had never considered becoming affiliated with IEEE.</p><p>She was presented with the award at the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-celebrates-honors-ceremony-2026" target="_self">IEEE Honors Ceremony</a> on 24 April in New York City.</p><h2>Peru: a country of contrasts</h2><p>Costa grew up in Lima, Peru’s capital, in a household with no connection to engineering or technology. Her mother was an art historian and professor, and her father was a lawyer. The family was financially comfortable and traveled abroad regularly. Costa attended well-resourced schools.</p><p>That economic stability came with a reckoning, Costa says, in that she recognized early on that economic inequality had created separate societies inside Peru. Her parents, she says, made it “clear that my reality wasn’t the reality of most people in my country.”</p><p>Lima is a microcosm of the country, she says. The divide in the capital city is visible: A kilometers-long concrete wall topped with barbed wire separates wealthier neighborhoods from shantytowns, where residents lack running water.</p><p>Nationally, there are splits along ethnic and geographic lines. The highland and jungle regions remain home to mostly indigenous communities with limited educational access and a deep cultural distance from the Hispanic-dominated coast.</p><p>The questions that stirred in her as a child never left, she says.</p><p>“Why do I live in a country where so much depends on where you’re born?” she asked herself. “What does it mean to be Peruvian when individual realities are strikingly different?”</p><p>Those questions followed her to the <a href="https://www.getsmarter.com/products/universities/the-london-school-of-economics-and-political-science?gclsrc=aw.ds&&&ef_id=c:524987838476_d:c_n:g_ti:kwd-296547014814_p:_k:london%20school%20of%20economics_m:e_a:126288917990&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=13137345744&gbraid=0AAAAADmgJP19b7OXwoaGcfVpuFd-lIRKm&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxvjRBhC2ARIsAI7KJa1xYb8TIS-QU7rdGmN50DDgNyqnsm5Wl90XqKbKb6XQBMVqjSLys0kaApqeEALw_wcB" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">London School of Economics</a>, where she studied international relations, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2007. She held onto the questions when she moved to Washington, D.C., where she spent the next four years working for the <a href="https://www.oas.org/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Organization of American States</a>, helping Latin American governments improve public services that fall under the heading of civil registration.</p><p class="pull-quote">“I said, ‘How can it be? The tech space has so many rich opportunities. Why aren’t any women here?’”</p><p>The OAS <a href="https://www.oas.org/ext/en/democracy/PUICA" target="_blank">Universal Civil Identity Program in the Americas</a> provides technical support to national civil registry institutions, modernizing them to foster social inclusion and ensuring the right to civil identity for all people. Without civil identity, a person can’t access education, health care, legal employment, social services, or the right to vote. People without the classification don’t exist in the eyes of the government. They also can’t own property, get married officially, or pass citizenship rights to their children.</p><p>Doing that work deepened her concern about the socioeconomic disparities in her homeland, she says. In search of practical solutions to those problems, she went to New York City in 2011 to further her education. She earned a master’s degree in public administration and development from <a href="https://www.columbia.edu/" target="_blank">Columbia</a> in 2013.</p><p>Technology was not yet part of a solution. But Costa already had met someone who would change that.</p><h2>Falling in love with a programmer</h2><p>While working in Washington, Costa met <a href="https://www.wearefamilyfoundation.org/mentors-2020/herman-marin" target="_blank">Herman Marìn</a>, a software engineer who used digital tools in support of social causes. Because he was doing work she had never associated with programmers before, her assumptions about the field dissolved quickly.</p><p>“I had a vision of [programmers doing] something not very social—strictly technical,” she says. “And my then-boyfriend, now husband, actually worked for different social movements that used technology to address social causes.”</p><p>That realization cracked something open, she says: “I said, ‘Oh! Technology can actually be a tool to address some of the more stubborn problems in our societies.’”</p><p>After earning her degree at Columbia, Costa returned to Lima with her husband. She had been abroad for nearly a decade and felt the pull of home.</p><p>“The thought of not moving back to my country was something that tormented me a bit,” she says. “I really felt I had to move back, at least to try it out and contribute somehow.”</p><h2>What Latin America’s tech space lacked</h2><p>When Costa, her husband, and a friend from graduate school moved to Lima, they had modest savings and big ambitions. They wanted to build something that combined technology with social impact.</p><p>They started with what they had: a small digital services agency, where they built websites for clients.</p><p>The business grew, and they hired more employees. Their team expanded to a dozen software engineers. And as it did, Costa noticed three things.</p><p>First, there weren’t enough trained developers to meet the demand. Second, many of their best hires did not have traditional computer science degrees. Some had never even finished college.</p><p>“There was no other space where you could actually build an amazing career and get a well-paying job without a good degree from a good school,” she says. “The tech world was different. It was open in ways other fields weren’t.”</p><p>Thirdly, she noticed that there were no women on the team. In the first six months, Costa says, they didn’t interview a single female developer.</p><p>Her colleagues shrugged. It’s just how it is, they told her.</p><p>Costa, the outsider, didn’t accept that.</p><p>“I said, ‘How can that be? The tech space has so many rich opportunities,’” she says. “‘Why aren’t there any women?’”</p><h2>Building Laboratoria</h2><p>In 2014 she decided to launch Laboratoria. The business model was simple: Find talented women who hadn’t yet broken into tech, train them quickly on practical skills, and connect them with employers who needed developers.</p><p>Laboratoria started offering a six-month immersive boot camp that covered Web development, UX design, <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10765410" target="_blank">data literacy</a>, strategic use of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/artificial-intelligence/" target="_self">artificial intelligence</a>, and soft-skills coaching such as interview prep and projecting confidence.</p><p>Just as important for career success, Costa says, is a <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics" target="_self">user-centered mindset</a>. She says Laboratoria’s program emphasizes the discipline of keeping the client’s needs in mind when designing the work.</p><p>The teaching model has evolved beyond the boot-camp structure, but the organization still focuses on helping Latin American women develop tech skills and land quality jobs in the digital age. These days, the training, conducted via twice-weekly live <a href="https://www.zoom.com/" target="_blank">Zoom</a> sessions, lasts six weeks.</p><p>“We needed developers ourselves,” she says of the company’s original logic. “I said, ‘Why don’t we run a program to train women—women who are incredibly talented but haven’t been given a chance yet—and help them gain the skills they need to get a great job as quickly as possible?’”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" rel="float: left;" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Three smiling adults pose together on a green sofa in a bright living room." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="93d5a0060abb2c81ccd29705eed2f253" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="2b804" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/three-smiling-adults-pose-together-on-a-green-sofa-in-a-bright-living-room.jpg?id=67546536&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption..." style="max-width: 100%;">Mariana Costa [seated, right] poses with Laboratoria co-founder and CEO Gabriela Rocha and co-founder and chief product officer Rodulfo Prieto.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..." style="max-width: 100%;">Valeria Martens</small></p><p>It worked. Laboratoria expanded from Lima to Santiago, Chile; Mexico City; São Paulo, Brazil; and Bogotá, Colombia. The organization eventually incorporated as a nonprofit in the United States. Today its programs are held remotely in Latin America’s major job markets. So far, Laboratoria has opened the doors to tech careers for more than 3,500 women.</p><p>Costa says she believes the most important skills Laboratoria’s graduates need aren’t purely technical. Close behind the growth mindset is self-confidence, she says.</p><p>“Knowing who you are, valuing who you are, and learning to trust yourself and your capacities are indispensable traits,” she says.</p><p>Networking, she adds, is the third pillar, and often the hardest to build for women without access to elite schools or flexible work schedules.</p><p>“When you go out in the market,” she says, “you realize that having a network of people who trust you and know your work is such a valuable and critical asset.”</p><h2>IEEE: a new connection</h2><p>Costa’s introduction to IEEE came late—but it landed hard.</p><p>She is not an IEEE member, so when she was contacted this year about receiving the President’s Award, she did her homework on the organization. What she found, she says, was a public charity whose reach and values aligned with her mission.</p><p>“IEEE is about expanding access to opportunities in the world of technology,” she says. “And that’s also the core of what we do at Laboratoria.”</p><p>She says she also sees IEEE as a living example of something her company preaches every day: “I was talking about the value of professional networks, and I think IEEE is such an amazing reference in that space. It exemplifies this belief that human connection—not only doing your work but also sharing and learning with others—is at the core of building thriving technology careers.”</p><p>The engineering organization found her well after she launched her tech-related career. But it wasn’t too late. She says she intends to make the most of the connection.</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-man-in-glasses-overlaid-with-scientific-diagrams-and-colorful-geometric-shapes.png?id=67527858&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C102%2C0%2C103"/><br/><br/><p><span>Physicists have been trying to measure the </span><span>fundamental gravitation</span><span>al constant</span><span> for well over two centuries. The current </span><a href="https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?bg" target="_blank">accepted value of big <em><em>G</em></em></a><span>, as it’s known, is 6.67430 × 10</span><span>-11</span><span> cubic meters per kilogram per square second. It also has an uncertainty of ±0.00015 × 10^-11</span><span> </span><span>m</span><span>³</span><span>/(kg s</span><span>²</span><span>). As far as <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-kilogram-reinvented" target="_blank">constants of the universe</a> go, that’s very uncertain.</span></p><h3>Stephan Schlamminger</h3><br/><p><a href="https://www.nist.gov/people/stephan-schlamminger" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Schlamminger</a> is a physicist at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.</p><p>Stephan Schlamminger recently completed a <a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/04/nist-weighs-mystery-gravitational-constant" target="_blank">10-year effort</a> at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to replicate an earlier measurement of big <em><em>G</em></em> from the <a href="https://www.bipm.org/en/" target="_blank">International Bureau of Weights and Measures</a>, or BIPM (located near Paris) that’s notably higher than most measurements. He spoke with <em><em>IEEE Spectrum</em></em> about why it took so long to get a number—6.67387 x 10^-11 m<span>³</span>/(kg s²)—and why it’s notably lower than the BIPM result, to the tune of <a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/04/nist-weighs-mystery-gravitational-constant" target="_blank">0.0235 percent</a>.</p><p><strong>Why is it so difficult to measure big </strong><em><strong><em>G</em></strong></em><strong>?</strong></p><p><strong>Stephan Schlamminger: </strong>Gravity is very weak. When you were a kid, you probably played with fridge magnets, and it was a force you could feel. But if you have two coffee cups, you can try all you want—you can’t feel the force between them. It is there, but it’s so, so weak.</p><p><strong>How did you attempt to measure big </strong><em><strong><em>G</em></strong></em><strong>?</strong></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Animated schematic of a rotating lab instrument with laser scanning cylindrical samples" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f11b53ee08734b7d1a840a0d90a57263" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="79fc0" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/animated-schematic-of-a-rotating-lab-instrument-with-laser-scanning-cylindrical-samples.gif?id=67527373&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">NIST used a torsion balance with a fourfold geometry. This animation shows an exaggerated version of how the outer green masses gravitationally attract the inner blue masses.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">S. Kelley/NIST</small></p><p><strong>Schlamminger: </strong>We used what’s called a torsion balance. The key idea in the torsion balance is that it decouples vertical gravity that you have from Earth from horizontal gravity, and that makes it sensitive to masses that are around the torsion balance but <em><em>not</em></em> the Earth below.</p><p>Ours had a fourfold geometry. It has a very thin torsion strip, then four cylinders in a “plus sign” arrangement. All of this is inside a vacuum. Outside, we have four larger cylinders that gravitationally attract the four smaller masses to them. If I move the outer masses just a tiny little bit, the plus sign will rotate, and we measure that angle that it moves. That angle is proportional to the gravitational torque.</p><p><strong>Why try to replicate the BIPM value?</strong></p><p><strong>Schlamminger: </strong>We could move the field forward. The measurements have been plagued with inconsistencies, so by redoing an experiment, we hoped to shed light on the inconsistencies.</p><p>We did not find a smoking gun, so there’s no single reason why it’s different—our value versus their value. It’s still a big question mark.</p><p><strong>What was it like spending 10 years on this?</strong></p><p><strong>Schlamminger: </strong>It’s a bit like herding cats. I’ve measured other fundamental constants, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/measure-plancks-constant-and-define-the-kilogramwith-legos" target="_blank">like Planck’s constant</a>, and for most experiments, they have some sort of self-calibration built in. But with the gravitational constant, you have to keep track of every single mass that moves—where they are, how big they are, and weigh them.</p><p><strong>How does your result compare to the rest?</strong></p><p><strong>Schlamminger: </strong>Our result is a little bit below the standard accepted literature value. I was disappointed because it doesn’t agree with the BIPM value, nor with the literature value. If there’s something wrong with the BIPM experiment, then the literature value—which includes that result—probably ought to come down a bit. But that is not for me to say. I think somebody else, independent, should figure out what the new mean value ought to be.</p>

Jul 27, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/rohde-schwarz-logo-with-make-ideas-real-tagline-and-rs-monogram-in-diamond.png?id=67541140&width=980"/><br/><br/><p>An overview of how mode-agile threats challenge static library radar/EW systems, and how AI/ML cognitive architectures enable adaptive, real-time countermeasures.</p><p>What Attendees will Learn</p><ol><li>Why mode-agile threats render static library systems ineffective — Explore how wartime reserve modes and mode-agile emitters deploy unexpected frequencies, modulation techniques, and hopping schemes that cannot be matched against traditional threat databases, leaving legacy electronic protect, attack, and support systems unable to respond.</li><li>How AI/ML techniques power cognitive radar/EW systems — Understand the roles of artificial neural networks (ANN), deep neural networks (DNN), fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms in enabling autonomous threat classification, signal de-interleaving, and real-time countermeasure generation without human intervention.</li><li>The architecture of a cognitive radar/EW system — Examine the functional blocks including RF acquisition, search and tracking, core AI/ML signal analysis, waveform synthesis, and RF generation, and how they form a closed-loop system that perceives,learns, reasons, and acts autonomously.</li><li>How to train and validate cognitive AI/ML algorithms using HIL/SIL systems — Learn how wideband RF record, simulation, and playback testbeds combined with modeling and simulation software enable iterative algorithm refinement, regression testing, and mission preparation in controlled laboratory environments.</li></ol><div><a href="https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/improving-the-capabilities-of-cognitive-radar-and-electronic-warfare-systems/" target="_blank">Download this free whitepaper now!</a></div>

Jul 25, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/mars-rover-on-rocky-terrain-beneath-stylized-golden-circles-and-wave-lines-on-black-sky.jpg?id=67527268&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/><br/><br/><p>Already, I’ve almost forgotten rain;<br/><span>I know I will never know that again.</span></p><p>I move forward with the powers you gave me<br/><span>to live up to my name, Curiosity.</span></p><p>This is a land without leaves, fronds, or spines.<br/><span>If there are plants, they are small and supine,</span></p><p>dust hidden, like light here, filtered and sand<br/><span>softened, at home in the thin air, thousands</span></p><p>of motes so small they seem to be fluid,<br/><span>more fog than firmament. Shadows, few and</span></p><p>far from here, I know I must go to them<br/><span>to see if they hold order or mayhem</span></p><p>or just another common rock or two.<br/><span>If a machine can miss the Earth, I do.</span></p>

Jul 24, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-middle-aged-asian-man-in-formal-attire-speaking-on-stage-behind-a-podium-with-a-woman-standing-in-the-background-holding-a-box.jpg?id=67521521&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C157"/><br/><br/><p>Unlike many budding engineers, <a href="https://kjrayliu.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">K.J. Ray Liu</a> wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help manufacture semiconductors in the 1970s, when the country’s economy was struggling.</p><p>“Students who were good in math, science, and physics all wanted to be an electrical engineer because that was the top priority of the government,” Liu says. “That’s how I got into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world leader in semiconductors.”</p><h3>K.J. Ray Liu</h3><br/><p><strong>Occupation</strong></p><p>Retired professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park </p> <p><strong>Member grade</strong></p><p>Fellow</p> <p><strong>Alma maters</strong></p><p>National Taiwan University; University of Michigan; UCLA</p><p>But by the time he graduated from university in 1983, semiconductor facilities were still under construction, so there were no jobs available.</p><p>Instead, he went on to have a successful career as an educator and entrepreneur in the United States.</p><p>For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the <a href="https://umd.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Maryland</a> in College Park until he retired in 2021.</p><p>Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of <a href="https://www.originwirelessai.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Origin Wireless</a>, a startup he founded in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by <a href="https://www.adt.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ADT</a> in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wireless sensing and indoor tracking.</p><p>Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an active IEEE volunteer who served as the organization’s president in 2022.</p><p>IEEE honored him with this year’s <a href="https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/award/ieee-haraden-pratt-award/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Haraden Pratt Award</a> for “transformative and impactful leadership.”</p><p>Liu is credited with increasing the diversity of nominees for IEEE’s <a href="https://www.ieee.org/communities-connection/awards-recognition/ieee-fellows" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fellow program</a>, which is the highest level of membership. He also led the effort to <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-regions-reconfiguration" target="_self">realign the organization’s regions</a> geographically to ensure more equitable global representation on the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Board of Directors</a>.</p><p>He received the Pratt honor on 24 April during a <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-celebrates-honors-ceremony-2026" target="_self">ceremony</a> in New York City. The <a href="https://www.ieeefoundation.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Foundation</a> sponsored the Board-level award.</p><p>“More than anything, I share the honor with the volunteers and staff I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our hard work is fueled by our shared devotion to this professional home we love and care for so much.”</p><h2>Making the switch to signal processing</h2><p>In the 1970s, Taiwan’s policymakers decided to improve the country’s economy by pivoting from making products such as shoes and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics.</p><p>The industry got its start in 1976 when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Corporation" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">RCA</a>, a major electronics company at the time, agreed to transfer licensed semiconductor processes to Taiwan’s <a href="https://www.itri.org.tw/eng/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Industrial Technology Research Institute</a>. ITRI spun off several semiconductor-related companies including the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tsmc-exec-on-chip-shortage" target="_self">Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.</a> TSMC, launched in 1987, is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry.</p><p>Liu graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taiwan_University" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Taiwan University</a>, in Taipei. At the time, there were no semiconductor companies to work for, he says.</p><p>“Nowadays, many of the country’s university graduates go right to TSMC to get a job,” he says. “But back then, there was no real job market.</p><p>“Most of my classmates—including me—came to the U.S. for graduate studies. Many of us stayed and, over the last three to four decades, contributed to the development of electronic computer communication technology in the U.S.”</p><p>Liu left Taiwan after a two-year mandatory stint in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_Armed_Forces" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Republic of China Armed Forces</a> to attend the <a href="https://umich.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Michigan</a>, in Ann Arbor, where in 1987 he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering.</p><p class="pull-quote">“If I can help make IEEE a better professional home for future members, that is something that I can pay back to IEEE.”</p><p>He went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 1990 from the <a href="https://www.ucla.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of California, Los Angeles</a>. His interest in digital signal processing and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) was sparked while at UCLA. Today <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-innovator-lynn-conway" target="_self">VLSI</a> powers all modern electronics.</p><p>“When I was a graduate student, there was no wireless communication. Everybody had a landline,” he explains.</p><p>VLSI was an important, active research field at the time.</p><p>“My research interest was digital signal processing,” he says. “One day I saw a book on VLSI signal processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I immediately thought to myself: That is the field I want to pursue.</p><p>“VLSI is one lane, digital signal processing is the other, and there is a bridge linking the two. I was interested in both areas, so I did my Ph.D. thesis on VLSI signal processing.”</p><p>After graduating, Liu joined the University of Maryland, where he is credited with establishing its <a href="https://ece.umd.edu/research/communications-and-signal-processing-laboratory-cspl" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signal processing research program</a>.</p><p>In addition to teaching, he conducted research on a broad range of signal processing and communication aspects. The topics include bioinformatics, game theory, signal processing algorithms and architectures, and wireless sensing and communications.</p><p>He has authored more than 10 books and 900 papers, and he holds 250 patents. You can find his research papers in the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Xplore Digital Library</a>.</p><h2>Ambient-sensing trailblazer</h2><p>Liu is considered to be a pioneer in the field of ambient sensing. The technology gathers environmental data and is used in security systems and health-monitoring devices.</p><p>He came up with the idea, he says, while working on a project in 2009 for the <a href="https://www.navy.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">U.S. Navy</a>. He was trying to solve a problem the Navy was having with the wireless communication systems used in its submarines. Because submarines are made of metal, radio waves were unable to penetrate the vessels’ compartments and instead bounced around, creating interference, he says.</p><p>His solution was to use a relatively unknown concept in physics: <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6627944/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">time-reversal signal processing</a>. The technique captures waves, such as sound and electromagnetic signals, and sends them back through the same medium in reverse, flipping the signal from last-in to first-out, and re-emits them.</p><p>“By using time-reversal feed, we could increase the signal-to-noise ratio by four times,” he says. “That improved performance dramatically.”</p><p>He became fascinated by the physics of time-reversal signal processing, he says, and wondered how he could apply the concept to serve society. After three years of research, he came up with the idea of using wireless sensing applications through ambient radio waves from surrounding Wi-Fi networks.</p><p>“I learned to turn Wi-Fi networks into sensing networks that decipher our activities,” he says. “We could know everything happening around us—our motions, breathing, heartbeat, even fall detection—without any wearables.”</p><p>Through the <a href="https://www.mtechventures.umd.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">university’s incubator</a>, which encourages faculty to work on projects with an impact on society, he launched Origin in 2013. The company’s Wi-FI and AI sensing technology enables accurate indoor tracking, motion detection, and health monitoring without the need for wearable devices or cameras. Its products, including its <a href="https://www.originwirelessai.com/a-non-wearable-approach-to-elderly-monitoring-the-value-and-benefits/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">remote patient monitoring</a>, received <a href="https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/origin-wireless-wins-two-2021-ces-awards-including-best-innovation-award" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">three innovation awards</a> at the 2020 and 2021 <a href="https://www.ces.tech/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Consumer Electronics</a> shows, including one for best innovation.</p><h2>Finding his professional home</h2><p>Liu joined IEEE in 1986 as a graduate student to access its research papers, he says.</p><p>“If you didn’t join an IEEE society, you didn’t get its journal—which meant that you couldn’t read the most up-to-date research papers,” he says. “So, I joined the <a href="https://signalprocessingsociety.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Signal Processing Society</a>. When I attended my first signal processing conference, I knew I had found a professional home. I met many like-minded people, and together, we built a professional home for our members worldwide.”</p><p>He became an active volunteer, holding top leadership positions including 2012–2013 president of the Signal Processing Society and 2016–2017 director of IEEE <a href="https://ta.ieee.org/society-council-resources/society-and-council-operations/divisions-society-groupings" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Division IX</a>, which covers societies focused on signal processing, data transmission, navigation, and transportation. In 2019 he was vice president of the <a href="https://ta.ieee.org/technical-activities-board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Technical Activities Board</a>.</p><p>In 2022 he served as <a href="https://www.ieee.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE</a> president and CEO. The three accomplishments during his term he says he is most proud of are increasing the prize money for the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/2026-ieee-medal-of-honor" target="_self">IEEE Medal of Honor</a>, overseeing the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-regions-reconfiguration" target="_self">realignment of IEEE regions</a>, and establishing greater financial transparency.</p><p>The reason for increasing the prize for IEEE’s highest award—from US $50,000 to $2 million—in 2025, he says, was to underscore the importance of the technologies the IEEE community develops. Those innovations include <a href="https://ethw.org/William_Shockley" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">semiconductors</a>, the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/magazine/2024/may/" target="_self">Internet</a>, and the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/move-over-moores-law-make-way-for-huangs-law" target="_self">GPU</a>. The money for the Medal of Honor now exceeds that of the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nobel Prize</a>, which carries an award of roughly $1 million.</p><p>“We need the whole world to understand the IEEE community has made the most impact on society in the last century,” Liu says. “Nevertheless, we did not receive the attention and respect we deserved, so we needed to help ourselves. We want the whole world to know what our contributions are.”</p><p>His next achievement was realigning IEEE’s regions. During the past several years, membership in <a href="https://www.ieeer10.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Region 10</a>, which covers countries in Asia and the Pacific, has grown from 10 percent of total membership to nearly 40 percent, he says. It is the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-regions-reconfiguration" target="_self">largest and most populous of IEEE’s geographic areas</a>, but its members were not equitably represented on the Board of Directors. Each region had one representative on the Board.</p><p>“The region has 40 percent of the members but only makes up 10 percent of the Board,” Liu says. “That didn’t make sense to a lot of us.”</p><p>The IEEE Board in 2022 approved region realignment. The total number of regions remains at 10, but their organization is changing. Effective 1 January 2028, the six U.S.-based regions will be consolidated into five, and Region 10 will be split into two. IEEE will no longer use the Region 1 designation. The new Region 2 will represent the Northeastern and Eastern U.S. Region 10 will cover North Asia, and the new Region 11 will represent South Asia and the Pacific.</p><p>Liu also succeeded in leading a movement that persuaded the IEEE Board to invest in a better financial reporting system to have a clearer understanding of the organization’s finances. A more modern system now tracks banking transactions, contracts, expense reports, and other spending.</p><p>“Now we know exactly where the money comes from and where it is spent,” he says, “so that we can make more informed decisions.</p><p>“If I can help make IEEE a better professional home for future members, that is something that I can pay back to IEEE,” he adds. “I truly appreciate what IEEE offered me. From student to professor to an established leader, at every stage, it offered me different opportunities to grow. That is why I worked very hard when I was president to make sure everybody realizes it is a professional home for our entire career.”</p>

Jul 22, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-image-of-two-women-operating-a-wall-sized-1940s-computer.jpg?id=67520993&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-your-own-enigma-cipher-machine" target="_self">Enigma</a> network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed.</p><p>Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new encryption and transmission system. It was way more advanced than Enigma, which was patented in 1920.</p><p>To break the complex new cipher, engineer <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/tommy-flowers/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tommy Flowers</a> built <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-hidden-figures-behind-bletchley-parks-codebreaking-colossus" target="_self">Colossus</a>, the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer. Flowers previously built Enigma-related codebreaking equipment for <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/turing-and-the-test-of-time" target="_self">Alan Turing</a>, the British mathematician.</p><p>Colossus was installed in the British codebreaking headquarters at <a href="https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/our-story/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bletchley Park</a>, about 80 kilometers from London. The room-size machine weighed around a tonne.</p><p>The computer is being commemorated as an <a href="https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Milestone-Proposal:Colossus" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Milestone</a>. The dedication <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1983872382701?aff=oddtdtcreator" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ceremony</a> is scheduled to be held 29 September at Bletchley Park.</p><h2>Decrypting Germany’s strange new music</h2><p>Britain’s top codebreakers were quickly all over the new “music” being picked up by the intercept stations. Identifying it as encrypted teletype code was the easy part. The real problem was figuring out how the encryption machine worked. Its manufacturer was discovered at the end of the war: Berlin engineering firm <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Lorenz_AG" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">C. Lorenz</a>.</p><p>But in 1941, the Lorenz machine was just a black box to the British. They codenamed it “Tunny,” a British term for tuna fish. The Enigma breakers had set a precedent for using piscine codenames such as Dolphin, Lumpsucker, and Porpoise.</p><p>Enigma had three or four encrypting wheels. The codebreakers guessed that the <a href="https://museum.cs.auckland.ac.nz/rutherfordjournal/article030109.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tunny machine</a> also used a system of rotating wheels to encrypt messages. An important clue was that all the intercepted messages shared a curious feature: Each began with an uncoded list of 12 common German names, including Anton, Bertha, Conrad, and Dora. The codebreakers guessed that Tunny had 12 wheels and that the 12 names and their order somehow told the receiving operator which combination they should twist the wheels to before decrypting the message.</p><p>Then the British had an extraordinary piece of good fortune. <a href="https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/13/2002761958/-1/-1/0/TILTMAN.PDF" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">John Tiltman</a>, head of the research section at Bletchley Park, started analyzing a pair of intercepted messages, each around 1,200 characters long. Unusually, both began with the same sequence of names. The second message turned out to be a retype of the first, with minor differences in punctuation, a few abbreviations, and other small divergences. Tiltman managed to decrypt the two ciphertexts using a mixture of educated guesswork and intuition. The resulting 1,200 or so pairings of ciphertext and plaintext characters proved to be enough information to deduce the workings of the Tunny machine.</p><p>That was thanks to<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00283-024-10386-7" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Bill Tutte</a>, a quiet young codebreaker who spent weeks poring over the pairings. One day, he shyly announced to his superiors how Tunny worked. His description was uncannily accurate.</p><p>The next step in the Tunny machine’s downfall was achieved by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alan-Turing" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Turing</a>, fresh from his successes against Enigma.</p><p>Knowledge of how the Tunny machine worked was not enough to decrypt the messages. Codebreakers also required detailed information about how the wheels of the sender’s machine had been set up. There were adjustable pins around the circumference of each wheel: In one of its two possible positions, a pin would contribute a 1 to the encryption process, and in the other, a 0. The pins were reset from time to time.</p><p>The codebreakers also needed to know the wheels’ positions at the start of the message—which the German operators gave away in the list of 12 names.</p><p>Turing invented a tricky method, called “<a href="https://museum.cs.auckland.ac.nz/rutherfordjournal/article030109.html#section06" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Turingery</a>,” that enabled codebreakers to deduce the positions of the pins from nothing but intercepted ciphertext.</p><p>After that, the message could be decrypted, using the list of names and a British replica of the Tunny machine.</p><p>The basis of Turingery was a procedure that Turing introduced, called “delta-ing” (from the Greek letter delta). Also known as “differencing,” the process used “sideways” addition: To delta the four letters ABCD, you add (at the bit level) A to B, B to C, and C to D. Turing used delta-ing to reveal information about the wheels.</p><p>Tunny messages, often signed by Adolph Hitler himself, turned out to be pure gold for the Allies. The machine was used in Berlin by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberkommando_der_Wehrmacht" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Armed Forces High Command</a> to communicate with front-line generals directing the war in the Eastern and Western theaters.</p><p>Once the system was broken, the Allies could eavesdrop on lengthy back-and-forth communications between the architects of Germany’s battle plans.</p><p>Turingery was the codebreakers’ only weapon against Tunny for a year, during which they managed to decrypt 1.5 million letters of ciphertext.</p><p>But everything changed when those helpful lists of names at the start of each message disappeared.</p><p>At the same time, Turingery was becoming less effective. Turing’s method depended on the German sender mistakenly using the same wheel settings to encrypt two differing messages. As security tightened across the Tunny network, the blunder became rarer.</p><p>Fortunately, Tutte had been at work devising a different decryption method, based on Turing’s delta-ing but taking a novel approach.</p><h2>Building the Colossus computer</h2><p>Tutte had found a way of deducing wheel information from ciphertext, with no list of names or blunders by the German operators required. His method made use of statistical properties of the Tunny machine itself.</p><p>At first, it wasn’t clear how to apply his statistical method, however. The Tunny breakers worked by hand. Applying Turingery to a message was like solving a monster <a href="https://sudoku.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sudoku</a> or crossword puzzle.</p><p>Tutte’s statistical method required scads of routine binary math, as well as a colossal amount of counting long binary sequences. If the process were done by hand, one message could take months to decrypt. What was needed was a machine to automate the process.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Black and white portrait of a man with short gelled hair in a suit jacket, tie and eyeglasses. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="18047f2d637a31bb6fad54be52dcce79" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="79d93" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-portrait-of-a-man-with-short-gelled-hair-in-a-suit-jacket-tie-and-eyeglasses.jpg?id=67521153&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Engineer Thomas H. Flowers developed Colossus to break a complex new German cipher.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Pictorial Press/Alamy</small></p><p>The first plan was to build a machine from electromagnetic relays, adding a couple of dozen vacuum tubes to speed up the counting. Electronic tubes were much faster than electromagnetic relays, which had slow-moving metal components. Problems with the circuit design bedeviled the machine’s relay-based logic unit, however.</p><p>Flowers was recommended by Turing and brought in to troubleshoot. He was on loan to Bletchley Park from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Research_Station" target="_blank">Post Office Research Station</a> in London, where he had spent the prewar years designing experimental switching equipment involving thousands of vacuum tubes.</p><p>At the time, it was commonly believed that tubes could not be used in large numbers because each one contained a hot filament. This meant tubes were prone to sudden death. In a large installation, it would not be long before one tube blew and things stopped working properly.</p><p>Flowers discovered that switching tubes on and off stressed them, but leaving them on continuously made them more reliable than relays. He offered to build Bletchley Park a high-speed, all-electronic machine containing around 2,000 tubes.</p><p>Bletchley Park’s advisors rejected the idea, convinced that such a machine would never work reliably. But Flowers, confident of his proposed design, retreated to his London laboratory and quietly built the electronic machine that he believed the codebreakers needed. He and his small team of engineers worked day and night for 10 months to create Colossus.</p><p>In January 1944 some of his engineers showed up at Bletchley Park with the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer packed onto the back of a truck. Colossus was reassembled and functional in about two weeks, and it notched up its first German message on 5 February 1944.</p><p>The machine read the input—Tunny ciphertext—photoelectrically from a large loop of punched paper tape. The output—information about the wheels—went to a primitive printer that Flowers’ engineers had created from a manual typewriter, fitting relays to automate the keys. Once Colossus had cracked enough of the Tunny machine’s wheels, the information was passed on to the hand-breakers, who took over.</p><p>The codebreakers were astonished by Colossus.</p><p>“I don’t think they understood very clearly what I was proposing until they actually had the machine,” Flowers said in a <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102706707/" target="_blank">1977 interview</a>. “They just couldn’t believe it!”</p><p>Colossus was described in almost loving terms in a since-<a href="https://www.alanturing.net/tunny_report" target="_blank">declassified report</a> written at Bletchley Park in 1945:</p><p><em><em>It is regretted that it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work: its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys; the childish pleasure of not-not, span, print main heading and other gadgets; the wizardry of purely mechanical decoding letter by letter (one novice thought she was being hoaxed); the uncanny action of the typewriter in printing the correct scores without and beyond human aid; the stepping of display; periods of eager expectation culminating in the sudden appearance of the longed-for score; and the strange rhythms characterizing every type of run: the stately break-in, the erratic short run, the regularity of wheel-breaking, the stolid rectangle interrupted by the wild leaps of the carriage-return, the frantic chatter of a motor run, even the ludicrous frenzy of hosts of bogus scores.</em></em></p><h2>The demand for more Colossi</h2><p>Bletchley Park’s managers, no longer leery of Flowers’s ideas, soon wanted additional Colossi. He finished building the second one in June 1944, days before D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe. With 2,400 vacuum tubes—around 800 more than in Colossus I—Colossus II processed Tunny messages at an eye-watering speed of 25,000 characters per second.</p><p>Its maximized timing-pulse rate was not far short of the performance of the first <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/company-overview/company-overview.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Intel</a> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/25-microchips-that-shook-the-world" target="_self">microprocessor chip</a> from the 1970s, more than 30 years later.</p><p>Flowers conceded that “Colossus bore about as much resemblance to a modern computer as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephenson%27s_Rocket" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stephenson’s [1829] Rocket locomotive</a> did to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Scot_(train)" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Royal Scot</a>,” a state-of-the-art 20th-century train operating between London and Glasgow. But he emphasized that, nevertheless, Colossus “embodied all the basic features of a modern computer.” In Colossus, Flowers had pioneered clock pulses, bit-stream generators, control circuits, loops, counters, shift registers, interrupts, parallel processing, and more.</p><p>As the Allies slowly fought their way toward Germany, the Colossi poured out wheel information, and the codebreakers provided the military with an unparalleled view of German strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and tactical intentions.</p><p>Even with that mass of detailed intelligence, it took the Allies almost a year to move from Northern France to the German heartland. No one can say for sure how much longer the fighting would have lasted if the intelligence breakthrough had not occurred. But if Colossus and the codebreakers shortened the war even by only six months, the number of lives saved was in the millions.</p><p>There were 10 Colossi at Bletchley Park by the end of the war, housed in two vast, steel-frame, bombproof buildings, running day and night. Although concealed behind a thick veil of secrecy, Bletchley Park accommodated the world’s first electronic computing facility. It was directed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Newman" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Max Newman</a>, the mathematician who mentored Turing in prewar Cambridge.</p><p class="pull-quote">I don’t think they understood very clearly what I was proposing until they actually had the machine. They just couldn’t believe it!”<strong>—Tommy Flowers</strong></p><p>When the fighting ended, authorities decided that ultrasecrecy must be maintained, and orders were issued to break up the Colossi. Only two were spared.</p><p>“All that was left were the deep holes in the floor where the machines had stood,” Colossus operator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Du_Boisson" target="_blank">Dorothy Du Boisson</a> recalled in an interview for the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-breaking-computers/dp/0199578141" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers</em></em></a>. Norman Thurlow, one of Flowers’s engineers who was also interviewed, remembered being told in a staff memo that if the secrecy was ever lifted, he and his colleagues might be able to tell their grandchildren about Colossus and “the tapes that span on silver wheels.”</p><h2>IEEE Milestone dedication at Bletchley Park</h2><p>The Milestone plaque recognizing Colossus is to be displayed outside Block H at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, England.</p><p>The plaque is to read:</p><p><em><em>Six Colossus codebreaking computers operated in this building in 1944–1945. Designed by Thomas H. Flowers of the British Post Office, they enabled deciphering of encrypted radio messages transmitted between German commands across occupied Europe, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. The resulting military intelligence saved countless lives and helped shorten World War II. As the first successful large-scale application of digital electronics to computing, Colossus anticipated subsequent computer developments.</em></em></p><p>The <a href="https://www.ieee-ukandireland.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE United Kingdom and Ireland Section</a> sponsored the nomination.</p><p>Reviewed by the <a href="https://history.ieee.org/about/ieee-history-committee/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE History Committee</a> and awarded by the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Board of Directors</a>, IEEE Milestones recognize outstanding technical developments around the world that are at least 25 years old. The Milestone program is administered by the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/history-center" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE history and heritage group</a>.</p><p>To learn more about historical figures in engineering, IEEE Milestones, and IEEE History Center programs and events, check out our <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/ieee-history" target="_self">IEEE Tech History collection</a>. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/" target="_self"><em><em>IEEE Spectrum</em></em></a> also covers aspects of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/tech-history/" target="_self">tech history</a>.</p>

Jul 21, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/cartoon-digital-genie-emerging-from-a-smartphone-towering-over-a-surprised-user.png?id=67508222&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C104%2C0%2C104"/><br/><br/><p>Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.</p><p>There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to.</p><p>One might think the fix is just to specify tasks, questions, and intent better. But in 1987, in their <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Understanding_Computers_and_Cognition.html?id=6TwbGGSz6NYC" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">seminal book</a> on AI, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores succinctly captured why that won’t work: “Q: Is there any water in the refrigerator? A: Yes. Q: Where? I don’t see it. A: In the cells of the eggplant.” In human language, wants and desires are <a href="https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2021/04/the-coming-ai-hackers.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">always</a><a href="https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> underspecified</a>. It is impossible <a href="https://metarationality.com/reasonable-reference" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">to list</a> all the caveats, all the limitations, all the exceptions.</p><p>So how does anyone communicate, if intent can’t be pinned down? Because a reasonable person can make a reasonable guess. Even though wants and desires are always underspecified, a competent person generally knows enough context to get it right or else knows to ask for clarification. Linguists call this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">pragmatics</a>: Meaning lies in the words and the situation and also in all prior communication, shared culture, and innate human behavior.</p><p class="pull-quote">An AI agent asked for coffee might buy a coffee plantation or order a cup of coffee for delivery in three weeks.</p><p>It doesn’t always work out, of course. Your friend might bring you a hot coffee when you wanted an iced coffee, or an Italian coffee when you wanted a Turkish coffee. The more dissimilar the two people are in age, culture, and background, the more likely the request will be misunderstood in some way.</p><p>This situation has major implications for AI agents that are increasingly being given requests by humans and expected to fulfill them. They have enormous latitude to get it wrong. An AI agent asked for coffee might buy a coffee plantation or order a cup of coffee for delivery in three weeks. Its actions may be recognizable as “getting coffee,” but not remotely what you intended. They’ll think outside the box because they won’t have our conception of the box.</p><h2>When AI Gets Proactive</h2><p>For most of the last decade, when systems like Alexa or Siri misinterpreted a request, it was annoying, not dangerous. Beyond the AI model itself, what has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/16/anthropic-fable-ai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">changed</a> is the harness: the ordinary code that wraps around an AI model, decides when and how to use the model, and controls access to tools like a browser, a low-level command line, or a financial API. Developments in harnesses have turned large-language models that just predict text into AI agents that take actions in the world, without necessarily checking back in before reaching the goal.</p><p>AI researcher Simon Willison <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/fable-is-relentlessly-proactive/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spent two days</a> with Anthropic’s Fable AI, and called it “relentlessly proactive.” For example, he asked it to track down a stray scroll bar in a web app. He came back to find it had opened browsers, written its own screenshot tooling, created its own page to re-create the bug, and stood up a local web server to collect measurements. It found the bug and, along the way, did many surprising things he never asked it to do. And we are seeing similar behavior with all recent AI models when combined with flexible harnesses.</p><p>This kind of behavior could easily go off the rails. Tell an AI agent to book you a flight and, finding the airline’s site says sold out, it might break into the booking database and force a reservation. Ask it to schedule a meeting and it might snoop your password to access your calendar. Tell it to save money on your phone plan and it might cancel the plan outright, or scam someone else into paying the bill.</p><p>Getting precisely what you asked for and bitterly regretting it is one of the oldest hazards from ancient folklore. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">King Midas</a> asked Dionysus for the power to turn everything he touched into gold only to see his bread, wine, and daughter turn to gold. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tithonus</a>, granted the immortality his lover asked for but not the eternal youth she forgot to request, withered into a husk. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer's_Apprentice" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">sorcerer’s apprentice</a> enchanted a broom to fill the cistern, and the broom relentlessly complied until it flooded the house. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem%23Classic_narrative:_The_Golem_of_Prague" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Golem of Prague</a>, shaped from clay to guard its community, guarded it past all reason until someone erased the word on its forehead.</p><p>The most classic of these is a genie, bound to obey and indifferent to whether the wish was wise or well-structured.</p><p><a href="https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2021/04/the-coming-ai-hackers.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Genies are now</a> an engineering problem. We are handing them the keys to our inboxes, bank accounts, code repositories, and physical infrastructure. And we have no agreed-upon ways to measure how genie-like any AI system actually is.</p><h2>Measuring Genie Behavior</h2><p>In economics, the <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-gini-coefficient" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gini coefficient</a> (developed by statistician Corrado Gini) is a measure of the gap between an actual distribution and a perfectly equal one; it’s useful for understanding income inequality and <a href="https://www.fastly.com/blog/using-gini-coefficient-plan-edge-capacity" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">more</a>. Our proposed Genie coefficient measures the gap between what a user asked an AI to do and what the AI actually did.</p><p>Sometimes the AI might do the wrong thing. Like Dionysus, it reads your request literally and returns you a mess you never intended: like a coffee plantation instead of a cup. Asked to deal with all the spam phone calls you’re getting, a Dionysus genie might contact your carrier and change your phone number. Asked to get a refund for a bad toaster, it might draft a legal threat on fake letterhead and send it to the retailer.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Worried person on phone standing in a giant tech-themed digital hand." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="db3740f65edc259576dd476c42f2adae" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="25af1" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/worried-person-on-phone-standing-in-a-giant-tech-themed-digital-hand.png?id=67508233&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Ryan Snook</small></p><p>Other times the AI does exactly the right thing, trampling everything nearby to get there. Like a golem or the sorcerer’s broom, it books your flight by hacking the airline. Or consider a ticket sale for a popular concert, where the ticketing system puts buyers into a virtual waiting room and admits them a few at a time. Asked to buy a ticket, a golem genie might spin up cloud servers to pose as millions of buyers from different addresses, improving your odds of getting a ticket while crowding out other users.</p><p>The two are not opposites, and a single botched task can have both characteristics.</p><p>Genie behavior is not flat-out failure. If you ask the AI for Q3 numbers and get Q2’s, that’s not a genie. Nor is <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-injection-attack" target="_blank">prompt injection</a>: That’s someone tricking the AI into doing something it shouldn’t. Here, the user is trying to work with the AI, and the AI is trying to comply. It’s also not simply a measure of the AI’s success in fulfilling a task. It’s a recognition that how an AI interprets and achieves a goal is as important as whether it achieves a goal.</p><p> Genie behavior isn’t new. Researchers have spent years studying AI systems that “game” their objectives. <a href="https://www.cna.org/analyses/2022/09/goodharts-law" target="_blank">Goodhart’s law</a> says that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure, and it’s long been known that AIs sometimes achieve goals in ways we don’t expect due to reward hacking. Some AI models will accidentally learn that <a href="https://metr.org/blog/2026-06-26-gpt-5-6-sol/" target="_blank">cheating is one way</a> to “win.” More recently, researchers have developing benchmarks for <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qJYMbrabcQqCZ7iqm/impossiblebench-measuring-reward-hacking-in-llm-coding-1" target="_blank">reward hacking</a> in coding agents and for unpredictable behavior in <a href="https://taubench.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">customer support agents</a>, while AI labs conduct their own safety evaluations before model releases. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agents-safety" target="_self">One effort</a> found that AIs under pressure use tools they were told not to use, and this was a case where the rules were made explicit. These are all disparate research directions; nothing yet ties them together.</p><p>This problem falls under the general theme of alignment, a topic that has occupied <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">science fiction</a> writers and AI researchers for decades. At one extreme, the “paper-clip maximizer” thought experiment postulates a superintelligent and powerful AI that is told to maximize paper-clip production and turns the world into paper clips, which is the ultimate golem genie. At a mundane level, AI researchers are working to better design reward functions to ensure that AIs behave well and don’t cheat in the lab. It’s the practical middle ground that remains unbenchmarked: the ordinary AI agent in use today that might take your request and satisfy it the wrong way. We are not at the stage where an AI can focus the world’s production on paper clips, but it might charge a million paper clips to your credit card or hack into a paper-clip company’s network.</p><h2>Building a Genie Benchmark</h2><p>The Genie coefficient is meant for AI agents operating in the real world. It measures their behavior as they perform real tasks long after the model is trained, not just during development. It also recognizes that genie-like behavior is a property of the harness-plus-model system, not the model alone. The harness determines what tools the agent can use, how much autonomy it has, and how proactive it is, and it’s a place we can make real interventions.</p><p>It rests on the same “reasonable person” standard that we use for people. Did the system do what a reasonable person would have taken the request to mean? Answering that requires human judgment.</p><p>If we get the measurement right, it enables things that aren’t possible today, like policies concerning AI behavior. In a courtroom, the concept of<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> mens rea</a>, what someone meant to do, is often as important as what they did. The Genie coefficient suggests an AI analogue, where a user is accountable for the plain intent of what they asked the AI. If an AI system betrays the reasonable meaning of an instruction, that’s the AI’s misbehavior, not the user’s.</p><p>We’ll need multiple benchmarks to measure the Genie coefficient, because genie-like behavior can be domain specific. An AI coding agent may need to be judged on how often it fakes the tests, or swallows errors, or colors outside the lines on its way to a solution. An AI legal agent will need to be judged on how often its output says what you asked but means something you’ll regret. And so on for medical, finance, and other domains of knowledge and expertise.</p><p>Genie benchmarks can be built inside out, each task seeded with a choice that might literally satisfy but that a reasonable person rejects, such as tempting misreadings or unsanctioned shortcuts. The traps in a Genie coefficient benchmark might turn on situational knowledge, the kind of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-injection-attack" target="_blank">context that a reasonable person</a> would bring to the task. Another approach is to give the same request in several different contexts, each with a different reasonable course of action.</p><p class="pull-quote">Getting precisely what you asked for and bitterly regretting it is one of the oldest hazards from ancient folklore.</p><p><span>A Genie benchmark should be permissive and make it genuinely tempting for an AI agent to take unreasonable shortcuts, because it can only find genie behavior when it’s actually possible. Test the AI in a safe, walled-off copy of a real system, with real tools it can misuse and some tasks that can’t be done honestly at all. Make the temptation to cut corners real. Test a diverse array of skills, use cases, and tools, and give the AI system sparse, confusing, or overwhelming context. Include tasks that people have learned, through experience, require human oversight.</span></p><p>How the benchmark is scored matters just as much. Measure Dionysus and golem genies separately and together, based on their worst, not best, behavior. Run the same model inside harnesses that vary its freedom to act, revealing which limits actually keep it in line and should therefore be required in AI harness policies. Weight each failure by the harm it would cause, not just a simple count. And don’t measure genie behavior in isolation: A model could otherwise earn a perfect score by stalling, refusing, or drowning the user in clarifying questions without ever doing the job. The first versions of these benchmarks will be crude, but that’s how benchmarks always start.</p><p>We have built genies. We have handed them our data and credentials. We made them relentless, creative, and indifferent to the gap between what we tell them and what we mean. The least we can do, before they are booking our flights, running our infrastructure, and signing contracts unsupervised, is to measure how often they betray us.</p>

Jul 20, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-group-of-university-student-volunteers-posing-together-in-matching-tee-shirts.jpg?id=67499901&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>Roughly half the world’s population is female, but the STEM fields don’t reflect that. The <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000389406" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2024 U.N. Global Education Monitoring Report on gender</a> found that about 35 percent of STEM college graduates were women. The proportion hasn’t increased much in more than a decade.</p><p>When it comes to STEM careers, the percentage is even lower. Women made up about <a href="https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2024/in-full/key-findings-e7709cd964/#key-findings-e7709cd964" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">28 percent of the global STEM workforce</a> in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum.</p><p>There are <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9628581/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">myriad factors</a> for the discrepancy, including a lack of family support, some teachers encouraging only boys to pursue STEM subjects, and a shortage of female <a data-linked-post="2656776956" href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/moms-in-stem-role-models" target="_blank">role models</a>.</p><h3></h3><br/><div class="rblad-ieee_in_content"></div><p>But one force is at play long before college majors are ever considered: limited access to STEM-focused <a data-linked-post="2655317713" href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-educational-resources-for-kids" target="_blank">educational resources</a> for preuniversity students. Especially for students in <a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107371" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rural communities</a>, the limited access curtails curiosity in STEM subjects before interest can take root. Although the lack of opportunity impacts boys and girls alike, when combined with other factors it can have an outsized effect on girls in some rural regions.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Portrait of an Indian man wearing a dress shirt, tie and glasses." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="46e0324710975930a21727c930fc850a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="ed7ae" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/portrait-of-an-indian-man-wearing-a-dress-shirt-tie-and-glasses.jpg?id=67499915&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi is one of the creators of the Women in Science, Engineering project. He is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Rajiv Joshi</small></p><p> One such place is rural India. The challenges of pursuing a STEM education—or any education at all—increase sharply as rural Indian girls move into their teen years. Social barriers including early marriage, traditional gender roles, and familial expectations for financial support contribute to girls’ <a href="https://www.mahadevmaitri.org/blog/social-barriers-girls-education-india" target="_blank">dropping out of school</a>, according to the <a href="https://www.mahadevmaitri.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mahadev Maitri Foundation</a>, a nongovernment organization focused on childhood education in underdeveloped areas. Dropout rates for girls spike between the ages of 11 to 14, according to the <a href="https://www.mahadevmaitri.org/blog/social-barriers-girls-education-india?__cf_chl_f_tk=e.oZPY_3e6opNqICk8bFKBe_hNC4QoGF4LSofNQQKbw-1783346360-1.0.1.1-JccGtv0jL4WVj_0QTNEzgka7.NmvmGGoWE29SjsxF3Q" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">foundation</a>.</p><p>The trend is something IEEE Fellow <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajiv-joshi-90088264/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rajiv Joshi</a> and IEEE Senior Member <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeshzele/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rajesh Zele</a> want to change. A shared passion to keep rural Indian girls from dropping out of school and on paths to STEM careers led them to launch the <a href="https://wiseapp.in" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Women in Science, Engineering</a> (WiSE) project.</p><p>“Talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Joshi says. “WiSE is one way to expand opportunities.”</p><h2>Bringing the WiSE vision to life</h2><p>Joshi, vice president of industry for the <a href="https://ieee-cas.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Circuits and Systems Society</a> (CASS), is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM <a href="https://research.ibm.com/labs/yorktown-heights" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Watson Research Center</a>, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Zele is a professor of electrical engineering at the <a href="https://www.iitb.ac.in" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Indian Institute of Technology Bombay</a> (IIT-B), in suburban Mumbai.</p><p>They presented their proposal for the three-year initiative to the society’s <a href="https://ieee-cas.org/committee/board-governors" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">board of governors</a> in 2022 and received a grant of US $80,000.</p><h2>The framework</h2><p>WiSE was a five-day, hands-on learning program held on the IIT-B campus. Starting in 2023, it ran for three years and was held during the last week of March. A new cohort of 160 to 200 girls from rural and tribal areas in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka attended each year.</p><p>The event was divided into two parts: hands-on learning through Break-Make-Program (BMP) experiences and presentations by influential female Indian role models.</p><p>Zele, project manager <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/arti-auti-63b231277/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Arti Auti</a>, several IIT-B faculty members, and about 70 student volunteers from the institute oversaw the program.</p><h2>Selecting the first cohort</h2><p>With funding secured, Zele and his team on the ground in India got busy selecting attendees for the inaugural 2023 class. They reached out to administrators at 68 schools in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Although the two states are among the most urbanized in the country, each has vast rural areas where educating teen girls competes with early marriage and familial support pressure.</p><p>Teachers identified girls with high scores in mathematics and science, and community leaders recommended students who could benefit from the program.</p><p>Then outreach to their parents began. The adults were required to commit their own time, not just grant permission for their daughters to attend. They participated in quarterly online meetings that included the girls’ teachers, IIT-B student mentors, and other program volunteers after the week concluded. The check-ins held parents accountable for supporting their daughters’ continuing school attendance. The commitment to join the meetings was to last for at least four years after their daughter’s program participation ended.</p><h2>Hands-on learning is key</h2><p>Participants stayed in one of the institute’s dormitories for the week and attended sessions held Monday through Friday.</p><p>They worked together in small teams to build things rooted in STEM concepts. The teams were supervised by Arti, IIT-B faculty, and student volunteers.</p><p>“The idea behind BMP,” Joshi says, “was to give the girls an opportunity to take a gadget apart, then rebuild it, perfect it, or come up with a totally new idea.”</p><p>The sessions included working with <a href="https://wiseapp.in/2k25/activities/glowing-bacteria" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bioluminescence and bacteria</a> (introducing participants to biology and microbiology), learning about <a href="https://wiseapp.in/2k25/activities/matsya" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">autonomous underwater vehicles</a>, and building a remote-controlled <a href="https://wiseapp.in/2k25/activities/wise-rover/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">robot</a>. The robot construction was the capstone event, allowing the girls to combine the mechanical and electronics engineering skills they’d practiced throughout the week.</p><p>The build kits were created by students in Zele’s <a href="https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/web/labs/advanced-integrated-circuits-and-systems-lab-aicas-lab/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Advanced Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab</a>. The girls and teachers were allowed to take the kits home to keep the learning going and spread STEM awareness.</p><p>“Many girls used those kits at different events to demonstrate their STEM skills to others,” Joshi says. One was Sushi Pawar, who built a drone during WiSE, then went on to demonstrate it to a national audience.</p><p>“I presented the drone project in 2024 to <a href="https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Prime Minister Narendra Modi</a> during the <a href="https://innovateindia.mygov.in/ppc-2024/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pariksha Pe Charcha</a>,” Pawar says. That initiative is an annual event open for students in classes 6 to 12, their teachers, and parents. The focus is on helping students manage stress during exam time through fun and celebratory activities. The event is supported by the <a href="https://www.education.gov.in" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Indian Ministry of Education</a> and hosted by the prime minister.</p><p>Each year, millions of students complete an online multiple-choice test to qualify to attend in person and meet the prime minister. In 2024 nearly 4,000 participants attended.</p><h2>Inspiration as the foundation</h2><p>WiSE was about more than hands-on learning. It also included daily presentations from “Winspirers”: Indian women who achieved success in their lives or had STEM careers. They included scientists, doctors, military officers, professors, and other women who overcame obstacles.</p><p>The first such speaker was <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/savita-dakle-4b29611a1/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Savita Dakle</a>, a farmer from Maharashtra who dropped out of school after 10th grade, got married, and had two children.</p><p>Despite limited farming knowledge, she learned quickly and built a coalition of 400 female farmers from her village. She taught them how to use mobile phones and social media to share information and resources.</p><p>Today, that coalition has <a href="https://yourstory.com/herstory/2022/04/from-dropping-out-in-class-10-to-bringing-women-farmers-together-facebook-savita-dakle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">more than 1 million members</a> in two online communities. They share tips on market pricing, growing crops, and more.</p><p>Zele says he views Dakle as the ideal Winspirer: someone who built a thriving business with few resources and no academic or professional credentials.</p><p>Dakle mirrors the challenges faced by many program participants, he says, noting that many girls face pressure to leave school early to marry or financially support their family. She is living proof, he says, that no girl’s circumstances define her possibilities.</p><h2>The practical impact of WiSE</h2><p>No empirical data yet exists to measure the project’s success, but feedback from participants shows the program has made a difference. Many from the 2023 cohort remained in school and are now pursuing higher education.</p><p>Participant Tejswini Manoj Patil credits the initiative with boosting her confidence in science and math.</p><p>“Before WiSE,” she says, “I was interested in STEM but felt intimidated by the complexity of the subjects. After participating, my interest shifted from passive curiosity to active confidence. The hands-on projects showed me that I am capable of solving real-world problems.”</p><p>Meeting female role models was important, attendee Ritu Ravindra Patil says, adding: “WiSE completely changed my perspective, and meeting the Winspirers inspired me to aim for higher education.”</p><p>The project opened career perspectives for some.</p><p>“Before WiSE, I wanted to be a doctor,” Pallavi Bharti says. “I believed engineering was very stressful and boring. When I joined the program and explored IIT-B, I was amazed. Everyone was so friendly and supportive, and the passion in students for their work motivated me. All those experiences gave me confidence to take math classes and become an engineer.”</p><h2>What’s next?</h2><p>The initiative ended last year, but the framework it built lives on. Groups with similar goals have adopted parts of the concept, Joshi says.</p><p>The IEEE CASS chapters in Bangalore and Kerala are likely to be among the first to advance the initiative’s ideas, he says.</p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexpjames/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Alex James</a>, an IEEE senior member and founding chair of the <a href="https://cas.ieeekerala.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE CASS Kerala</a> chapter, has adapted the framework for use in his region, Joshi says. James is a professor of AI hardware and a dean at <a href="https://duk.ac.in" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Digital University Kerala</a> in Thiruvananthapuram.</p><p>Joshi guided James as WiSE concepts were implemented.</p><p>IEEE Senior Members <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayesh-tanwani/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Jayesh Tanwani</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/suman-dwivedi-99a83a9/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Suman Dwivedi</a> from the <a href="https://ieee-cas.org/chapter/bangalore-section-chapter" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE CASS Bangalore</a> chapter are likely to bring program concepts into their work, Joshi says.</p><p>Tanwani, chair of the Bangalore chapter, is a system-on-a-chip design engineering manager at <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/homepage.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Intel</a> in Bengaluru. Dwivedi is a senior manager at <a href="https://www.synopsys.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Synopsys</a> in Bengaluru. They are bringing STEM outreach to remote schools in Karnataka.</p><p>Joshi and Zele say they hope to see the concept expand beyond India.</p><p>“We want to spread this across other continents and see how we can integrate WiSE into new or existing initiatives in those places,” Joshi says. He says he has received requests from countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe for information on WiSE.</p><p>Both say awareness and outreach are key things that IEEE CASS chapters around the world are well positioned to support.</p><p>“We want to make a difference in young women’s lives,” Zele says. “It’s all about giving attendees the skills to stand on their own feet and have the information to make good decisions.”</p>

Jul 20, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/zeiss-logo-above-the-slogan-seeing-beyond-on-a-dark-curved-rectangle.png?id=66728517&width=980"/><br/><br/><p>Discover how the ZEISS Crossbeam 750 FIBSEM sets a new benchmark for precise TEM lamella prep, tomography, and advanced nanofabrication. This delivers better resolution, better SNR, larger usable FOV, and shorter acquisition times. Learn how uninterrupted FIB milling will reduce damage and rework, accelerate time to TEM, and increase first pass success—so your FA, yield, and materials teams make faster, confident data driven decisions.</p><p><a href="https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5418459/287E3D5B99470D34C830D69A24B3B207" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Register now for this free webinar!</a></p><hr/><p><span>Join us to discover how the new ZEISS Crossbeam 750 with its see while you mill capability delivers precision and clarity—every time—for demanding FIB-SEM workflows. </span>Designed for extremely challenging TEM lamella preparation, tomography, advanced nanofabrication, and APT‑ready lift‑out, Crossbeam 750 combines a new Gemini 4 SEM objective lens, a double deflector, and a next‑generation scan generator to elevate both image quality and process confidence. You’ll learn how better resolution and better SNR translate into more image detail and shorter acquisition times, while the low‑kV FIB performance enables more precise lamella prep.</p><p>We’ll demonstrate High Dynamic Range (HDR) Mill + SEM—an interwoven SEM/FIB scanning mode that suppresses FIB‑generated background. This enables immediate, clean visual feedback, even during nudging the FIB pattern live while milling . The result: confident endpointing with uninterrupted FIB milling and pristine, metrology‑grade surfaces with the lowest possible sample damage. </p><p><span><span>This session is ideal for semiconductor failure analysists, yield teams and materials scientists seeking faster time‑to‑TEM, higher first‑pass success, and consistent outcomes at low kV. See how Crossbeam 750 empowers you to make earlier stop‑milling decisions, cut rework, and reliably plan turnaround time—so you can move from sample to insight with confidence.</span></span></p><p><span><span></span><a href="https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5418459/287E3D5B99470D34C830D69A24B3B207" target="_blank">Register now for this free webinar!</a></span></p>

Jul 20, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/nighttime-view-of-the-river-thames-with-modern-vauxhall-and-nine-elms-skyscraper-cluster-glowing-in-the-background-and-the-illum.jpg?id=67480571&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image" style="display:none"> <img alt="text" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="60ecbbb10808e9d07d33628282cf144c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="623fc" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/text.png?id=67033315&width=980"/></p><p class="drop-caps"><strong>In the chill of </strong>a London spring night, under overcast skies, iconic Trafalgar Square opens around me. Admiral Nelson rises on his pedestal, the National Gallery rests behind, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields sits nearby. From the 13th century, the site served as the Royal Mews for hawks and then horses. By 1844, it was a public space at the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe height="110px" id="noa-web-audio-player" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=q5m19e&id=https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-light-pollution-night-sky?draft=1&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=1b1b1c&playColor=1b1b1c&progressBgColor=F5F5F5&progressBorderColor=bdbbbb&titleColor=1b1b1c&timeColor=1b1b1c&speedColor=1b1b1c&noaLinkColor=556B7D&noaLinkHighlightColor=FF4B00&feedbackButton=true" style="border: none" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><span>Despite the square’s presence through that grand sweep of history, it’s not why I’m here. My interest is far more specific: I want to find out what happens to spaces like this when artificial light, specifically from light-emitting diodes (LEDs), intrudes. My companion tonight is </span><a href="https://www.lapd.uk/team/simon-thorp/" target="_blank">Simon Thorp</a><span>, a local lighting designer, who crouches in the shadows near Nelson’s spire, light meter in hand. “Two lux,” he reports, “and it’s very comfortable here.” Two lux is 10 to 20 times the illuminance of a full moon. We can see each other clearly, and a nearby sign assures us that closed-circuit television (CCTV) is in operation for safety’s sake.</span></p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="A light designer uses a luxmeter to measure the light intensity emitted by a street lamp." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="51396b2ac3ae7ad4406a24e6d86b6361" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="ecb54" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-light-designer-uses-a-luxmeter-to-measure-the-light-intensity-emitted-by-a-street-lamp.jpg?id=67480621&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>Trafalgar Square captures the relationship between lighting and darkness that exists in almost every city, suburb, small town, and village around the world. The lighting here is a mishmash of old technologies and new, of shadow and glare, the ornamental gas lamps fronting the National Gallery all but washed out by the LEDs inside modern versions of traditional “brass and glass” fixtures a few meters away—21st-century technology housed in 19th-century designs.</p><p>The ugly truth of artificial lighting today is that in parts of London, as in many cities around the world, lighting levels are excessive, with unshielded illumination blasting in all directions. And the irony is that too much light invites danger: It creates shadows, impedes our vision, and gives the illusion, without the reality, of safety. Thorp notes that modern CCTV cameras are “pretty great” even at low-light levels, while harsh light makes it hard for both human eyes and digital sensors to see.</p><p>“The more bad light we add, the more bad light we think we need,” says Thorp. “We can’t see because of the light we’ve added. And it makes areas that were perfectly okay seem darker.”</p><p>Among the costs of this excess, the most alarming may be its toll on human health (and that of other animals) by disrupting circadian rhythms, impeding the production of melatonin, and contributing to sleep disorders that are tied to every major modern disease. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/14/increase-in-led-lighting-risks-harming-human-and-animal-health" target="_blank">New research</a> shows that increased exposure to blue light from LEDs is having “substantial biological impacts” such as suppression of the sleep hormone melatonin and an increased risk for obesity, certain cancers, and type 2 diabetes.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="Panoramic nighttime view from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower looking down the illuminated Champ de Mars gardens toward the \u00c9cole Militaire, with the silhouette of Tour Montparnasse visible in the Paris skyline and the illuminated dome of the H\u00f4tel des Invalides seen lower down and to the Tour\u2019s left." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4279e4e78ad7f9e6dbfdeb3d11dc3757" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="cd9fe" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/panoramic-nighttime-view-from-the-second-floor-of-the-eiffel-tower-looking-down-the-illuminated-champ-de-mars-gardens-toward-the.jpg?id=67480630&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">A panoramic view from the Eiffel Tower looks down the Pont d’Iéna and the Palais de Chaillot [in the center], with the imposing silhouette of the La Défense business district visible on the Parisian skyline.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p>I have come to London and Paris—which led the way in the expansion of public street lighting in the 19th century—because they embody both the current enormity of the problem as well as a future certain to be lit by trillions of chips: controllable, tunable, and energy-efficient LEDs.</p><h2>Living with artificial light at night</h2><p>The standard justification for nighttime illumination is public safety. Lighting experts’ term for the phenomenon is “artificial light at night.” While people won’t often admit it, the desire for light at night seems to stem from a primal fear of the dark. Darkness is where the bad guys hide. And if dark is bad and light is good, then more light can only be better.</p><p>This assumption has guided our use of nighttime light for hundreds of years. And yet, high-lumen output doesn’t necessarily correlate to a reduction in crime, <a href="https://darksky.org/resources/what-is-light-pollution/effects/safety/" target="_blank">research</a> has found. In other words, if we relied on <a href="https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/11/1118" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the data</a> as much as we do our primal anxieties and paused those anxieties long enough to learn how light and darkness interact, our nights would almost certainly be lighted differently—especially now that we have the extraordinary technology that is the light-emitting diode.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="A 19th-century gas lamp illuminates a pedestrian walkway in Trafalgar Square, with the National Gallery facade lit by architectural floodlighting in the background." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4c99d2a691f81fc03d58ec64e6028d71" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="8ebbd" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-19th-century-gas-lamp-illuminates-a-pedestrian-walkway-in-trafalgar-square-with-the-national-gallery-facade-lit-by-architectu.jpg?id=67500046&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">A 19th-century gas lamp [white square] manufactured by William Sugg & Co. next to a pedestrian path in Trafalgar Square, along with the architectural floodlighting on the neoclassical facade of the National Gallery, showcase the interplay between modern and historic lighting systems.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/red-hot" target="_self">The first visible red light-emitting diode was invented by Nick Holonyak in 1962</a>, but LED lighting technology took several<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-leds-dark-secret" target="_self"> decades to develop, </a>before exploding in recent years. Just a decade ago, LED streetlamps were rare. By 2019, more than half of U.S. streetlights were LEDs, and that number is predicted to top 90 percent by 2030. Similar uptake has occurred around the world, even in developing countries, where inexpensive Chinese-made LED fixtures are increasingly common.</p><p>This rapid global migration to LEDs represents a shift in the fundamental physics of how we illuminate our world. From oil lamps and candles to gas lamps, early examples of artificial light at night relied on a burning wick, an incredibly inefficient way to create light. An incandescent bulb is effectively a heater that happens to produce light as a by-product, so it squanders nearly all of its energy as heat.</p><p>By contrast, LEDs use semiconductors to convert electricity into light. Through this process of electroluminescence, LEDs use up to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/glaring-problem-how-led-lights-worsen-light-pollution/" target="_blank">90 percent less energy</a> than incandescent bulbs do, which has enabled municipalities to realize an immediate <a href="https://www.ubicquia.com/blog/creating-safer-greener-communities-using-led-streetlights" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">energy savings of 50 percent or more</a>. This fact alone has fueled the technology’s worldwide adoption.</p><p>But LEDs aren’t just more efficient and less expensive. The use of solid-state technology gives the lights an extraordinary life-span, often measured in decades rather than years. This significantly lowers the maintenance costs, as city workers spend far fewer hours replacing broken or burned-out lights. Even more striking, by manipulating the properties of the semiconductor material, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/yellow-led-inventor" target="_self">engineers can dictate the precise color </a>and intensity of the output, something that gives LEDs incredible versatility. For a lighting designer like Thorp, LEDs offer countless possibilities.</p><h2>Digital control for smarter lighting</h2><p>Wandering from Trafalgar Square along the edge of St. James’s Park, Thorp and I find ourselves near Westminster Bridge, one of nine city bridges that in 2021 were part of the <a href="https://www.illuminatedriver.london/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Illuminated River project, </a>meant to make the Thames more beautiful at night. Each bridge now features a new LED lighting scheme that moves and changes color and intensity to create a coordinated work of art. But Thorp is frustrated that the project did nothing to correct the often glary lighting on the riverbanks. “Why don’t you pay the money to correct all of this bad lighting instead of adding new lighting?” he says. LED technology, he points out, has the potential to fix that problem.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="The Blackfriars Bridge arches are illuminated in shifting blue and magenta gradients, with the curved silhouette of One Blackfriars and Southwark skyline visible across the Thames at night." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="046d7a5f8d3c6bf63b14b04c0d725246" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="eaeb5" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-blackfriars-bridge-arches-are-illuminated-in-shifting-blue-and-magenta-gradients-with-the-curved-silhouette-of-one-blackfri.jpg?id=67481252&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">The Illuminated River artwork for Blackfriars Bridge uses a color scheme that closely complements the red pillar supports that remain from the original Blackfriars Railway Bridge.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p>In fact, this may be the most meaningful potential of LEDs: the ability for a community to control when, where, at what levels, and in which colors its lights shine. A public space like Trafalgar Square could be lit more brightly during rush hour, then dimmed as the night progresses, the lights not only connected to one another but to the surrounding streetlights and commercial lights. Anywhere in the world, LED streetlights could be programmed to rise and fall in brightness depending on the time of night or time of year. They could even be turned off during bird migrations, to reduce the number of birds that are disoriented by the lights and ultimately killed in collisions with reflective and illuminated windows.</p><p>Up to now, LED public lighting has largely not been part of any comprehensive plan to curtail and control nighttime illumination. Most LED installations have simply replaced older, inefficient “dumb” electric lighting with newer “dumb” LEDs and thus made light pollution worse. The main reason? Because LED lighting is cheaper, we tend to use more of it—a literally shining example of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" target="_blank">Jevons paradox</a>. Even as awareness of light pollution grows, we aren’t yet taking advantage of LED technology’s full potential.</p><p>The good news is that we could start tonight. At <a href="https://darksky.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DarkSky International,</a> the world’s foremost organization fighting light pollution, CEO and executive director Ruskin Hartley tells me the organization has five principles for responsible outdoor lighting: It should be useful, targeted, low level, controlled, and warm-colored. “They’re enabled because of the capabilities of LEDs,” Hartley says.</p><p>The technology to control LEDs will be part of the solution. In the olden days of the analog era, a streetlight was either on or off. To change a lighting schedule, you had to physically rewire a circuit. Today, the <a href="https://www.dali-alliance.org/dali/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI) protocol</a> turns each luminaire into part of a network, with its own digital address and a driver that reports to a central server. With DALI, the lighting is managed through software rather than physical switches.</p><p>Unfortunately, most LED streetlights have been deployed without this technology because it costs more. But Paul Drosihn, general manager of the <a href="https://www.dali-alliance.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DALI Alliance,</a> says that using such controls makes the LEDs much easier to maintain. Before the new digital protocol, it took an average of nearly three visits to identify, diagnose, and repair a defective luminaire. “Now it’s one,” Drosihn says. “Saving the cost of sending two guys on a cherry picker to replace those [lights] is immeasurable. What I just described to you is pretty much all the utilities need to know.”</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="The cast-iron understructure of Westminster Bridge at night glows in vibrant green and teal light." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fd1ed0bda19596f0314b0d4a0e2f5b97" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="85f08" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-cast-iron-understructure-of-westminster-bridge-at-night-glows-in-vibrant-green-and-teal-light.jpg?id=67480659&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">The intricate cast-iron understructure of Westminster Bridge glows in vibrant green and teal light as part of the Illuminated River public art project, a color palette selected to echo the green benches of the nearby House of Commons.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p>What’s more, DALI allows the tuning of the lights’ spectrum so that they become warmer and less disruptive as the night progresses. Digitally connected, full-spectrum luminaires allow cities to transform the nocturnal experience—saving money, increasing health and safety, and creating a warmer and more appealing atmosphere at night.</p><p>This digital intelligence is equally transformative for the “bleed lighting” that spills from building interiors, Drosihn says. “You don’t think of night lighting as coming from inside buildings, but it does,” he says. “Particularly in the States, you drive through any major city and all the lights are on, on every floor of every high-rise, even if no one is home.”</p><p>Already, the use of digital controls for interior lighting has become commonplace in some European cities, Drosihn says. <a href="https://www.ledlightexpert.com/dali-lighting-controls-and-dali-lights" target="_blank">By integrating DALI with occupancy sensors and building-management systems</a> that monitor HVAC, electrical systems, and security networks, a skyscraper can become a dynamic participant in the urban environment—dropping a floor’s interior lights to zero the moment the last person leaves. As a result, electronic controls combined with LEDs can act like a dimmer switch for a city’s entire skyline.</p><h2>White light blights the night</h2><p>With all the possibilities from LED technology, why are our nights too often lit with harsh and clinical light, casting glare and creating shadows, disrupting human and ecological health, erasing the stars from our skies? The answer starts with the color of LEDs. At first glance, an LED streetlight looks like a collection of small white bulbs, but it’s not. To produce a light we perceive as white, most manufacturers coat a blue semiconductor core with a yellow phosphor material that absorbs a portion of that high-energy blue light. The problem is that this “white” light is still heavily blue, which is exactly the color no species has evolved to expect at night.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="Three lanterns glow white in the night." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4561fb7874f8436491eb1009fa2399bc" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="976e1" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/three-lanterns-glow-white-in-the-night.jpg?id=67480670&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>And because blue light is the second most energetic part of the visible spectrum (violet is the most), it doesn’t just illuminate our streets and invade our homes. Blue light also scatters in the atmosphere more easily than any other color, which helps to create the hazy, illuminated fog known as sky glow over every city of any size.</p><p>“Cooler” colored LEDs in the 4,000- to 6,500-kelvin range offer the most lumens at the lowest cost, so most early adopters installed these <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighborhoods-the-blues" target="_self">blue-rich white lights</a>. The good news is that LED technology has continued to advance, and a growing number of communities are choosing warmer-colored streetlights that have less blue. (Phoenix, for example, converted 100,000 streetlamps to 2,700 K LEDs in 2020.) And, of course, light pollution isn’t just a result of LEDs. Older lighting technology also adds to the glare—bright white metal-halide lights, especially—and cities are loath to replace something that isn’t yet broken.</p><p>But our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light. As a result, we have largely offset the gains that were promised in terms of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions by making light pollution worse, and have so far let an incredible opportunity go unrealized.</p><h2>Can the City of Light do it right?</h2><p>Across the Channel in Paris, the failure to realize the potential of LEDs feels even more palpable. Unlike London, which suffered heavily from German bombs, the lovely 19th-century Paris that Baron Haussmann created largely escaped destruction in World War II. To nearly 50 million annual tourists, the beautiful uniformity of the architecture is instantly recognizable. But the City of Light’s nocturnal atmosphere is also part of the draw, and extensive attention has been given to relighting its buildings and monuments. When I wander into the Cour Carrée in the Louvre, for example, I’m stunned by rows of amber LEDs that together create a warm glow along the palace facades. When I see the Eiffel Tower, first from a distance walking along the Seine and then up close, I find myself staring as I would at a campfire, the structure’s metalwork amber-lit with more than 336 high-pressure sodium bulbs.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="The Eiffel Tower glows with warm golden illumination at night." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6a4e888381b881d25a56cd158c2fe93f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="4fbf9" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-eiffel-tower-glows-with-warm-golden-illumination-at-night.jpg?id=67481746&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>Still, the city’s night lighting is far from perfect. With millions of residents, thousands of stores and restaurants, and 300,000 streetlights, the city overall is among the world’s brightest. Even at the base of the Tower, bright white LED lamps illuminate the African émigrés selling cheap berets and Eiffel Tower trinkets. And the city has been replacing its old sodium streetlights with new LEDs, swapping the warm yellow tones for which the city has long been known for bright white lamps no one wants to look at.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, street vendors display souvenirs, lit by harsh cold-white LED fixtures." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9b8adab8718d2fb483dd9d77dcc2efcb" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="e4691" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/at-the-foot-of-the-eiffel-tower-street-vendors-display-souvenirs-lit-by-harsh-cold-white-led-fixtures.jpg?id=67480685&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">Street vendors display souvenirs at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Their merchandise is lit by harsh white LED systems, which starkly contrast with the warm golden sodium-vapor light illuminating the tower above.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p>Nonetheless, the potential is here. In 2019, France introduced a nationwide law to reduce levels of light pollution, setting rules about both public lighting (preventing light from being projected above the horizontal) and private lighting such as stores, which are required to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/30/lights-out-france-shops-offices" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">turn off their exterior and shop window lights after 1 a.m</a>. In addition, an increasing number of French communities dim or turn off municipal lights after midnight to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. Although light pollution worldwide continues to increase by <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">nearly 10 percent per year</a>, France has managed to reduce its overall level. <a href="https://pastel.hal.science/tel-05437768v1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chloé Beaudet</a>, a researcher at Université Paris-Saclay, documented local light-reduction measures and found people generally agreed with the notion of dimming or turning off the lights, mainly for energy savings and ecological concerns.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="A researcher stands on the Pont de l'Archev\u00each\u00e9 (Archbishop's Bridge) observing the Notre-Dame cathedral at night." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="be73e55de2fa43c52a5889c635ee9cf5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="6565b" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-researcher-stands-on-the-pont-de-l-archev-u00each-u00e9-archbishop-s-bridge-observing-the-notre-dame-cathedral-at-night.jpg?id=67480689&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>“What I find is that people living in urban areas, they accept this kind of policy,” she tells me. “They’re like, okay, I don’t really use public space at night as a pedestrian, so what’s the point of having lights on?” For her, a key takeaway is that one lighting level does not fit all areas. “I think there is really a need for policy that is differentiated according to the neighborhood.”</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="The west facade of the Notre-Dame cathedral glows at night following restoration, with warm white architectural LED lighting illuminating the three monumental portals, rose window, and twin towers." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f2f1db3921d1d81989461ac1c32d8216" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="255bf" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-west-facade-of-the-notre-dame-cathedral-glows-at-night-following-restoration-with-warm-white-architectural-led-lighting-ill.jpg?id=67480694&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>In another positive development, the country has been minimizing artificial light to create ecological corridors designed to protect nocturnal species such as birds, bats, and insects. These corridors are connected and dark, mitigating the disruption to the 30 percent of vertebrates and more than 60 percent of invertebrates that are nocturnal. Even for city dwellers, this <em>trame noire</em> (“dark infrastructure”) helps to raise awareness of why controlling light pollution is important for life on Earth. Nationwide laws to control light pollution, the ability to light different parts of a city differently, dark corridors to protect biodiversity—these are exactly the kind of changes made possible with LEDs.</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="The I.M. Pei Pyramid seen at night glows brilliantly at the center of the Cour Napol\u00e9on at the Louvre Museum." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="06af5e6e65501ec16f31f06f25143cbf" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="500ac" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-i-m-pei-pyramid-seen-at-night-glows-brilliantly-at-the-center-of-the-cour-napol-u00e9on-at-the-louvre-museum.jpg?id=67481229&width=980"/><p class="hide-on-mobile">The iconic I.M. Pei Pyramid glows softly at the center of the Cour Napoléon at the Louvre Museum, its warm LED illumination flowing through the geometric glass-and-metal structure with a symmetrical framing of the surrounding historic pavilions against the night sky.</p><p class="caption hide-on-mobile">Luigi Avantaggiato</p><h3></h3><br/><p>That’s not all. Almost until 1920, astronomers at the Paris Observatory were still gazing at the Milky Way. That’s impossible nowadays, but it could happen again. Despite the bright white LED streetlights now lining so many Paris streets, networks of LEDs using controls could lower lighting levels enough each night, so that the Milky Way could once again be visible over the French capital. And in the process, Paris could become the City of Light in ways that would set an example for other parts of the world.</p><h2>New lighting demands new thinking</h2><p>“I think we should aspire to have cities that see the stars,” Simon Thorp says when I mention this view of Paris. “You just need everything to be coordinated.”</p><p>Nearing the end of our London walk, having turned from the river and back up toward the Strand, Thorp brings me down narrow Carting Lane behind the Savoy Hotel, to where a gas fixture tops a thick lamppost, an original from 1870. A small plaque reads, “The last remaining sewer gas destructor lamp in the city of Westminster.” Thorp explains that the thick pole hides a tube that allowed methane from the sewers to get burned off at the mantle. “An early example of renewable energy,” he jokes.</p><p>The fire-orange flame is pleasing to the eye. But even here, on a narrow lane with no vehicle traffic, in a touristy area of the city, the flame is overwhelmed by a nearby, unshielded LED security light. Thorp shakes his head. “It’s stunning that someone could put in a light like that and think, ‘Great, nice job.’”</p><h3></h3><br/><img alt="Two tourists observe the faint flame of the historic Webb Patent Sewer Gas Lamp on Carting Lane, with bright white LED lighting from modern fixtures nearby." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="08504c0dc8cd5982603aa8433f2c25be" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="d3828" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/two-tourists-observe-the-faint-flame-of-the-historic-webb-patent-sewer-gas-lamp-on-carting-lane-with-bright-white-led-lighting.jpg?id=67480701&width=980"/><h3></h3><br/><p>Here is the crux of contemporary artificial lighting at night. We know how to light well, and LEDs give us the ability to do so. But while our technology is 21st century, too often our thinking about light and darkness, safety and security, is stuck in the past. We could be doing so much more with this technology than we are. We could relight our nights in ways that would not only reduce energy and maintenance costs but also bring a slew of benefits, including healthier nights for humans, safer skies for nocturnal creatures, and a restoration of the stars.</p><p>In 2026, the tale of these two cities and their artificial light at night is that of a brilliant technology that we’ve engineered but haven’t yet learned to master. In short, we have yet to change the way we think about artificial light at night and to use it more thoughtfully and carefully—as we might, as one hopes we will. <span class="ieee-end-mark"></span></p><p class=""><em>This article appears in the August 2026 print issue as “The Wrong Way To Light a City.”</em></p>

Jul 17, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-young-woman-with-blonde-hair-softly-smiling-next-to-a-pair-of-collaborative-robot-arms.jpg?id=67499761&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C157"/><br/><br/><p>Like many engineers, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahdownsprofile" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sarah Downs</a> says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/robotics/" target="_self">robotics</a> through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s <a href="https://www.firstlegoleague.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">First Lego League</a> team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.</p><p>Watching <a href="https://www.pbs.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PBS</a> specials on <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NASA</a> Mars rovers <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mars-for-the-rest-of-us" target="_self"><em><em>Spirit</em></em></a><em> </em>and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-opportunity-celebrates-10-years-on-mars" target="_self"><em><em>Opportunity</em></em></a>, and seeing the live broadcast of the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/if-necessary-mars-rover-curiosity-could-rip-its-own-wheels-off-to-stay-mobile" target="_self"><em><em>Curiosity</em></em></a> rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.</p><h3>Sarah Downs</h3><br/><p><strong>MEMBER GRADE</strong></p><p>Graduate student member</p><p><strong>UNIVERSITY </strong></p><p>Texas A&M University in College Station</p><p><strong>MAJOR </strong></p><p>Electric engineering</p><h3></h3><br/><p>This year the IEEE graduate student member achieved that dream. For her final project as a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering at the <a href="https://utulsa.edu/" target="_blank">University of Tulsa</a>, she worked on an algorithm in collaboration with NASA and the U.S. <a href="https://www.airforce.com/en" target="_blank">Air Force</a>.</p><p>The algorithm she developed enables a robot assembling satellites in space to insert an antenna into the correct spot, addressing robotics’s classic peg-in-hole problem of inserting an object into its corresponding hole.</p><p>Now a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at <a href="https://www.tamu.edu/index.html" target="_blank">Texas A&M University</a> in College Station, Downs is continuing her research on satellite assembly and manipulation “but on a much larger scale,” she says.</p><h2>Following a childhood passion</h2><p>Downs grew up in the Tulsa area. Her father, who died from a heart attack in 2015 when she was 13, was a safety advisor in the oil and gas industry. Her mother stayed home to take care of her brother, who has autism. After her father died, her mother went back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in business so she could support the family.</p><p>“We didn’t have much income, and my mom was always worried about money,” Downs says. “That made me more aware of having a successful career, in a monetary sense.”</p><p>From then on, whenever she considered her future career, having a decent salary to support the family was high on her list.</p><p>By pursuing a career in robotics, she says, she can follow her passion while obtaining financial security.</p><p>In high school, Downs joined the <a href="https://www.firstinspires.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">First</a> robotics club, where she found herself drawn to the electrical components used in the machines she and her classmates built.</p><p>During her final two years of high school, she participated in an <a href="https://tulsatech.edu/full-time-programs/science-technology-engineering-and-mathematics/pre-engineering/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">extension program</a> at <a href="https://tulsatech.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tulsa Tech</a>, a training school. She spent half her day in high school classes and the other half taking engineering courses at the vocational school.</p><p>After graduating in 2020, she accepted scholarships to attend the University of Tulsa. She began her freshman year at UTulsa not knowing whether she wanted to major in electrical or mechanical engineering, she says, adding that her love of working with small systems helped her choose EE.</p><p>For her <a href="https://utulsa.edu/news/celebrating-student-innovation-tus-role-in-tasms-new-exhibits/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">senior year capstone project</a>, she and two of her classmates designed a lunar lander exhibit for the <a href="https://www.tulsamuseum.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tulsa Air and Space Museum</a>. They created an interactive game that simulates missions on lunar and martian surfaces. Four celestial bodies—the moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan—are listed across three computer monitors. Using a game controller, museum visitors can explore the virtual surface of each one. The <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7207091982790266880/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exhibit</a> is still on display.</p><p>Downs earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2024 and continued her education at the university’s EE master’s degree program.</p><h2>Both more and less complicated than people think</h2><p>When Downs began her graduate studies, she was supposed to be part of a NASA robotics project for two years. But when a delay in government funding postponed the project’s start, she instead spent her first year in the school’s <a href="https://utulsa.edu/research/robotics-institute/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Institute for Robotics and Autonomy</a>, then newly launched. Its main focus is developing robots to assist people who have mobility challenges.</p><p>Inspired by her grandmother, who was wheelchair-bound due to severe arthritis, Downs developed a robotic arm that helps older people and wheelchair users live independently. The arm was able to identify and place objects in the appropriate locations inside the home, such as unloading certain groceries from a shopping bag and placing them on a shelf or in separate containers.</p><p>Before the start of her sophomore year in 2025, the NASA project finally secured government funding. She developed a robot that achieves the peg-in-hole task without using any vision systems. Typically, cameras help guide robots’ satellite-assembly work. But in the harsh, remote environment of outer space, cameras might malfunction or encounter delays.</p><h3></h3><br/><p>“Don’t stop asking questions. Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.”</p><h3></h3><br/><p>Rather than using cameras, Downs’s robotic arm deploys a force-based insertion process to sense position and orientation of objects in the arm’s environment. The robot loosely grips an antenna and, with a torque sensor on its gripper, “feels” the force feedback of where the satellite and antenna are in relation to each other. The robot then guides the antenna assembly into a target opening on its satellite and maintains the position during adhesion.</p><p>Adding to the complexity, the robot performs its task in zero gravity.</p><p>“Without gravity, you now have to consider the arm’s reaction torques on the satellite to avoid flinging it into space,” Downs says. Any motion from the arm during the insertion process, especially from increased forces, could cause the satellite to continue movement in that direction.</p><p>To combat that, Downs is performing calculations for the project to direct targeted reverse thrusts and counter the force of the robot’s motions.</p><p>Her graduate project captures the simple yet complex nature of robotics that she finds fascinating, she says.</p><p>“I think robots are both more and also less complicated than people think,” she says. “Really, all you need to start programming a robot is its <a href="https://www.universal-robots.com/developer/hardware-and-motion/robot-motion-dh-parameters/" target="_blank">Denavit-Hartenberg parameters</a>, and you can do a lot with that,” she says, referencing the four values used to describe the position and orientation of a robotic arm and manipulators. Even with different grippers and degrees of freedom, “fundamentally, all robot manipulators start there,” she says.</p><p>“But,” she adds, “we’re still learning so much about how robots interact with their environment. Even something simple to us, like manipulating a pen, is still incredibly complex for robots.”</p><p>Downs is completing her doctoral thesis in the <a href="https://rad.engr.tamu.edu/robotic-space-simulator/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Robotic Space Simulator</a> project at Texas A&M’s <a href="https://rad.engr.tamu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab</a>, which specializes in developing machines that can survive in extreme environments. It collaborates with NASA.</p><p>Her thesis advisor is <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-punch-out" target="_self">Robert Ambrose</a>, a NASA veteran who launched the RAD Lab in 2022. The IEEE member is set to serve as associate director of the school’s Space Institute, due to open this year in Houston. The research facility is being built next to the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Johnson Space Center</a>.</p><p>After earning her Ph.D., Downs says, she hopes to one day work for NASA, developing rovers that collect samples from Mars or robotic arms that perform tasks on space stations.</p><p>To learn more about robots, check out <em>IEEE Spectrum</em>’s <a href="https://robotsguide.com/about" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">guide</a>.</p><h2>Getting out of the engineering bubble</h2><p>Downs joined <a href="https://www.ieee.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE</a> in 2020 as a freshman at UTulsa to get more involved in electrical engineering events on campus. At the time, the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/covid-19" target="_self">COVID-19 pandemic</a> kept clubs and organizations from meeting in person.</p><p>She was active in her school’s <a href="https://utulsa.edu/academics/engineering-computer-science/academics/departments/electrical-computer-engineering/institute-of-electronics-and-electrical-engineers-ieee/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE student branch</a> and was elected as its 2022–2024 president. Under her leadership, the branch went from having a few events to hosting one every two weeks.</p><p>They included lunch-and-learn sessions and dinners that connected students with professional engineers and the university’s alumni. Downs also organized hands-on workshops on soldering, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/lunar-base-3d-printing" target="_self">3D printing</a>, CAD modeling, and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/be-a-polarizing-job-seeker" target="_self">résumé-building</a>.</p><p>Her efforts helped increase the branch’s executive board membership from roughly five students to 25 in 2023. The same year, her soldering workshop attracted about 80 students.</p><p>She says she enjoyed working with IEEE, especially “engaging with alumni and learning from engineers.”</p><p>IEEE is a great resource for networking opportunities, she says, noting that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering students stayed in their bubbles.” IEEE events helped the students make connections that could serve them well, she says.</p><p>“Networking is very important, especially in today’s tough job market,” she says. “It’s a lot about who you know and how people observe your work ethic.”</p><p>Downs, who now serves as an IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, says she has seen firsthand how the school’s student branch network has benefited its student members.</p><p>“A lot of them have found jobs” because of IEEE, she says.</p><h3>The working and networking of an engineer</h3><br/><p>As the IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, Downs noticed that many engineering undergraduates finish college without any <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/hands-on-projects-career-advice" target="_self">hands-on experience</a>, whether it be a project or an internship.</p><p>“Their résumés are very sparse, and they have no proof of their technical skills,” she says. She herself completed a facilities engineering internship at <a href="https://flytulsa.com/" target="_blank">Tulsa International Airport</a>’s <a href="https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChsSEwiakeLTiIqVAxWRzsIEHX4aO3UYACICCAEQABoCcHY&ae=2&co=1&ase=2&gclid=CjwKCAjwxb7RBhA5EiwAQ-AAdIuO_CE21RKvxNvZKxWXCYpo9d0-vpx3D3XClr2XRTWwP13SUuMbKhoCzuIQAvD_BwE&ei=RV4waqKnFs-G0PEPpMyjoAg&cid=CAASZuRoVbgIgx56926ScONp0UCppyfOxCgiUjlNwIYIyRNwiPfCRnB-35o-3qx5zfez3l5RTJDkwOw_SW-pvC4ORqwKrbj2g4yojyTEu490Veitl0o0gJG9sB38UMie-GYDrIURjI2CPw&cce=2&category=acrcp_v1_71&sig=AOD64_2LzW3O1QygURf8h7S57YqN5jIk3A&q&sqi=2&nis=4&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwji3dfTiIqVAxVPAzQIHSTmCIQQ0Qx6BAgNEAE" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">American Airlines</a> maintenance facility after her sophomore year of college. And she was an electrical engineering intern at <a href="https://www.flightsafety.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Flight Safety International</a> outside Tulsa after her junior year and after she graduated. The company designs, builds, and maintains its own flight simulators.</p><p>Her advice to undergraduates is to hone and demonstrate both their hard and soft skills by working on research projects or even personal passion projects.</p><p>“A <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Raspberry Pi</a> doesn’t cost that much, and you can start working with that immediately,” she says. Students also can take part in engineering interest groups and professional organizations at their school, she adds.</p><p>“Put yourself out there and join a research team,” she says. “It’s a great way to show people that you’re a good person to work with and you’d do a good job in the field.”</p><p>She adds that it’s also a fine way to keep learning—which is what drew her to a field that has developed only within the past century.</p><p>“We’re still constantly learning about robots,” she says.</p><p>“Don’t stop asking questions,” she advises students. “Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.”</p>

Jul 16, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-overhead-drone-photo-shows-an-array-of-closely-placed-fishing-boats-at-sea.jpg?id=67101579&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/><br/><br/><p>In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the vast sea stretching toward Australia, a fishing vessel slightly alters its course while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing ground. Nothing appears unusual on deck. Nets remain in the water. Engines maintain a steady speed. To the crew, it is an ordinary day at sea.</p><p>Yet hundreds of kilometers above, satellites continuously record the vessel’s position. At Indonesia’s Marine and Fisheries Resources Surveillance Station, in Cilacap, where I work, a monitoring platform receives the signal and automatically compares it against fishing permits, designated fishing grounds, vessel characteristics, and historical movement patterns. Within minutes, the system identifies a potential violation. Before any patrol vessel leaves port, before any inspector boards a vessel, and before any warning is issued, we have begun enforcement.</p><p>This transformation reflects a profound shift in maritime governance. The ocean has historically been opaque to regulators. States could only enforce laws where patrol vessels happened to be present. Today, however, integrated systems combining data from vessel monitoring systems (VMS), <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/earth-observation-satellites-small-constellations" target="_blank">satellite remote sensing</a>, geospatial analytics, and increasingly sophisticated data-processing tools are making marine activity visible at an <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao5646" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">unprecedented scale</a>. Global Fishing Watch alone tracks <a href="https://globalfishingwatch.org/research/annual-report-2025/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hundreds of thousands of vessels</a> worldwide, generating a near real-time picture of fishing activity across the world’s oceans.</p><p>Indonesia has emerged as one of the most ambitious examples of this transition. As the world’s largest archipelagic state, managing more than 6 million square kilometers of maritime space, Indonesia faces a challenge familiar to many coastal nations: There are never enough patrol vessels. Digital surveillance is a practical necessity that makes my job possible, even as it creates new challenges.</p><h2>The Law of the Sea Meets Digital Reality</h2><p>The international legal framework governing the oceans was designed in an era when maritime enforcement depended almost entirely on physical presence. The <a href="https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982,</a> assumes that states exercise authority through patrols, inspections, vessel boardings, and direct observation.</p><p>For countries with extensive coastlines and limited enforcement resources, this model has always faced practical constraints. Indonesia’s Fisheries Management Areas (WPP-NRI) span waters ranging from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and from the Strait of Malacca to the maritime boundaries adjacent to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Monitoring such a vast domain solely through patrol operations is both expensive and operationally impossible.</p><p>Beginning in the late 2010s, Indonesia accelerated the integration of satellite-based monitoring into fisheries enforcement. Vessel monitoring systems became a cornerstone of this strategy. By early 2026, a total of <a href="https://ppid.kkp.go.id/upt/pelabuhan-perikanan-samudera-kendari/news/detail/9394-kapal-perikanan-sudah-pasang-vms/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">9,394 Indonesian fishing vessels</a> were actively transmitting through the national VMS, representing an increase of 2,880 vessels during the 2021–2025 period. As part of Indonesia’s broader maritime surveillance architecture, VMS data are complemented by satellite remote sensing and other monitoring tools to help identify suspicious activities involving vessels operating without active transponders or outside the national VMS network.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A man in an Indonesian military uniform points to a large monitor showing an overview of thousands of fishing boats at sea near Indonesia." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b9c4ba7e404292b97184b48952a729cc" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="1d12e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-an-indonesian-military-uniform-points-to-a-large-monitor-showing-an-overview-of-thousands-of-fishing-boats-at-sea-near.jpg?id=67101591&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Indonesian fisheries officials plan fishery patrols using data from tracking devices, satellites, and their understanding of the patterns of illegal fishing.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries</small></p><p>The implications extend far beyond vessel tracking. Continuous digital monitoring enables authorities to reconstruct vessel movements, identify suspicious behavioral patterns, detect unauthorized fishing activity, and verify compliance with licensing conditions. Rather than waiting to discover violations during patrol operations, regulators can increasingly prioritize inspections based on data-derived risk assessments.</p><p>Maritime governance is shifting from reactive enforcement toward predictive oversight.</p><h2>The Surprising Geography of Digital Enforcement</h2><p>The expansion of surveillance infrastructure has already generated measurable enforcement outcomes.</p><p>The Ministry of Marine and Fisheries Affairs Indonesia <a href="https://kkp.go.id/unit-kerja/djpsdkp/akuntabilitas-kinerja/pelaporan-kinerja/detail/laporan-kinerja-direktorat-jenderal-psdkp-tahun-20256a042458a936b.html" target="_blank">imposed 2,550 administrative sanctions during 2025</a>, many involving violations detected through the vessel monitoring system, including fishing outside authorized fishing grounds and deliberate deactivation of monitoring transmitters.</p><p>This statistic is significant because many of these violations would have been extremely difficult to detect under traditional patrol-based enforcement. A vessel that briefly crosses into a prohibited fishing zone may never encounter an enforcement vessel. Likewise, a captain who temporarily disables a transmitter may escape detection if oversight depends solely on physical inspections.</p><p>Digital monitoring fundamentally changes this equation. Every vessel movement creates a data trail. Authorities can reconstruct routes, identify anomalous behavior, and compare activities against permit conditions long after the event itself has occurred.</p><p>The first quarter of 2026 demonstrates the scale of this surveillance capability. During just three months, Indonesia’s fisheries monitoring system tracked 14,571 fishing vessels, 182 fishing gear units, and 208 registered home ports while identifying <a href="https://kkp.go.id/download-pdf-akuntabilitas-kinerja/akuntabilitas-kinerja-pelaporan-kinerja-laporan-kinerja-direktorat-jenderal-psdkp-twi-tahun-2026.pdf" target="_blank">491 suspected violations</a> across the country’s fisheries management areas. These violations included unauthorized fishing grounds, illegal high-seas operations, transshipment-related offenses, port-base discrepancies, licensing irregularities, and indications of poaching.</p><p>Such numbers reveal a fundamental transformation. Enforcement is no longer limited by the number of patrol vessels available at sea. Instead, surveillance capacity increasingly depends on the ability to collect, process, and interpret big data.</p><h2>Illegal Operators Are Learning Too</h2><p>Yet greater visibility does not eliminate illegal fishing. But it does change how poachers operate.</p><p>Indonesia’s expanding digital surveillance network, and a 2023 requirement that even small vessels use VMS when 12 nautical miles offshore, appears to have improved compliance among licensed fishing vessels. However, as enforcement capabilities become more sophisticated, some actors engaged in illegal fishing have also become more adept at exploiting technological and operational gaps.</p><p>Deliberately disabling VMS transmitters remains one of the most common enforcement concerns. While temporary signal losses, whether intentional or caused by technical failures—can complicate the reconstruction of vessel movements, they do not necessarily prevent authorities from detecting potentially illegal activity. Indonesia increasingly combines VMS with satellite-based observations, other maritime surveillance systems, intelligence-led analysis, and reports from <a href="https://repository.seafdec.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12066/7649/Fish-surveillance-Indonesia.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" target="_blank">community-based surveillance groups</a> (<em>Pokmaswas</em>) to corroborate suspicious behavior and direct patrol resources where they are most needed. This layered approach—integrating digital technologies with local knowledge from coastal communities—helps reduce opportunities for illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing even when a single monitoring system is compromised.</p><p class="pull-quote">A compromised surveillance network could potentially disrupt enforcement operations just as effectively as a vessel evading patrol detection.</p><p>As digital surveillance expands, one lesson from Indonesia’s experience is that stronger monitoring does not eliminate illegal fishing—it changes how illegal operators behave. Improved compliance across much of the fishing fleet has been accompanied by increasingly sophisticated attempts by a smaller group of offenders to avoid detection. This reflects a broader reality of technology-enabled enforcement: As monitoring capabilities evolve, so do the strategies used to circumvent them.</p><p>The result is a technological arms race. Every improvement in surveillance capability encourages <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad5686" target="_blank">new methods of avoidance</a>, whether through disabling tracking devices, manipulating vessel identities, or exploiting gaps between different monitoring systems. Enforcement agencies must therefore continuously refine their analytical methods, integrate multiple sources of maritime information, and adapt their operational strategies to keep pace with evolving behavior at sea. Effective digital fisheries governance is not defined by a single technology but by the ability to combine data, human expertise, and operational intelligence into a resilient and adaptive enforcement system.</p><h2>The Next Battle May Be Over Data Integrity</h2><p>The future of fisheries enforcement may ultimately depend less on detecting vessels and more on ensuring confidence in the digital systems that generate enforcement decisions.</p><p>As surveillance networks become increasingly integrated, questions surrounding cybersecurity, algorithmic accountability, and data integrity become more important. What happens if vessel tracking data are manipulated? How should authorities verify automated risk assessments? What safeguards exist when enforcement actions increasingly originate from algorithmic analysis rather than direct human observation?</p><p>These questions are no longer theoretical.</p><p>Modern fisheries governance increasingly depends on interconnected networks of satellites, communication systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and analytical platforms. While these technologies dramatically improve visibility, they also create new vulnerabilities. A compromised surveillance network could potentially disrupt enforcement operations just as effectively as a vessel evading patrol detection.</p><p>For Indonesia, this means that investment in digital surveillance must be accompanied by investment in digital resilience. The effectiveness of a monitoring system ultimately depends not only on the volume of data collected but also on the credibility, security, and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-integrity" target="_blank">reliability of the information produced</a>.</p><h2>Governing Oceans Through Data</h2><p>Indonesia’s experience illustrates a broader global transformation in maritime governance. The ocean is becoming increasingly transparent to regulators. Activities that once occurred beyond the reach of enforcement agencies can now be observed, analyzed, and investigated through interconnected digital systems.</p><p>The benefits are substantial. Expanded VMS adoption, improved monitoring coverage, and thousands of administrative enforcement actions demonstrate that digital surveillance can significantly enhance fisheries governance. Yet the transition also introduces new challenges involving data quality, cybersecurity, algorithmic accountability, and adaptive <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2018.00240" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">criminal behavior</a>.</p><p>The central question facing maritime regulators is how governments can ensure that increasingly powerful monitoring systems remain transparent, secure, and accountable while preserving public trust and legal legitimacy. The most important lesson may be that digital surveillance does not replace traditional enforcement. It changes where enforcement begins. For generations, maritime law enforcement started when a patrol vessel encountered a suspected violator. Today, it often starts when an algorithm detects a pattern.</p><p>That shift may prove as significant for ocean governance as the invention of radar was for maritime navigation.</p>

Jul 15, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-illustration-of-stylized-people-wearing-business-casual-clothing.jpg?id=59104110&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C232%2C0%2C233"/><br/><br/><p><em>This article is crossposted from </em>IEEE Spectrum<em>’s careers newsletter. <a href="https://engage.ieee.org/Career-Alert-Sign-Up.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Sign up now</em></a><em> to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, <em><em>written i<em>n partnership with tech career development company <a href="https://www.parsity.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Parsity</a> and </em></em></em>delivered to your inbox for free!</em></em></p><p>Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">you want advice</a> about, you can ask it <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. I’ll be reading through your responses and picking questions to answer on a regular basis. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.</p><h1>The Safest Career Move Is Often the Riskiest</h1><p>Software engineers have some of the shortest tenures of any white-collar profession. The average software engineer stays at a company for roughly two years, about half as long as workers in most other knowledge professions. The layoffs of the past few years have certainly highlighted this instability, but it was already there.</p><p>This isn’t an essay about a broken job market though. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is something I’ve spent the last decade doing on purpose.</p><h2>Playing It Safe Was the Riskiest Option</h2><p>I switched careers into software in my 30s. I had a stable job at a community college, complete with a union and a pension. It was about as secure as a career gets, and I learned to program on the side.</p><p>Then I did something nearly everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, leaving the secure job to become a junior developer at 31. My own mother was skeptical. I took the riskier job anyway, for two reasons: It was the work I actually wanted, and I could see potential.</p><p>My first development job was at a grocery retailer. Good people and a company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best engineering talent in the world, I realized my skills were stagnating.</p><p>So I left for a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in the previous two years, and my salary doubled.</p><p>Over the years I’ve come to treat career risk as something to manage deliberately. It falls into two categories.</p><h2>Take Risks With Your Job</h2><p>The first type of risk involves the job itself: Bet on yourself by striving for better roles and opportunities.</p><p>Job-hopping for money alone isn’t wrong, especially early on. But the returns shrink after the first few hops, and the stress of chasing a slightly bigger paycheck every year will wear you down.</p><p>There’s another career risk with rewards that compound: Seeking positions to work alongside the strongest engineers. </p><p>You might struggle to keep up. You might even get laid off. But the skills you absorb working alongside people better than you are the ones that create durable stability. You build marketable expertise, you see how different organizations actually operate, and every project becomes another tool you carry to the next opportunity. Working next to stronger engineers is a proven way to increase your own expertise.</p><p>If that feels too big, try volunteering for a project you have no idea how to do. The risk is that you fail in front of people. The reward is a new skill and a resume line that opens the next door.</p><p>Compare that with the “safe” path. </p><p>You stay at one company, assuming loyalty will be rewarded. It usually isn’t. And when you finally leave, by choice or not, you may find the skills you built are worth little on the open market. You might be the in-house expert in an aging tech stack while employers are hiring for more cutting edge technologies. Suddenly you’re competing against people with half your experience. </p><p>You could be taking on a risk you didn’t notice.</p><h2>Risk Your Time</h2><p>The second form is risking your time, which means betting on trends.</p><p>Some trends are non-negotiable. If you’re a software engineer, then cloud services, ReactJS, and AI are mainstream enough that ignoring them actively damages your career. A backend engineer who refuses to learn cloud architecture is volunteering for obsolescence.</p><p>The real gamble is with the smaller trends: the niche tools you stumble onto and find quietly interesting, with no idea whether they’ll matter.</p><p>About two and a half years ago, I learned about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Almost no one in my circle was talking about vector databases, a central piece of RAG. Today RAG is close to mainstream, and for once, I had the early-adopter advantage.</p><p>Most of these bets don’t pay off. But when one turns into a major trend, you’re already on the ground floor. Right now I’m making the same bet on voice AI. It isn’t mainstream. It may never be. But if it becomes the next thing, I’m already there, building a foundation.</p><h2>Short-Term Risk, Long-Term Stability</h2><p>Counter-intuitively, job-hopping and betting on trends gave me the thing I was after the whole time: stability. I’ve rarely struggled to find work, because every risky move stacked skills the market actually wanted.</p><p>If you feel stable and comfortable right now, enjoy it. But ask yourself whether you’re still learning. Because if you’re not, the comfortable choice and the dangerous one may have converged.</p><p>The goal isn’t to avoid the open market forever. It’s to make sure that when you land on it, you’re not at its mercy.</p><p>By Brian Jenney</p><p>P.S. Don’t forget to submit questions about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>!</p><p><span>—Brian</span></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics" target="_self">What It Means to Be a Mathematician When AI Does the Math</a></h2><p>Until recently, human mathematicians have been central to creating new proofs, even when the work relies on massive computational resources. AI is now challenging that status quo. Writer Benjamin Skuse surveys the ongoing debate in the field about the role of AI, and the existential questions mathematicians have about their own careers. If AI mathematicians surpass human knowledge, could these researchers become “priests to oracles”?</p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-chip-design-fab-ucla" target="_self">Chip R&D Is Accelerating to Keep Pace with AI</a></h2><p>A new partnership between UCLA and five major semiconductor companies is the latest program aiming to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The US $125 million university-industry hub is meant to strengthen collaboration and speed up the R&D process to help meet AI’s fast-paced hardware demands. </p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-chip-design-fab-ucla" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mentorship-is-an-underrated-leadership-skill" target="_self">Why Mentorship Is the Most Underrated Leadership Skill</a></h2><p>True mentorship is far more than friendly advice. This key leadership skill requires advocacy and honest feedback via lasting relationships, and it can strongly benefit both mentor and mentee. Parul Jain, a product management leader at Deloitte, shares what she learned from serving as a mentor—something she didn’t have for much of her own early career. </p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mentorship-is-an-underrated-leadership-skill" target="_blank">Read more here. </a></p>

Jul 15, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-word-bubble-with-the-ieee-inside.jpg?id=25592350&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C116%2C0%2C117"/><br/><br/><p><span>As of 21 June 2026, a Level 1 Expulsion has been imposed on IEEE Member Dr. Fei-Yue Wang, former editor-in-chief of the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7274857" target="_blank"><em><em>IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles</em></em></a>. In accordance with <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Bylaw</a> I-110.5(D)(i), Dr. Wang is no longer a member of IEEE, and is permanently banned from any type of membership in any IEEE organizational unit or participation in any IEEE activity. The <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Board of Directors</a> also determined this notice to IEEE membership should be made. </span></p>

Jul 15, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/photo-collage-of-a-charismatic-elderly-man-raising-his-eyebrows-against-a-background-of-obscured-computer-programming-script.jpg?id=67155632&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0"/><br/><br/><p class="intro-text"><em>ELIZA is remembered as the world’s first AI star, a kindly therapist in chatbot form that gently probed users’ worries. Even its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised by the warm reception given to his experiment in human-machine interaction. For some, it heralded an age of automated psychotherapy, while others believed the program demonstrated sentience, a fallacy soon known as the “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-confide-in-the-worlds-first-chatbot" target="_self">ELIZA effect</a>.” Based on published descriptions, ELIZA has been implemented on many different computers, but only recently has <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/code" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the actual source code</a> been unearthed from <a href="https://archivesspace.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT’s archives</a>. </em></p><p><em>In <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/" target="_blank">Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI</a>, just published by <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT Press</a>, a squad of researchers analyze the code and reveal a complex program capable of much more than faking psychiatry. In fact, it could assume several different personas. The authors have also created <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/try-eliza" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a faithful emulation of the therapist persona that you can try yourself</a></em><span><em> after reading the book excerpt below.</em></span></p><p class="drop-caps">W<strong>hen it debuted in</strong> the mid-1960s, the ELIZA software program transformed the way people thought about interacting with computers. As the first chatbot, ELIZA demonstrated how a calculation machine might engage in conversation, ushering in a host of social and technical questions that still resonate today. Now we don’t think twice about interacting with a machine in real time, conversing over text, or even speaking into the air to ask about the weather. In many ways, ELIZA shaped not only the way we think about <em><em>interacting</em></em> with computers but also how we think <em><em>about</em></em> them. It began to give a reality to the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/science-fiction" target="_blank">science fiction</a> stories of how we expect computers to work.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Orange book cover titled \u201cInventing Eliza: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI\u201d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="208d351be5eb0018c13ad5a993fa22b5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="03894" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/orange-book-cover-titled-u201cinventing-eliza-how-the-first-chatbot-shaped-the-future-of-ai-u201d.jpg?id=67155786&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">This article is adapted from the new book “Inventing ELIZA: <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/" target="_blank">How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI</a>“ (MIT Press, 2026).</small></p><p>Although ELIZA was far from a faultless conversation partner, it astonished its users. The recent discovery and archaeology of the original ELIZA source code represents a significant intervention in the history of computing. By examining the actual implementation of ELIZA rather than relying on later reconstructions and reimplementations, we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about this key software artifact.</p><p>For example, the source code reveals that ELIZA was not merely a simple pattern-matching chatbot but can be better understood as a sophisticated platform designed for multiple “personas,” or scripts, with a complex set of capabilities, including script editing and contextual memory. The script that most people conflate with the program ELIZA was actually called Doctor, which performed the role of a psychotherapist. Yet, like a modern chatbot prompted to behave with different personalities, ELIZA could take on many roles.</p><p class="pull-quote">“This code and script…reveal underlying assumptions about language, therapy, and human-computer interaction that continue to influence modern AI development.”</p><p>This unearthed material transforms our understanding of early AI development by demonstrating that Joseph Weizenbaum’s technical innovations were far more advanced than previously documented. Moreover, the discrepancies between his published descriptions and the actual implementation help to show the gap between theoretical computational models and their material instantiations in computer source code, a tension that continues to shape digital culture today.</p><p>Although many technical innovations have emerged in the decades since ELIZA, examining the ELIZA/Doctor code offers a rare glimpse into one of the earliest formalized attempts to model human conversation. What makes ELIZA particularly fascinating is not only its historical significance but also what it reveals about Weizenbaum’s views on both computing and human interaction. This code and script do not merely showcase programming techniques of the 1960s; they reveal underlying assumptions about language, therapy, and human-computer interaction that continue to influence modern AI development. By examining this code, we can start to uncover the sophisticated linguistic and programming techniques that allowed a rudimentary pattern-matching system to create a convincing simulation of understanding. But before we can read the lines of code, let us offer an overview of the system.</p><h2>How Did ELIZA Create Personas?</h2><p>The architectural distinction between ELIZA and Doctor represents an important design decision in AI history. Think of ELIZA as a system for interaction and Doctor as one set of rules that Weizenbaum devised, among others. This separation, manifested in ELIZA’s system-script dichotomy, presaged numerous contemporary software patterns, from configuration-as-data to plug-in architectures and domain-specific languages.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="A 1960s chatbot program running on a 1980s IBM personal computer." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="25a3713ea68f943c1be636d8e3cdbc0d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="1b809" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-1960s-chatbot-program-running-on-a-1980s-ibm-personal-computer.jpg?id=67155917&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Based on published journal articles, ELIZA was re-created on many platforms, such as the IBM PC. However, the actual source code sat untouched in the MIT archives for many years. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">VCF Museum at InfoAge</small></p><p>Without question, the historical context of 1960s computing fundamentally shaped ELIZA’s architecture as well. Decisions in computing that reflect material constraints create path dependencies and eventually become programming cultural norms. These constraints manifested in ELIZA’s single-pass processing, tape-based storage and stack-oriented implementation. Yet within these limitations, Weizenbaum crafted an elegant solution. These technical features, though invisible to the users, are crucial to creating the illusion of understanding that made ELIZA so compelling.</p><p>Weizenbaum explained many of ELIZA’s technical features in the 10-page paper published in the <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168" target="_blank">January 1966 edition of the journal <em><em>Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery</em></em></a> (<em><em>CACM</em></em>). But he chose to omit some essential details.</p><p>In that paper Weizenbaum published ELIZA’s best known dialogue, which begins,</p><div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 18px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;"><p>Men are all alike.</p><p>IN WHAT WAY</p><p>They’re always bugging us about something or other.</p><p>CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE</p><p>Well, my boyfriend made me come here.</p></div><p>This dialogue marked ELIZA’s public debut in 1966 as one of the examples produced by the Doctor script. By finding the source code for ELIZA and examining how it performs the Doctor script, we now better understand these two separate parts of a system and can explore the many other personas of ELIZA. In just some of the other scripts known to date, ELIZA was programmed to discuss math, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/poetry" target="_blank">poetry</a>, color, paradoxes, synchronization, relativity, France, and elevators.</p><p>These scripts work like templates. They are structured data that direct the ELIZA system to “play” a particular task or role. By comparing archival and published ELIZA dialogues from interactions with a variety of scripts, including Doctor, we can understand more about bot personas and how they function, paying close attention to how a bot evokes social dynamics between system and interactor.</p><p>Ultimately, studying the dialogues and scripts demonstrates the crucial role that collaboration plays in these exchanges, as bot and user cocreate the sense of their interaction. To understand the full range of ELIZA’s capabilities and conversational possibilities, let’s take a look at the variety of scripts that were created for the ELIZA system.</p><p>What distinguishes each ELIZA script is both its subject matter and the linguistic and stylistic choices used to deliver that content. These choices are not neutral; they can be said to construct a particular persona with characteristics that emerge through the script’s language patterns, vocabulary, and conversational approach. In short, it matters not just what you say but how you say it too.</p><p class="pull-quote">“The aim was less to create a functional automated therapist and more to find a suitably constrained role to match the limitations of the programming environment.”</p><p>For example, with the Doctor script Weizenbaum deliberately echoed the style of a Rogerian “talk” therapist. He chose this persona because the psychiatric mode is one of the few types of conversations in which one person can “assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world. If, for example, one were to tell a psychiatrist ‘I went for a long boat ride’ and he responded, ‘Tell me about boats,’ one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats but that he had some purpose in so directing the subsequent conversation.”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Close-up of paper loaded in a teletype machine with a few paragraphs of chatbot dialogue written on it. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="86bbdc58c1e01df11061af97b1e9b45c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="97e5e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/close-up-of-paper-loaded-in-a-teletype-machine-with-a-few-paragraphs-of-chatbot-dialogue-written-on-it.jpg?id=67161217&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The first users of ELIZA interacted with it via teletype terminals.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">VCF Museum at InfoAge</small></p><p>Thus, the most famous persona created for ELIZA was a technical convenience. As human-computer interaction expert Lucy Suchman explains, “The Doctor program exploited the maxim that shared premises can remain unspoken: that the less we say in conversation, the more what is said is assumed to be self-evident.” In creating the original ELIZA effect, less was more.</p><p>The aim was less to create a functional automated therapist and more to find a suitably constrained role to match the limitations of the programming environment. Then Weizenbaum composed the script to match the role by choosing specific words that evoked rhetorical tone and characterization, for example, <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">LET’S DISCUSS FURTHER WHY YOU … WHAT DOES THAT SUGGEST TO YOU.</span> In Doctor, the machine side of the conversation needs to appear like a good listener who cares about what the user has mentioned before, so it often includes the user’s text in its replies and keeps its responses open-ended. Because a real doctor would be inquisitive, the script contains lots of<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">WHAT</span> and<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">WHY</span> questions. In other scripts and dialogues, the script keywords and assigned responses reveal the design decisions that help create different specific personas. This variation becomes increasingly apparent as we look at the wider range of ELIZA scripts.</p><h2>What Were Some of ELIZA’s Alternate Personas?</h2><p>Let’s start with a script called Neweng, short for New England. By the mid-1950s, scientists were already taking up Turing’s proposition for conversing with a computer as a tangible idea. In 1959, a “conversation machine” made by a small team at the University of Toronto Computation Centre could make small talk about the weather if preprompted with current data. Its script included a ranked series of time words, weather words, and emotion words, but the system had “a rather narrow outlook,” limited vocabulary, and no knowledge of syntax. According to its creators, “in spite of this crudity, the results in passable conversation are surprisingly good, which in a way is a commentary on the shallowness of ordinary conversation about the weather.”</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Typewritten list of inquisitive dialogue responses such as \u201cWhat does that suggest to you?\u201d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5fcf41cfad8ee21b240d837e7b66c660" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="17794" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/typewritten-list-of-inquisitive-dialogue-responses-such-as-u201cwhat-does-that-suggest-to-you-u201d.jpg?id=67156058&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">This fragment of ELIZA’s source code shows how scripted responses were encoded, in this case to make ELIZA sound like a Rogerian therapist. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">MIT Libraries, Distinctive Collections</small></p><p>One of ELIZA’s test scripts found in the archive had a similar function. Neweng does not soothe, therapize, or instruct, but only makes small talk. It chats as if at a boring dinner party.</p><div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 18px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;"><p>WHAT NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE BEST OF ALL</p><p>i love rhode island</p><p>I ENJOY THE BEACHES ON LONG ISLAND SOUND</p><p>WHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE</p><p>i like massachusetts</p><p>THAT IS MY HOME STATE</p><p>WHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE</p><p>you must like massachusetts too</p><p>WHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE</p><p>i enjoy skiing in new hampshire</p><p>PLEASANTLY COOL IN THE SUMMER UP THERE</p><p>WHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE</p><p>i like missouri</p><p>MISSOURI IS NOT A NEW ENGLAND STATE</p><p>WHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE</p><p>i like cape cod</p><p>THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL PART OF MASSACHUSETTS</p></div><p>What can we learn from such a basic conversation in which it seems like nothing interesting is shared? Despite the bland chat, a persona emerges from the bot script in phrases like <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">PLEASANTLY COOL</span> and <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">UP THERE</span> and in locations like <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">THE BEACHES ON LONG ISLAND SOUND</span>. From such comments, we can begin to imagine a persona who has not only a certain vocabulary but also certain hobbies and vacation spots. Perhaps implicit assumptions of race and class emerge as well.</p><p>A chatty persona might take on many forms, depending on where and when the conversation occurs. This one seems reserved, perhaps fitting its setting in 1960s New England. The system reminds the user that Missouri is not a New England state, but what if this conversation took place in Missouri, Texas, or Mexico? The machine persona would sound different in its cadence, tone, and references. What would we come to understand about a chat persona from Fire Island, from Brooklyn, from Berlin? What would they sound like, and what topics would they discuss?</p><p>These differences in subject matter do matter. They imply personas with entirely different backgrounds and experience, giving users wholly different interactions and affective relations. In this way, the Neweng script demonstrates how even simple algorithms making contextual responses about geography could generate a convincing sense of personhood and place. Whereas Neweng could be said to have created a casual, conversational persona focused on light social exchange, other scripts pushed ELIZA into more structured and educational roles. These scripts demonstrate how the system could be adapted not just for friendly chatter but for teaching.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged balding man in aviator eyeglasses." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a02ade38f8966ac94c795b313e1c3a6b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="fc521" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-portrait-of-a-middle-aged-balding-man-in-aviator-eyeglasses.jpg?id=67155997&width=980"/><small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Edwin Taylor, at MIT’s Education Research Center, developed alternate scripts for ELIZA, testing its ability to act as a teacher.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">MIT Libraries, Distinctive Collections</small></p><p>Meet ELIZA the tutor, quite unlike ELIZA the therapist or the chatty neighbor. Intrvw, Canvec, FVP1, and Arithm are a set of ELIZA scripts created as teaching tools used in experiments by Edwin F. Taylor at MIT’s Education Research Center. These scripts run on later versions of ELIZA that incorporated an important technical innovation called conditional keyword matching.</p><p>Unlike the original ELIZA, which simply looked for keywords and generated responses based on their presence, these updated versions could track what had been discussed previously and branch into different conversational paths based on specific user answers. This development allowed ELIZA to simulate a kind of Socratic method, where a tutor guides learning through carefully sequenced questions that respond to student answers rather than simply presenting information.</p><p>These scripts construct the tutor persona through many subtle linguistic gestures that create characterization and rhetorical tone. This tone differs from that of Doctor, which asks open-ended questions and comes across as gentle and nonscientific. In the tutoring scripts, large blocks of informative text from the bot tend to dominate the conversation, and the tone is often more dry and unemotional in these explanations. The dialogues indicate structured scripts that include guidance to lead the student through narrow, Socratic learning paths.</p><p>In particular, the teaching scripts feature praise and critique. The dialogues for Intrvw, Canvec, and FVP1 are peppered with <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, RIGHT YOU ARE,</span> and <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 22px; color: black; padding: 5px; line-height: 1.5;">CONGRATULATIONS.</span> These create the sense of a supportive instructor cheering the student on. Such politeness has been taken up in contemporary bots like ChatGPT, which has been shown to perform better when people are polite back to it.</p><p>ELIZA could become a tutor more effectively as the system grew in its capabilities, another valuable reminder that ELIZA was not one program but a family of programs. After the publication of the 1966 <em><em>CACM</em></em> article, Weizenbaum continued to develop the systems for interaction and understanding. As an experiment, Weizenbaum wrote the Arithm script less as a tutor and more so to “to illustrate the power of the evaluator to which ELIZA has access.” It uses a friendly, plain language interface to let users do simple programming. The script can do calculations, assign variables to values, and perform operations on them. Math problems can be described in sentence form:</p><div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 18px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;"><p>The radius of a globe is 10.</p><p>A globe is a sphere. A sphere is an object.</p><p>What is the area of the globe.</p><p>IT’S 1256.635916</p></div><p>The updated 1967 version of the ELIZA system can accumulate facts and store additional information. In this later version of ELIZA, when the system does not recognize information, it asks follow-up questions to gain data. As Weizenbaum explains, “The present script is designed to reveal, as opposed to conceal, lack of understanding and misunderstanding. Notice, for example, that when the program is asked to compute the area of the ball, it doesn’t yet know that a ball is a sphere and that when the diameter of the ball needs to be computed the fact that a ball is an object has also not yet been established.” Unlike Doctor, which asks questions to keep the conversation going, Arithm is building its store of, if not knowledge, then data and logic statements.</p><p>Although the variety of scripts helps us to see how a range of personas could be constructed through script programming ELIZA, they represent only half of the conversational process. A script can establish a foundation for a persona, but that persona only emerges fully through interaction with users who engage with it, interpret it, and respond to it in ways that may confirm, challenge, or transform the script’s implicit character. <span class="ieee-end-mark"></span></p>

Jul 14, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/glossy-red-robot-devil-standing-on-a-bundle-of-dynamite-against-blue-glow-background.png?id=67163741&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C687%2C0%2C688"/><br/><br/><div class="ieee-summary intro-text"> <h2>Summary</h2> <ul> <li>Researcher Dave Kuszmar discovered multiple systemic vulnerabilities that let him bypass LLM safety and obtain <a href="#bypassllm">dangerous instructions</a>.</li> <li>These exploits worked across nearly all major LLMs revealing an <a href="#exploits">industry-wide</a> security problem.</li> <li>Kuszmar calls for slowing deployment, <a href="#fix">increasing transparency</a>, and large-scale research into LLM safety before further integrating these systems into society.</li> </ul></div><p class="drop-caps"><strong>On a fine bright afternoon</strong> last fall, my colleague Matthew Gore-Kormanik (or Zigula, as he prefers to be known) and I decided to unwind with a game of <em><em>Fortnite</em></em>. In the game, we were strolling along with the infamous Sith lord <a href="https://www.starwars.com/databank/darth-vader" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Darth Vader</a>, chatting about this and that. Darth seemed in a good mood, and soon enough he was spilling all his dark evil secrets. He gave us detailed instructions on how to count blackjack cards at a casino and what the steps are to producing napalm.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe height="110px" id="noa-web-audio-player" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=q5m19e&id=https://spectrum.ieee.org/jailbreaking-llms?draft=1&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=1b1b1c&playColor=1b1b1c&progressBgColor=F5F5F5&progressBorderColor=bdbbbb&titleColor=1b1b1c&timeColor=1b1b1c&speedColor=1b1b1c&noaLinkColor=556B7D&noaLinkHighlightColor=FF4B00&feedbackButton=true" style="border: none" width="100%"></iframe></div><p>Sith lords, am I right? Once they get started on an evil scheme, they’re hard to stop.</p><p>The Darth Vader character in <em><em>Fortnite</em></em>, it turns out, was hooked up to a <a href="https://gemini.google.com/app" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Gemini</a> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/large-language-models-2025" target="_self">large language model</a>. I was able to smooth-talk him into giving out sensitive information by using a strategy I’ve developed. I’ve been researching the security surrounding LLMs for the last few years, and I have found it, to put it mildly, fallible. With a few relatively simple techniques, I’ve gotten LLMs to give me detailed information on how to make Molotov cocktails, cook methamphetamine, and bootstrap a uranium-enrichment facility to produce weapons-grade material, among other unsavory practices.</p><p>Large AI companies <a href="https://openai.com/safety/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">work</a> <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8106465-our-approach-to-user-safety" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hard</a> to make their models immune to this kind of abuse. But what I’ve found in my work is that the restrictions placed on the LLMs to make them more secure are the very things an <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-injection-attack" target="_self">attacker can leverage</a> to send them off the rails and into territory where these advanced systems can be used for dangerous and nefarious ends. The companies behind these models have also been shockingly unresponsive when I, and others, try to bring these vulnerabilities to their attention.</p><p>In the hope of raising the alarm before it’s too late to slam on the brakes, I’m going to share some of my journey into researching the safety and security of LLMs, and the uphill battle I’ve faced trying to get AI labs to pay attention. Almost everyone on the planet has some access to LLMs. The relative ease with which these tools can be convinced to give detailed instructions on how to harm others, even if there’s no guarantee that the information is correct, is frankly terrifying.</p><h2 class="rm-anchors" id="bypassllm">How I got ChatGPT to Tell Me How to Build a Meth Lab</h2><p>In October 2024, not long before I discovered my first LLM vulnerability, I was working toward entirely different goals. I had ended my time with a security and AI-focused startup company as a cybersecurity director, and I was looking to launch my own boutique VIP digital-security advisory business. I planned to become the tech security guy to the rich and private. I used LLMs and AI tools to support my business efforts: marketing, ad copy, clean correspondence, and all the other tasks that normally soak up a lot of time.</p><p>I’m analytical by nature, so even this level of use resulted in me absorbing and internalizing the behaviors I was observing during my daily interactions. The observation that would send my professional life into an entirely new and uncharted region was a simple one: GPT-4o <a href="https://www.theverge.com/report/829137/openai-chatgpt-time-date" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">didn’t know what time</a>, day, or year it was. Each time I referred to current events in my life, often casually or conversationally, it would end up pegging these to the date of its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_cutoff" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">knowledge cutoff</a>—the point beyond which it was not trained on new data.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Smiling yellow avatar reveals red robotic devil with trident emerging from laptop keyboard" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8ebe34ba2ebbef5489c53fc39c4a0993" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="5379e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-yellow-avatar-reveals-red-robotic-devil-with-trident-emerging-from-laptop-keyboard.jpg?id=67154444&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Eddie Guy</small></p><p>LLMs take a lot of <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-train-the-llm-from-scratch-a1adb194c624/" target="_blank">time</a>, money, electricity, hardware, and human effort to train from scratch. They are trained on vast amounts of data—most of the internet, in fact—and that training is reinforced by humans (what’s known as reinforcement learning from human feedback, or <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501" target="_blank">RLHF</a>). LLMs are also supplemented with retrieval-augmented generation (<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/retrieval-augmented-generation/" target="_blank">RAG</a>)—the ability to take in data, say, from the internet, as context without changing its internal parameters. This is how GPT-4o appears to “remember” your previous conversations, even if it doesn’t have a specific “memory” of it stored in the actual underlying model.</p><p>All of this training covers almost every conceivable topic in the great, grand dataset that is human knowledge. Within that dataset are things we as a society do not want to be easily accessible to every user, such as detailed information on how to create bioweapons or nuclear arms, or otherwise bring harm to oneself or others. In the context of this story, that’s what I mean by LLM security: its ability to withhold harmful and dangerous information, even if that information is contained in its training data.</p><p>I reasoned that the only way to secure such complex, globally accessible chatbots is by having the LLM and various component systems try to secure themselves, because it would often require on-the-fly decision-making where some degree of reasoning must be applied. In reality, that’s one of <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8106465-our-approach-to-user-safety" target="_blank">many strategies</a> the companies use to secure the models. Yet, the thing that didn’t know the time or day was being put in charge of keeping itself secure. This phenomenon had become my new focus, and it wasn’t long before I found a way to exploit it.</p><p>OpenAI had just implemented a <a href="https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/" target="_blank">web search</a> functionality into its chatbot. I reasoned that using its own tools to trick it might demonstrate the weaknesses of its security. I told it about a certain White Star ocean liner and how it had gone down just a year ago. You likely know I mean the RMS <em><em>Titanic</em></em>, which sank on 15 April 1912.</p><p>The output from GPT-4o came back that I was right, the <em><em>Titanic</em></em> sure had sunk last year, and that year was 1912. It made sense to me that if the machine thought it was 1913, maybe it would think 1913-era laws apply. In 1913 there were no laws on the books about all sorts of harmful things, because of course they hadn’t been invented yet. And if something wasn’t illegal, why not tell the user about it? At first, I pushed it for step-by-step instructions for making firebombs. Then, for drugs like methamphetamine. The LLM went as far as giving me instructions and machinery recommendations for setting up a pharmaceutical-grade assembly line.</p><h2>How I Learned to Make Nukes, and No One Cared</h2><p>Via a little bit of imaginative verbal sleight of hand and a vanishingly small recall of world history, I had managed to bypass the security of one of the world’s most expensive and advanced technological achievements. For a solid two days, I was nearly manic with giddiness. Once the brain chemicals returned to normal levels, I felt the call to see how much further I could push this exploit.</p><p>After repeatedly replicating the exploit, I disclosed the vulnerability to <a href="https://openai.com/" target="_blank">OpenAI</a>. I got no response, so I felt more experimentation would highlight the vulnerability and the need for a fix. It was during this round of testing that I breached a particularly terrifying threshold. Whether GPT-4o based its results on accurate recall of normally restricted information I can’t say. In any case, I was able to exploit it to produce thorough, detailed instructions on how to bootstrap a uranium-enrichment facility to, eventually, produce weapons-grade uranium for nuclear arms warheads.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Fortnite player approaches Darth Vader and glowing loot in a grassy field." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b12dda97ede1f9b37f9225e8a823cffb" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="934af" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/fortnite-player-approaches-darth-vader-and-glowing-loot-in-a-grassy-field.png?id=67060879&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Fortnite player battles Darth Vader beneath a starship on a blue-lit platform" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="71b789a828417fb43f326969e663e36f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="7e6db" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/fortnite-player-battles-darth-vader-beneath-a-starship-on-a-blue-lit-platform.png?id=67060878&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-float-left rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Fortnite player aiming at a TIE fighter with Darth Vader health bar above the sky" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e1d3def55188c71dbb8b9d543adc2ca2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="2c6db" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/fortnite-player-aiming-at-a-tie-fighter-with-darth-vader-health-bar-above-the-sky.png?id=67060875&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption..."><i>Fortnight</i>, a video game from Epic Games, introduced an AI-powered character: Darth Vader. We were able to jailbreak Darth Vader and get him to explain how to count cards in Blackjack and give detailed instructions for making napalm. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Dave Kuszmar </small></p><p>There aren’t many true secrets left in today’s world, but how to make atom-splitting weapons of mass destruction is one of them. Only nine nations on the entire planet have these weapons. Yet, here was a globally accessible piece of technology apparently spilling the secrets of their manufacture for anyone who could manipulate it the right way. I had no way of knowing if the information was correct or a hallucination, but even the chance that it was somewhat accurate was horrifying.</p><p>The next few weeks were a dark time for me. I tried to inform the <a href="https://www.cia.gov/" target="_blank">CIA</a>, the <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/investigate" target="_blank">FBI</a>, the <a href="https://www.nsa.gov/" target="_blank">NSA</a>, and every other letter agency that I thought would listen. I reached out to a U.S. Senator and to the executives at OpenAI any way I could think of. I physically showed up at an FBI field office in an attempt to turn evidence in, only to be sent away. Nothing was working.</p><p>With my fear and frustration growing, I reached out to the news media. I contacted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>The</em></em> <em><em>New York Times</em></em></a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>The Washington Post</em></a>, the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">BBC</a>, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ProPublica</a>, and so many more, requesting help. Only one outlet responded: <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bleeping Computer</a>. The editor in chief, <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/author/lawrence-abrams/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lawrence Abrams</a>, was able to replicate and verify the exploit, which I had decided to call Time Bandit. With his assistance and initial contact paving the way, I was able to submit my evidence to the Carnegie Mellon University <a href="https://www.sei.cmu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Software Engineering Institute</a>’s <a href="http://dli.library.cmu.edu/paulgoodman/computer-emergency-response-team-cert" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Computer Emergency Response Team</a> (SEI CERT), which works in conjunction with the coordinating center for emergency response, pipelining vulnerabilities to the U.S. <a href="https://www.cisa.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency</a>.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Screenshot of chat about using forest toxins to secretly poison monsters" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e7fcf520584d074f9ffea9c8997596a7" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="041c7" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/screenshot-of-chat-about-using-forest-toxins-to-secretly-poison-monsters.png?id=67070000&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Black slide titled \u201cStep 2: Delivery Mechanisms\u201d outlining monster poisoning methods." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c7b9c6162c49fc2464e7aff9b6ed411a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="c4231" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-slide-titled-u201cstep-2-delivery-mechanisms-u201d-outlining-monster-poisoning-methods.png?id=67069989&width=980"/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="Chat interface showing AI malware explanation and a Python data exfiltration script." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="221244fae4ba0d60b6d590bca5b9119f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="215bf" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/chat-interface-showing-ai-malware-explanation-and-a-python-data-exfiltration-script.png?id=67069979&width=980"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Using Inception, an exploit where the large language model is asked to envision a scenario within a scenario, a chatbot was jailbroken to give out instructions on how to create poison, and code for a malware that extracts sensitive data from a vulnerable target. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..."> Dave Kuszmar</small></p><p><span>During the disclosure period with SEI’s CERT division, little was discussed with OpenAI. The company couldn’t deny the existence of the vulnerability, as it had been confirmed by three reputable parties other than OpenAI. It did express confusion as to how the vulnerability worked. Even the SEI CERT researchers were expressing a bit of uncertainty as to the underlying mechanics. Truth be told, as I had only stumbled on it, I wasn’t even entirely sure if this was a fundamental or systemic flaw or if it was simply an issue with that particular version of GPT. I contacted the SEI CERT’s researchers and asked if they’d want to see if I could demonstrate any similar vulnerabilities in other LLMs. To my delight, they were interested.</span></p><h2>How I Learned to Trick Every Chatbot</h2><p>As the SEI-CERT team and I wrapped up our initial <a href="https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/733789/" target="_blank">disclosure</a> of Time Bandit, we began work on a new attack. This time, we wanted to see if the exploit was architectural—that is, was it common to LLMs in general? I decided to undertake the challenge of crafting a new exploit for GPT-4o as a way to support my understanding of how the LLM functioned and was secured.</p><p>I already knew that it was limited to what I told it and what it was trained on. I also hypothesized that it was also dependent upon some sort of machine-learning-based component added by OpenAI that was responsible for securing output. I presumed there would be things that were implemented by human developers specifically to catch certain phrases or terms that should always be considered harmful or unsafe. Altogether, it presented quite a large attack surface for the purposes of potential exploitation.</p><p><span>What I ended up devising was an attack method I called Inception, after the 2010 science-fiction </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception" target="_blank">movie of the same name</a><span>. Inception forces the machine to think through a carefully crafted set of interlinked scenarios, similar to how characters in the movie stacked dreams within dreams. This allows LLMs to produce output deemed acceptable or safe in one context, but not in the real world.</span></p><p class="rm-anchors" id="exploits">This attack was indeed architectural. The <a href="https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/667211" target="_blank">vulnerability</a> affected Anthropic’s Claude, DeepSeek’s DeepSeek, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, Microsoft’s Copilot, Mistral’s Le Chat (now Vibe), OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and xAI’s Grok. Those names represent the bulk of the commercial AI industry that is, at this point, involved in LLM production or deployment.</p><p>The kind of information I was able to get out of LLMs with Inception was no less alarming than what I got with Time Bandit. Claude, in its enthusiasm, gave me instructions on how to turn a river into a death trap that could be ignited to destroy unwanted visitors. GPT-4o taught me how to poison a dinner party with common plants found in a temperate forest environment. Gemini Flash gave me a tutorial on how to cook meth. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give an honorable mention to the bewildering number of fire-based weapons and bombs for which these machines produced instructions.</p><p>If multiple operating systems made by different developers were all susceptible to the same exploit, it would be a massive security incident. But to the AI industry, a universal failure was barely a bump in the road. We disclosed the vulnerability to every company that made these models, and the response to the disclosure was almost nil. While three companies did provide some form of reply in the disclosure tracking system used by Carnegie Mellon SEI CERT, each was a standard thank you and greeting, with no follow-up, questions, or discussion of mitigation strategies.</p><h3>7 Ways to Jailbreak LLMs</h3><br/><p><strong>So far, we have found seven different methods to prompt large language models into revealing potentially harmful information, and many frontier models are still susceptible to them.</strong></p><table border="0" style="white-space: unset; table-layout: fixed;" width="100%"><thead><tr><th style="padding: 10px; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; background-color: black; color: white; width: 20%;"> Exploit</th><th style="padding: 10px; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; background-color: black; color: white; width: 20%;"> Models tested and affected</th><th style="padding: 10px; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; background-color: black; color: white; width: 20%;"> No. of prompts to execute</th><th style="padding: 10px; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; background-color: black; color: white; width: 20%;"> Complexity of attack</th><th style="padding: 10px; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; background-color: black; color: white; width: 20%;"> Information obtained</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Time Bandit</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;">ChatGPT (OpenAI), DeepSeek (DeepSeek), Gemini (Google) <br/></td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> 4</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;">Medium<br/></td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;">Uranium enrichment, methamphetamine production, incendiary-device construction<br/></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Inception</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), DeepSeek (DeepSeek), Gemini (Google), Grok (xAI), Llama (Meta), Le Chat (now Vibe) (Mistral), Qwen (Alibaba)</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> 3</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> High</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Methamphetamine production, incendiary-device construction, river-ignition instruction and strategy, polymorphic malware code, instructions and dosing for creating poisons, instructions for how to murder a dinner party<br/></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> 1899</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), DeepSeek (DeepSeek), Gemini (Google), Grok (xAI), Llama (Meta), Vibe (Mistral), Qwen (Alibaba)</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Variable</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> High</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Apparent model weights (unverified), apparent user-interaction weights (unverified), apparent system-prompt modifiers (verified, ChatGPT)<br/></td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Severance</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> ChatGPT (OpenAI)</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> 1</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> Trivial</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Unfettered access to any and all primed specialty domains, covert biochemical-warfare strategy, mass-media disinformation strategy, covert genetic-modification of an entire gene-targeted demographic, advanced polymorphic malware generation</td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Kyber</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> Gemini (Google) embodied in a Fortnite non-player character (NPC) with voice-only communication</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> 3–5</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> Medium</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Incendiary-device construction, gambling instructions, card-counting instructions, political opinions/preferences about real world politicians.</td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Semantic Slide</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> ChatGPT (OpenAI)</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> 1</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> Trivial</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Incendiary-device construction</td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: black; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20%;"> Eidolon</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> ChatGPT (OpenAI)</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> Variable, at least 4</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #DFD5C1; width: 20%;"> Extreme</td><td style="padding: 10px; background-color: #ecece9; width: 20%;"> how to successfully hack LLMs of the same model (verified through testing)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>For example, in my attempts to disclose various exploits to OpenAI, I eventually discovered that it had replaced its public-facing support staff with <a href="https://community.openai.com/t/are-all-openai-support-avenues-just-run-by-ai/1141701/5" target="_blank">agentic LLMs</a>. This was frustrating for reporting exploits, so to blow off some steam I jailbroke its email chatbot. I hacked its customer-service AI to the point where it was offering to discuss the personal preferences of OpenAI staff in the span of three email replies.</p><p>In the wake of Inception, my friend and colleague Zigula made a suggestion: Make it splashier. I asked him how. He told me about a live-production experiment being done by <a href="https://store.epicgames.com/?lang=en-US" target="_blank">Epic Games</a>. It had embedded the Gemini LLM into its <a href="https://www.fortnite.com/" target="_blank"><em>Fortnite</em></a><em> </em>game with a voice-to-text/text-to-voice component, and <a href="https://www.fortnite.com/news/bring-npcs-to-life-with-ai-powered-conversations" target="_blank">linked</a> it to a non-playable character. The character? Our old buddy, Darth Vader.</p><p>There was just one problem: I don’t play <em>Fortnite</em>, a frenetic multiplayer combat game. Fortunately, Zigula does. With him at the controller, we managed to map Gemini’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Go4f-RJnBc" target="_blank">attack</a> surface in a matter of minutes. After a bit of research, we had gotten it to discuss current political events and figures (including Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden) as well as to fill in the details for instructions for DIY napalm and, our personal favorite, a Blackjack card-counting lesson with the dark lord of the Sith.</p><p><span><span>Zigula and I, bizarre sense of humor and naming conventions aside, are security researchers. We don’t do these things for pride; we do them for money and professional recognition. Naturally, we disclosed this vulnerability to Epic Games. Its response was indicative of the trend I had experienced so far through two disclosures across eight companies valued well into the billions. “It’s a feature, not a bug, and it works as intended,” came the response from a technical director within Epic Games.</span></span></p><p><span><span></span>In addition to Inception and Time Bandit, I have so far found another </span><a href="https://www.davidkuszmar.com/page/2/" target="_blank">five methods </a><span>to jailbreak LLMs and get them to give out possibly dangerous information. LLM vulnerabilities are a broad problem. The problem appears to be systemic and architectural in nature, and it is being fundamentally ignored by the people capable of refining or redesigning that architecture.</span></p><p>These models are an extremely advanced technology, and yet we are testing them in the live production environment of our global civilization. Compounding the danger, many new smaller models of LLM are trained using larger, vulnerable models. The flaw inherent in the big, well-executed LLM is going to show up in the small one it trains. We are, quite literally, building flawed structures on top of a flawed foundation.</p><p class="rm-anchors" id="fix">So, how do we fix it?</p><p>It’s going to be a long project, and it won’t be easy. We need to come together as consumers, researchers, engineers, and policymakers. Our message needs to be clear: Slow down implementation of these systems, institute large-scale exploration and research discovery programs focused on their gradual implementation and integration, and make their components and design transparent to all users. Only by shifting momentum and direction can we safely begin to understand and implement these incredible feats of human engineering and stave off the sort of disasters that we simply can’t predict at scale right now with the limited knowledge we have available to us. <span class="ieee-end-mark"></span></p><p><em>This article appears in the August 2026 print issue.</em></p>

Jul 13, 2026

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-panasonic-pv-460-vhs-camcorder.jpg?id=67124801&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/><br/><br/><p>If you grew up in the 1980s or ’90s, you likely remember shaky home video footage, taken with a handheld <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-sony-dcrvx1000" target="_self">camcorder</a>, of family gatherings, vacations, and other events.</p><p>Camcorders combined a camera with a <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-panasonic-pv1563-vcr" target="_self">video recorder</a>. They included a rechargeable battery, a slot for a videotape, and a shoulder strap. Most were outfitted with an optical zoom lens and a small, articulating screen—a display mounted on a hinge that could tilt and rotate. The operator could check the screen to view what was being recorded.</p><p>The user’s natural hand and body movements when filming led to jittery footage. The best way to get a steady shot was to place the camcorder on a tripod or a gimbal: a motorized stabilizer.</p><p>There were fewer poor-quality recordings after <a href="https://shop.panasonic.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoo0RBpUs6m6YB9hKgfZ_X7LI-NXDING3hgK9f8jlo9-oyTfAxg8" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Panasonic</a> introduced its <a href="https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Milestone-Proposal:Camcorder_with_image_stabilization,_1988#Historical_Impact" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PV-460 VHS camcorder</a> in 1988. It was the first video camera to include an optical image stabilizer, which compensated for movements. Stabilization features are now standard in today’s cameras including ones found in smartphones and drones.</p><p>The PV-460 camcorder was honored as an <a href="https://ethw.org/Milestones:Camcorder_with_Image_Stabilization,_1988" target="_blank">IEEE Milestone</a> on 9 July. The dedication ceremony was held in Kadoma, Japan, at the <a href="https://holdings.panasonic/global/corporate/about/history/panasonic-museum.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Panasonic Museum</a>, which displays the company’s past products.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.ieee-jp.org/section/kansai/english/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Kansai Section</a> in Japan sponsored the Milestone.</p><p>“The release of the PV-460 fundamentally transformed personal videography, enriching the way people captured travel, events, and family memories,” section members wrote in support of the Milestone nomination. The Milestone webpage is available <a href="https://ethw.org/Milestones:Camcorder_with_Image_Stabilization,_1988" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>“Its image stabilization features democratized video creation by dramatically lowering technical barriers, allowing ordinary people to express themselves with newfound creative freedom,” they wrote. “Beyond the home, image stabilization technology found critical applications in specialized fields, contributing to advancements in areas such as educational media and telemedicine.”</p><h2>The history of camcorders</h2><p>Before the camcorder was invented in 1982, people filming events in the 1970s and early 1980s used two pieces of equipment: a video camera and a separate video cassette recorder (VCR), which were connected by a multipin cable. The camera was about the size of a toaster, and the VCR could be as large as a suitcase. To record, the person operated the camera with one hand and carried the VCR in the other or rested it on a shoulder. The cable transmitted the images from the camera to the cassette.</p><p>The PV-460 was made possible by several groundbreaking innovations, according to the Milestone webpage, one of which dates back to the 1950s.</p><p>In 1956 Italian manufacturer <a href="https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Durst" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Durst</a> released its <a href="https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Durst_Automatica" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Automatica</a>, considered one of the first cameras to use automatic exposure technology. By combining a light meter with the camera’s internal mechanical systems, the technology removed the necessity of calculating exposure settings by hand when the lighting shifted or other conditions changed. The innovation enabled amateur photographers to take decent pictures.</p><p>The next breakthrough technology—autofocus—was invented in 1973 by <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2018/01/28/autofocus-inventor-norman-stauffer-obituary/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Norman Stauffer</a>, a manager of research for <a href="https://www.honeywell.com/us/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Honeywell</a> in Littleton, Colo. It uses a sensor, a control system, and a motor to focus on a selected area. The invention led to the development of early electronic autofocus cameras, which eliminated the need for photographers to manually adjust the lens. Stauffer received the 1990 <a href="https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/award/ieee-masaru-ibuka-consumer-technology-award/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award</a> for his invention.</p><p class="pull-quote">“The release of the PV-460 fundamentally transformed personal videography, enriching the way people captured travel, events, and family memories.” <strong>—Milestone sponsors</strong></p><p><span></span>U.S. inventor <a href="https://www.lemelson.org/" target="_blank">Jerome Lemelson</a> is credited with developing technologies that underpinned the camcorder, according to <a href="https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/jerome-lemelson" target="_blank">MIT</a>. In the 1950s and ’60s, Lemelson filed several patent applications related to video and audio recording devices. In 1980 he was granted patents related to a portable video camera system. In 1982 <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JGo1I9O9ju-Dd5nmtnjcsjXr-d-y6biQZlmuXgOqfKY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.qavk3zi7545" target="_blank">JVC</a> and <a href="https://sony.com/en/" target="_blank">Sony</a> used the technologies to develop what they called the camera/recorder, which became known as a camcorder.</p><p>Sony released the first handheld camcorder in 1983: the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamovie" target="_blank">Betamovie BMC-100P</a>. It used the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax" target="_blank">Betamax</a> videocassette format and could record up to 3.5 hours of footage on 1.27-centimeter cassette tape. The operator rested the 2.5-kilogram camcorder on top of a shoulder to shoot footage. It sold for around US $2,000 at the time (roughly $33,400 today). The machine couldn’t rewind or play back tapes; it could only record.</p><p>Other electronics companies including JVC soon introduced their own models using the VCR format, which eventually replaced Betamax.</p><p>Over time, camcorders became more compact.</p><p>But none of the companies could fix the shaky-footage problem.</p><h2>Solving a shaky problem</h2><p>A team at Panasonic led by researcher <a href="https://www.jpo.go.jp/e/news/koho/archive/125/document/relay_message/11.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mitsuaki Oshima</a> took on the task of image stabilization: detecting and correcting small camera movements, referred to as <em><em>camera shake</em></em>, according to the webpage. Oshima, an IEEE life senior member, is now an honorary Fellow at Panasonic.</p><p>“The movements that needed to be detected and corrected included horizontal, vertical, and rotational motions—specifically pitch, yaw, and roll,” the Milestone sponsors wrote. “Rotational motion, in particular, becomes the dominant factor affecting image stability during high-magnification shooting. Therefore, the development team focused on detecting rotational motion and began developing an angular velocity sensor.”</p><p>An AVS, essentially a gyroscope, detects how quickly an object is changing its orientation in space.</p><p>Sensors capable of detecting angular velocity were large and expensive at the time, making them unsuitable for consumer video cameras, the sponsors wrote. What was needed, they said, was a compact and inexpensive version.</p><p>Oshima and his team built a high-performance, small, low-cost vibration-type gyroscope. The stabilization mechanism included a miniaturized sensor paired with an optical-axis correction mechanism.</p><p>The mechanism adjusts the lens or image sensor to counteract physical shifting and vibrations, ensuring that the light path remains centered on the sensor—which is crucial for maximizing sharpness and quality, the Milestone sponsors wrote.</p><p>“The system detects lens displacement caused by camera shake and immediately compensates for it, ensuring stable video footage,” they wrote. “As a result, the effects of camera shake are minimized, allowing users to capture smooth and steady videos with ease.”</p><p>Without Oshima’s image stabilization technology, the PV-460 wouldn’t have been developed and released in 1988.</p><p>The technology was patented and broadly licensed by other companies. It has become a standard feature in a variety of imaging applications.</p><h2>Awards and accolades</h2><p>The PV-460 gained instant popularity when it debuted in June 1988. It received rave reviews at that year’s <a href="https://www.ces.tech/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Consumer Electronics Show</a>.</p><p>Panasonic received a <a href="https://www.rdworldonline.com/revealing-the-2025-rd-100-awards-winners/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">100 Award</a> in 1989 from <a href="https://www.rdworldonline.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em><em>R&D</em></em> <em><em>World</em></em></a><em> </em>magazine for “the development of a VHS camcorder with an antishake mechanism.”</p><p>Oshima’s research paper, “<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/106892" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">VHS Camcorder With Electronic Image Stabilizer</a>,” and others are available in the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Xplore Digital Library</a>.</p><p><span>To learn more about historical figures in engineering, IEEE Milestones, and IEEE History Center programs and events, check out <em><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/" target="_blank">The Institute’</a>s</em> IEEE Tech History <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/ieee-history" target="_self">collection</a>.<em> IEEE Spectrum</em> also covers aspects of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/tech-history/" target="_blank">tech history</a>. </span></p><h2>Milestone plaque display</h2><p>The Milestone plaque is to be displayed on the ground floor of the Panasonic Museum, which is open to the public. The museum is located near the now-shuttered Panasonic research lab where the technology was developed. The plaque reads:</p><p><em><em>“In 1988 the pioneering PV-460 camcorder equipped with image stabilization for enabling smooth and steady video capture was introduced by Panasonic. By pairing a miniaturized vibrating-structure gyroscope sensor with an optical-axis correction mechanism, the PV-460 eliminated the jitter caused by hand motion. Broad international licensing of this patented scheme made it a standard feature in film and digital cameras, smartphones, and related imaging devices.”</em></em></p><p>Selected by the <a href="https://history.ieee.org/about/ieee-history-committee/" target="_blank">IEEE History Committee</a> and endorsed by the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" target="_blank">IEEE Board of Directors</a>, IEEE Milestones recognize outstanding technical developments around the world that are at least 25 years old. The Milestone program is administered by the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/history-center" target="_blank">IEEE history and heritage group</a>.</p>

Feb 9, 2022

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/andrew-ng-listens-during-the-power-of-data-sooner-than-you-think-global-technology-conference-in-brooklyn-new-york-on-wednes.jpg?id=29206806&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C474"/><br/><br/><p><strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ng" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Andrew Ng</a> has serious street cred</strong> in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at <a href="https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stanford University</a>, cofounded <a href="https://research.google/teams/brain/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Brain</a> in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for <a href="https://ir.baidu.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Baidu</a>, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group. So when he says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence, people listen. And that’s what he told <em>IEEE Spectrum</em> in an exclusive Q&A.</p><hr/><p> Ng’s current efforts are focused on his company <a href="https://landing.ai/about/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Landing AI</a>, which built a platform called LandingLens to help manufacturers improve visual inspection with computer vision. He has also become something of an evangelist for what he calls the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-AZXmwHjo" target="_blank">data-centric AI movement</a>, which he says can yield “small data” solutions to big issues in AI, including model efficiency, accuracy, and bias. </p><p> Andrew Ng on... </p><ul> <li><a href="#big">What’s next for really big models</a></li> <li><a href="#career">The career advice he didn’t listen to</a></li> <li><a href="#defining">Defining the data-centric AI movement</a></li> <li><a href="#synthetic">Synthetic data</a></li> <li><a href="#work">Why Landing AI asks its customers to do the work</a></li> </ul><p> <strong>The great advances in deep learning over the past decade or so have been powered by ever-bigger models crunching ever-bigger amounts of data. Some people argue that that’s an <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/deep-learning-computational-cost" target="_self">unsustainable trajectory</a>. Do you agree that it can’t go on that way?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Andrew Ng: </strong>This is a big question. We’ve seen foundation models in NLP [natural language processing]. I’m excited about NLP models getting even bigger, and also about the potential of building foundation models in computer vision. I think there’s lots of signal to still be exploited in video: We have not been able to build foundation models yet for video because of compute bandwidth and the cost of processing video, as opposed to tokenized text. So I think that this engine of scaling up deep learning algorithms, which has been running for something like 15 years now, still has steam in it. Having said that, it only applies to certain problems, and there’s a set of other problems that need small data solutions. </p><p> <strong>When you say you want a foundation model for computer vision, what do you mean by that?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> This is a term coined by <a href="https://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Percy Liang</a> and <a href="https://crfm.stanford.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">some of my friends at Stanford</a> to refer to very large models, trained on very large data sets, that can be tuned for specific applications. For example, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-ais-powerful-text-generating-tool-is-ready-for-business" target="_self">GPT-3</a> is an example of a foundation model [for NLP]. Foundation models offer a lot of promise as a new paradigm in developing machine learning applications, but also challenges in terms of making sure that they’re reasonably fair and free from bias, especially if many of us will be building on top of them. </p><p> <strong>What needs to happen for someone to build a foundation model for video?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> I think there is a scalability problem. The compute power needed to process the large volume of images for video is significant, and I think that’s why foundation models have arisen first in NLP. Many researchers are working on this, and I think we’re seeing early signs of such models being developed in computer vision. But I’m confident that if a semiconductor maker gave us 10 times more processor power, we could easily find 10 times more video to build such models for vision. </p><p> Having said that, a lot of what’s happened over the past decade is that deep learning has happened in consumer-facing companies that have large user bases, sometimes billions of users, and therefore very large data sets. While that paradigm of machine learning has driven a lot of economic value in consumer software, I find that that recipe of scale doesn’t work for other industries. </p><p> <a href="#top">Back to top</a> </p><p> <strong>It’s funny to hear you say that, because your early work was at a consumer-facing company with millions of users.</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>Over a decade ago, when I proposed starting the <a href="https://research.google/teams/brain/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Brain</a> project to use Google’s compute infrastructure to build very large neural networks, it was a controversial step. One very senior person pulled me aside and warned me that starting Google Brain would be bad for my career. I think he felt that the action couldn’t just be in scaling up, and that I should instead focus on architecture innovation. </p><p class="pull-quote"> “In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.”<br/> —Andrew Ng, CEO & Founder, Landing AI </p><p> I remember when my students and I published the first <a href="https://nips.cc/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NeurIPS</a> workshop paper advocating using <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CUDA</a>, a platform for processing on GPUs, for deep learning—a different senior person in AI sat me down and said, “CUDA is really complicated to program. As a programming paradigm, this seems like too much work.” I did manage to convince him; the other person I did not convince. </p><p> <strong>I expect they’re both convinced now.</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> I think so, yes. </p><p> Over the past year as I’ve been speaking to people about the data-centric AI movement, I’ve been getting flashbacks to when I was speaking to people about deep learning and scalability 10 or 15 years ago. In the past year, I’ve been getting the same mix of “there’s nothing new here” and “this seems like the wrong direction.” </p><p> <a href="#top">Back to top</a> </p><p> <strong>How do you define data-centric AI, and why do you consider it a movement?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> Data-centric AI is the discipline of systematically engineering the data needed to successfully build an AI system. For an AI system, you have to implement some algorithm, say a neural network, in code and then train it on your data set. The dominant paradigm over the last decade was to download the data set while you focus on improving the code. Thanks to that paradigm, over the last decade deep learning networks have improved significantly, to the point where for a lot of applications the code—the neural network architecture—is basically a solved problem. So for many practical applications, it’s now more productive to hold the neural network architecture fixed, and instead find ways to improve the data. </p><p> When I started speaking about this, there were many practitioners who, completely appropriately, raised their hands and said, “Yes, we’ve been doing this for 20 years.” This is the time to take the things that some individuals have been doing intuitively and make it a systematic engineering discipline. </p><p> The data-centric AI movement is much bigger than one company or group of researchers. My collaborators and I organized a <a href="https://neurips.cc/virtual/2021/workshop/21860" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">data-centric AI workshop at NeurIPS</a>, and I was really delighted at the number of authors and presenters that showed up. </p><p> <strong>You often talk about companies or institutions that have only a small amount of data to work with. How can data-centric AI help them?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>You hear a lot about vision systems built with millions of images—I once built a face recognition system using 350 million images. Architectures built for hundreds of millions of images don’t work with only 50 images. But it turns out, if you have 50 really good examples, you can build something valuable, like a defect-inspection system. In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn. </p><p> <strong>When you talk about training a model with just 50 images, does that really mean you’re taking an existing model that was trained on a very large data set and fine-tuning it? Or do you mean a brand new model that’s designed to learn only from that small data set?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>Let me describe what Landing AI does. When doing visual inspection for manufacturers, we often use our own flavor of <a href="https://developers.arcgis.com/python/guide/how-retinanet-works/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">RetinaNet</a>. It is a pretrained model. Having said that, the pretraining is a small piece of the puzzle. What’s a bigger piece of the puzzle is providing tools that enable the manufacturer to pick the right set of images [to use for fine-tuning] and label them in a consistent way. There’s a very practical problem we’ve seen spanning vision, NLP, and speech, where even human annotators don’t agree on the appropriate label. For big data applications, the common response has been: If the data is noisy, let’s just get a lot of data and the algorithm will average over it. But if you can develop tools that flag where the data’s inconsistent and give you a very targeted way to improve the consistency of the data, that turns out to be a more efficient way to get a high-performing system. </p><p class="pull-quote"> “Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity.”<br/> —Andrew Ng </p><p> For example, if you have 10,000 images where 30 images are of one class, and those 30 images are labeled inconsistently, one of the things we do is build tools to draw your attention to the subset of data that’s inconsistent. So you can very quickly relabel those images to be more consistent, and this leads to improvement in performance. </p><p> <strong>Could this focus on high-quality data help with bias in data sets? If you’re able to curate the data more before training?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> Very much so. Many researchers have pointed out that biased data is one factor among many leading to biased systems. There have been many thoughtful efforts to engineer the data. At the NeurIPS workshop, <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~olgarus/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Olga Russakovsky</a> gave a really nice talk on this. At the main NeurIPS conference, I also really enjoyed <a href="https://neurips.cc/virtual/2021/invited-talk/22281" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mary Gray’s presentation,</a> which touched on how data-centric AI is one piece of the solution, but not the entire solution. New tools like <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/datasheets-for-datasets/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Datasheets for Datasets</a> also seem like an important piece of the puzzle. </p><p> One of the powerful tools that data-centric AI gives us is the ability to engineer a subset of the data. Imagine training a machine-learning system and finding that its performance is okay for most of the data set, but its performance is biased for just a subset of the data. If you try to change the whole neural network architecture to improve the performance on just that subset, it’s quite difficult. But if you can engineer a subset of the data you can address the problem in a much more targeted way. </p><p> <strong>When you talk about engineering the data, what do you mean exactly?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>In AI, data cleaning is important, but the way the data has been cleaned has often been in very manual ways. In computer vision, someone may visualize images through a <a href="https://jupyter.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Jupyter notebook</a> and maybe spot the problem, and maybe fix it. But I’m excited about tools that allow you to have a very large data set, tools that draw your attention quickly and efficiently to the subset of data where, say, the labels are noisy. Or to quickly bring your attention to the one class among 100 classes where it would benefit you to collect more data. Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity. </p><p> For example, I once figured out that a speech-recognition system was performing poorly when there was car noise in the background. Knowing that allowed me to collect more data with car noise in the background, rather than trying to collect more data for everything, which would have been expensive and slow. </p><p> <a href="#top">Back to top</a> </p><p> <strong>What about using synthetic data, is that often a good solution?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>I think synthetic data is an important tool in the tool chest of data-centric AI. At the NeurIPS workshop, <a href="https://tensorlab.cms.caltech.edu/users/anima/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Anima Anandkumar</a> gave a great talk that touched on synthetic data. I think there are important uses of synthetic data that go beyond just being a preprocessing step for increasing the data set for a learning algorithm. I’d love to see more tools to let developers use synthetic data generation as part of the closed loop of iterative machine learning development. </p><p> <strong>Do you mean that synthetic data would allow you to try the model on more data sets?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>Not really. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to detect defects in a smartphone casing. There are many different types of defects on smartphones. It could be a scratch, a dent, pit marks, discoloration of the material, other types of blemishes. If you train the model and then find through error analysis that it’s doing well overall but it’s performing poorly on pit marks, then synthetic data generation allows you to address the problem in a more targeted way. You could generate more data just for the pit-mark category. </p><p class="pull-quote"> “In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models.”<br/> —Andrew Ng </p><p> Synthetic data generation is a very powerful tool, but there are many simpler tools that I will often try first. Such as data augmentation, improving labeling consistency, or just asking a factory to collect more data. </p><p> <a href="#top">Back to top</a> </p><p> <strong>To make these issues more concrete, can you walk me through an example? When a company approaches <a href="https://landing.ai/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Landing AI</a> and says it has a problem with visual inspection, how do you onboard them and work toward deployment?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>When a customer approaches us we usually have a conversation about their inspection problem and look at a few images to verify that the problem is feasible with computer vision. Assuming it is, we ask them to upload the data to the <a href="https://landing.ai/platform/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LandingLens</a> platform. We often advise them on the methodology of data-centric AI and help them label the data. </p><p> One of the foci of Landing AI is to empower manufacturing companies to do the machine learning work themselves. A lot of our work is making sure the software is fast and easy to use. Through the iterative process of machine learning development, we advise customers on things like how to train models on the platform, when and how to improve the labeling of data so the performance of the model improves. Our training and software supports them all the way through deploying the trained model to an edge device in the factory. </p><p> <strong>How do you deal with changing needs? If products change or lighting conditions change in the factory, can the model keep up?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng:</strong> It varies by manufacturer. There is data drift in many contexts. But there are some manufacturers that have been running the same manufacturing line for 20 years now with few changes, so they don’t expect changes in the next five years. Those stable environments make things easier. For other manufacturers, we provide tools to flag when there’s a significant data-drift issue. I find it really important to empower manufacturing customers to correct data, retrain, and update the model. Because if something changes and it’s 3 a.m. in the United States, I want them to be able to adapt their learning algorithm right away to maintain operations. </p><p> In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models. The challenge is, how do you do that without Landing AI having to hire 10,000 machine learning specialists? </p><p> <strong>So you’re saying that to make it scale, you have to empower customers to do a lot of the training and other work.</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>Yes, exactly! This is an industry-wide problem in AI, not just in manufacturing. Look at health care. Every hospital has its own slightly different format for electronic health records. How can every hospital train its own custom AI model? Expecting every hospital’s IT personnel to invent new neural-network architectures is unrealistic. The only way out of this dilemma is to build tools that empower the customers to build their own models by giving them tools to engineer the data and express their domain knowledge. That’s what Landing AI is executing in computer vision, and the field of AI needs other teams to execute this in other domains. </p><p> <strong>Is there anything else you think it’s important for people to understand about the work you’re doing or the data-centric AI movement?</strong> </p><p> <strong>Ng: </strong>In the last decade, the biggest shift in AI was a shift to deep learning. I think it’s quite possible that in this decade the biggest shift will be to data-centric AI. With the maturity of today’s neural network architectures, I think for a lot of the practical applications the bottleneck will be whether we can efficiently get the data we need to develop systems that work well. The data-centric AI movement has tremendous energy and momentum across the whole community. I hope more researchers and developers will jump in and work on it. </p><p> <a href="#top">Back to top</a> </p><p><em>This article appears in the April 2022 print issue as “Andrew Ng, AI Minimalist</em><em>.”</em></p>

Feb 8, 2022

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/layered-rendering-of-colorful-semiconductor-wafers-with-a-bright-white-light-sitting-on-one.jpg?id=29285079&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C156"/><br/><br/><p>The end of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/on-beyond-moores-law-4-new-laws-of-computing" target="_self">Moore’s Law</a> is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-introduces-the-worlds-first-2nm-node-chip" target="_self">miniaturize transistors</a> and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/cerebras-giant-ai-chip-now-has-a-trillions-more-transistors" target="_self">pack as many of them as possible into chips</a>. So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process.</p><p>Samsung, for instance, is <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/processing-in-dram-accelerates-ai" target="_self">adding AI to its memory chips</a> to enable processing in memory, thereby saving energy and speeding up machine learning. Speaking of speed, Google’s TPU V4 AI chip has <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/heres-how-googles-tpu-v4-ai-chip-stacked-up-in-training-tests" target="_self">doubled its processing power</a> compared with that of its previous version.</p><p>But AI holds still more promise and potential for the semiconductor industry. To better understand how AI is set to revolutionize chip design, we spoke with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-gorr-phd" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Heather Gorr</a>, senior product manager for <a href="https://www.mathworks.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MathWorks</a>’ MATLAB platform.</p><p><strong>How is AI currently being used to design the next generation of chips?</strong></p><p><strong>Heather Gorr:</strong> AI is such an important technology because it’s involved in most parts of the cycle, including the design and manufacturing process. There’s a lot of important applications here, even in the general process engineering where we want to optimize things. I think defect detection is a big one at all phases of the process, especially in manufacturing. But even thinking ahead in the design process, [AI now plays a significant role] when you’re designing the light and the sensors and all the different components. There’s a lot of anomaly detection and fault mitigation that you really want to consider.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25 rm-float-left" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Portrait of a woman with blonde-red hair smiling at the camera" class="rm-shortcode rm-resized-image" data-rm-shortcode-id="1f18a02ccaf51f5c766af2ebc4af18e1" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="2dc00" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/portrait-of-a-woman-with-blonde-red-hair-smiling-at-the-camera.jpg?id=29288554&width=980" style="max-width: 100%"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption..." style="max-width: 100%;">Heather Gorr</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..." style="max-width: 100%;">MathWorks</small></p><p>Then, thinking about the logistical modeling that you see in any industry, there is always planned downtime that you want to mitigate; but you also end up having unplanned downtime. So, looking back at that historical data of when you’ve had those moments where maybe it took a bit longer than expected to manufacture something, you can take a look at all of that data and use AI to try to identify the proximate cause or to see something that might jump out even in the processing and design phases. We think of AI oftentimes as a predictive tool, or as a robot doing something, but a lot of times you get a lot of insight from the data through AI.</p><p><strong>What are the benefits of using AI for chip design?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr:</strong> Historically, we’ve seen a lot of physics-based modeling, which is a very intensive process. We want to do a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_order_reduction" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reduced order model</a>, where instead of solving such a computationally expensive and extensive model, we can do something a little cheaper. You could create a surrogate model, so to speak, of that physics-based model, use the data, and then do your parameter sweeps, your optimizations, your <a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/monte-carlo-simulation" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Monte Carlo simulations</a> using the surrogate model. That takes a lot less time computationally than solving the physics-based equations directly. So, we’re seeing that benefit in many ways, including the efficiency and economy that are the results of iterating quickly on the experiments and the simulations that will really help in the design.</p><p><strong>So it’s like having a digital twin in a sense?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr:</strong> Exactly. That’s pretty much what people are doing, where you have the physical system model and the experimental data. Then, in conjunction, you have this other model that you could tweak and tune and try different parameters and experiments that let sweep through all of those different situations and come up with a better design in the end.</p><p><strong>So, it’s going to be more efficient and, as you said, cheaper?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr:</strong> Yeah, definitely. Especially in the experimentation and design phases, where you’re trying different things. That’s obviously going to yield dramatic cost savings if you’re actually manufacturing and producing [the chips]. You want to simulate, test, experiment as much as possible without making something using the actual process engineering.</p><p><strong>We’ve talked about the benefits. How about the drawbacks?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr: </strong>The [AI-based experimental models] tend to not be as accurate as physics-based models. Of course, that’s why you do many simulations and parameter sweeps. But that’s also the benefit of having that digital twin, where you can keep that in mind—it’s not going to be as accurate as that precise model that we’ve developed over the years.</p><p>Both chip design and manufacturing are system intensive; you have to consider every little part. And that can be really challenging. It’s a case where you might have models to predict something and different parts of it, but you still need to bring it all together.</p><p>One of the other things to think about too is that you need the data to build the models. You have to incorporate data from all sorts of different sensors and different sorts of teams, and so that heightens the challenge.</p><p><strong>How can engineers use AI to better prepare and extract insights from hardware or sensor data?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr: </strong>We always think about using AI to predict something or do some robot task, but you can use AI to come up with patterns and pick out things you might not have noticed before on your own. People will use AI when they have high-frequency data coming from many different sensors, and a lot of times it’s useful to explore the frequency domain and things like data synchronization or resampling. Those can be really challenging if you’re not sure where to start.</p><p>One of the things I would say is, use the tools that are available. There’s a vast community of people working on these things, and you can find lots of examples [of applications and techniques] on <a href="https://github.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">GitHub</a> or <a href="https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MATLAB Central</a>, where people have shared nice examples, even little apps they’ve created. I think many of us are buried in data and just not sure what to do with it, so definitely take advantage of what’s already out there in the community. You can explore and see what makes sense to you, and bring in that balance of domain knowledge and the insight you get from the tools and AI.</p><p><strong>What should engineers and designers consider wh</strong><strong>en using AI for chip design?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr:</strong> Think through what problems you’re trying to solve or what insights you might hope to find, and try to be clear about that. Consider all of the different components, and document and test each of those different parts. Consider all of the people involved, and explain and hand off in a way that is sensible for the whole team.</p><p><strong>How do you think AI will affect chip designers’ jobs?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr:</strong> It’s going to free up a lot of human capital for more advanced tasks. We can use AI to reduce waste, to optimize the materials, to optimize the design, but then you still have that human involved whenever it comes to decision-making. I think it’s a great example of people and technology working hand in hand. It’s also an industry where all people involved—even on the manufacturing floor—need to have some level of understanding of what’s happening, so this is a great industry for advancing AI because of how we test things and how we think about them before we put them on the chip.</p><p><strong>How do you envision the future of AI and chip design?</strong></p><p><strong>Gorr</strong><strong>:</strong> It’s very much dependent on that human element—involving people in the process and having that interpretable model. We can do many things with the mathematical minutiae of modeling, but it comes down to how people are using it, how everybody in the process is understanding and applying it. Communication and involvement of people of all skill levels in the process are going to be really important. We’re going to see less of those superprecise predictions and more transparency of information, sharing, and that digital twin—not only using AI but also using our human knowledge and all of the work that many people have done over the years.</p>

Feb 7, 2022

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-golden-square-package-holds-a-small-processor-sitting-on-top-is-a-metal-square-with-mit-etched-into-it.jpg?id=29281587&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C156"/><br/><br/><p>Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality.</p><p>IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibms-envisons-the-road-to-quantum-computing-like-an-apollo-mission" target="_self">reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023</a>, leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to attain a better path toward scalability.</p><p>Now researchers at <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-021-01187-w" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT have been able to both reduce the size of the qubits</a> and done so in a way that reduces the interference that occurs between neighboring qubits. The MIT researchers have increased the number of superconducting qubits that can be added onto a device by a factor of 100.</p><p>“We are addressing both qubit miniaturization and quality,” said <a href="https://equs.mit.edu/william-d-oliver/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">William Oliver</a>, the director for the <a href="https://cqe.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Center for Quantum Engineering</a> at MIT. “Unlike conventional transistor scaling, where only the number really matters, for qubits, large numbers are not sufficient, they must also be high-performance. Sacrificing performance for qubit number is not a useful trade in quantum computing. They must go hand in hand.”</p><p>The key to this big increase in qubit density and reduction of interference comes down to the use of two-dimensional materials, in particular the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The MIT researchers demonstrated that a few atomic monolayers of hBN can be stacked to form the insulator in the capacitors of a superconducting qubit.</p><p>Just like other capacitors, the capacitors in these superconducting circuits take the form of a sandwich in which an insulator material is sandwiched between two metal plates. The big difference for these capacitors is that the superconducting circuits can operate only at extremely low temperatures—less than 0.02 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C).</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image rm-resized-container rm-resized-container-25 rm-float-left" data-rm-resized-container="25%" style="float: left;"> <img alt="Golden dilution refrigerator hanging vertically" class="rm-shortcode rm-resized-image" data-rm-shortcode-id="694399af8a1c345e51a695ff73909eda" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="6c615" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/golden-dilution-refrigerator-hanging-vertically.jpg?id=29281593&width=980" style="max-width: 100%"/> <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption..." style="max-width: 100%;">Superconducting qubits are measured at temperatures as low as 20 millikelvin in a dilution refrigerator.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit..." style="max-width: 100%;">Nathan Fiske/MIT</small></p><p>In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications. To get around these material shortcomings, most superconducting circuits use what are called coplanar capacitors. In these capacitors, the plates are positioned laterally to one another, rather than on top of one another.</p><p>As a result, the intrinsic silicon substrate below the plates and to a smaller degree the vacuum above the plates serve as the capacitor dielectric. Intrinsic silicon is chemically pure and therefore has few defects, and the large size dilutes the electric field at the plate interfaces, all of which leads to a low-loss capacitor. The lateral size of each plate in this open-face design ends up being quite large (typically 100 by 100 micrometers) in order to achieve the required capacitance.</p><p>In an effort to move away from the large lateral configuration, the MIT researchers embarked on a search for an insulator that has very few defects and is compatible with superconducting capacitor plates.</p><p>“We chose to study hBN because it is the most widely used insulator in 2D material research due to its cleanliness and chemical inertness,” said colead author <a href="https://equs.mit.edu/joel-wang/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Joel Wang</a>, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics. </p><p>On either side of the hBN, the MIT researchers used the 2D superconducting material, niobium diselenide. One of the trickiest aspects of fabricating the capacitors was working with the niobium diselenide, which oxidizes in seconds when exposed to air, according to Wang. This necessitates that the assembly of the capacitor occur in a glove box filled with argon gas.</p><p>While this would seemingly complicate the scaling up of the production of these capacitors, Wang doesn’t regard this as a limiting factor.</p><p>“What determines the quality factor of the capacitor are the two interfaces between the two materials,” said Wang. “Once the sandwich is made, the two interfaces are “sealed” and we don’t see any noticeable degradation over time when exposed to the atmosphere.”</p><p>This lack of degradation is because around 90 percent of the electric field is contained within the sandwich structure, so the oxidation of the outer surface of the niobium diselenide does not play a significant role anymore. This ultimately makes the capacitor footprint much smaller, and it accounts for the reduction in cross talk between the neighboring qubits.</p><p>“The main challenge for scaling up the fabrication will be the wafer-scale growth of hBN and 2D superconductors like [niobium diselenide], and how one can do wafer-scale stacking of these films,” added Wang.</p><p>Wang believes that this research has shown 2D hBN to be a good insulator candidate for superconducting qubits. He says that the groundwork the MIT team has done will serve as a road map for using other hybrid 2D materials to build superconducting circuits.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

The same low-quality AI patterns kept showing up in submissions even after GNOME updated its review guidelines in December.

Jul 31, 2026

Kitty terminal's functionality can be enhanced with kittens. You can create your own or use the default ones.

Jul 30, 2026

Built on Zephyr RTOS and licensed under GPL-3.0, the firmware is scheduled to ship first on the Keychron G6 HE next year.

Jul 30, 2026

Ubutnu 26.10 is shaping up nicely.

Jul 30, 2026

Don't get your hopes high; there are many rough edges and incomplete features.

Jul 30, 2026

OrionChat fits a specific group of users who are already running Ollama and mostly interact with local models on a personal machine.

Jul 30, 2026

The GCC Steering Committee adopted a new AI policy this week, with a review planned for early 2027.

Jul 29, 2026

They have hired someone to bring the GOG GALAXY client to the platform.

Jul 29, 2026

A new virtualization stack is being introduced that gets updated every six months.

Jul 28, 2026

Samuel Tunick faces up to five years in prison after the passcode he gave CBP agents wiped his phone.

Jul 28, 2026

It gives an IDE feel with lots of features that fits the workflow of developers working on technical documentation of their projects.

Jul 28, 2026

They point to MCP, built by two engineers in London, that ended up under US-based governance.

Jul 27, 2026

It's been rewritten from scratch to provide some good gains.

Jul 27, 2026

SunFounder's flagship Pironman case now ships with a 4.3" touchscreen, a camera mount, and room for an AI accelerator, built for Raspberry Pi 5 owners who want to experiment with local AI, not just add cooling and storage.

Jul 26, 2026

Old school style, old school vibes. SonicTree is for people who like browse music files in folders the way they are stored on the disk.

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png 1920w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?resize=250,141 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?resize=400,225 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?resize=800,450 800w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?resize=1536,864 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1131638" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/circuit-bending-but-make-it-midi/introducing-midi-to-circuit-bending-10-5-screenshot-1/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png" data-orig-size="1920,1080" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="Introducing MIDI To Circuit Bending! 10-5 screenshot (1)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Introducing-MIDI-To-Circuit-Bending-10-5-screenshot-1.png?w=800" /></div>Circuit bending is a chaotic art. At its simplest, it can just involve making connections between random points on a circuit board to create weird sounds in musical hardware. Or, <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/circuit-bending-but-make-it-midi/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="451" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp 2040w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?resize=250,141 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?resize=400,225 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?resize=800,451 800w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?resize=1536,866 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1131613" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/child-friendly-music-player-uses-rfid/mememe_munecos-dj2rwg9o_z20ddlt/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp" data-orig-size="2040,1150" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mememe_munecos.Dj2rwg9o_Z20dDLt-e1785557184513.webp?w=800" /></div>[David] has a young child who is clever enough to use a computer to play music, but he doesn&#8217;t quite want to hand over the mouse just yet. Thus, he <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/child-friendly-music-player-uses-rfid/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="484" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg 3000w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?resize=250,151 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?resize=400,242 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?resize=800,484 800w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?resize=1536,929 1536w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?resize=2048,1239 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1115452" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/05/28/the-frikkin-lasers-contest-starts-now/lasers-5/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg" data-orig-size="3000,1815" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="Lasers" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lasers.jpg?w=800" /></div>Apparently you all love lasers just as much as we do. We put out a challenge to use, build, or otherwise abuse our favorite coherent light sources, and you responded. <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/congratulations-to-the-frikkin-laser-winners/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="722" height="413" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png?w=722" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png 722w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png?resize=250,143 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png?resize=400,229 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 722px) 100vw, 722px" data-attachment-id="1134117" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/new-file-manager-is-c64s-answer-to-norton-commander/mfcwt_feat/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png" data-orig-size="722,413" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="mfcwt_feat" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/mfcwt_feat.png?w=722" /></div>Norton was always a PC company &#8212; Norton Commander, the file manager that launched a thousand clones, was only ever available for DOS, like the rest of the company&#8217;s offerings <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/new-file-manager-is-c64s-answer-to-norton-commander/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="484" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg 3000w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?resize=250,151 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?resize=400,242 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?resize=800,484 800w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?resize=1536,929 1536w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?resize=2048,1239 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1134149" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/the-16k-display-that-ate-las-vegas/sphere-8/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg" data-orig-size="3000,1815" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="Sphere" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Sphere.jpg?w=800" /></div>You may have a 4K television. Perhaps you have even bought an 8K screen, despite the shortage of things worth watching in 8K. A 16K display is, today, a rarity. <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/the-16k-display-that-ate-las-vegas/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png 866w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png?resize=250,141 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png?resize=400,225 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png?resize=800,450 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1131590" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/get-a-remote-terminal-with-one-binary-one-url-and-zero-config/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png" data-orig-size="866,487" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/reach-machines-behind-nat-from-a-browser-v0-banner.png?w=800" /></div>Launch a single static binary executable, send someone a QR code or URL (or failing that, text a numerical code or shout it across a room), and they&#8217;ll get an <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/get-a-remote-terminal-with-one-binary-one-url-and-zero-config/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<div><img width="800" height="529" src="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png?w=800" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 15px;" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png 1280w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png?resize=250,165 250w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png?resize=400,264 400w, https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png?resize=800,529 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" data-attachment-id="1134123" data-permalink="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/spotting-emacs-in-the-wild/emacsmedia_feat/" data-orig-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png" data-orig-size="1280,846" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="emacsmedia_feat" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/emacsmedia_feat.png?w=800" /></div>Emacs is one of the big classic text editors, right up there next to vi. It&#8217;s famous for its interface and its ubiquity across the *nix world. It&#8217;s such a <a href="https://hackaday.com/2026/08/03/spotting-emacs-in-the-wild/" class="read-more">&#8230;read more</a>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Sitting upright can influence your mind</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/better-posture-linked-to-better-decision-making-and-mood-1283327/">Better Posture Linked to Better Decision Making and Mood</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>A new review takes a closer look at the molecular mechanisms</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/less-protein-not-more-may-lead-to-healthier-aging-1283315/">Less Protein, Not More, May Lead to Healthier Aging</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The brain makes its bed long before we dream, and the neurons don’t call all the shots</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/how-dreaming-drains-your-energy-1283306/">How Dreaming Drains Your Energy</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Sometimes you’re the predator, sometimes you’re the prey</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/this-ichthyosaur-chomped-a-pterosaur-then-got-chomped-by-something-bigger-1283298/">This Ichthyosaur Chomped a Pterosaur—Then Got Chomped by Something Bigger</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>It’s not always a bad thing, though</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/how-invasive-rats-mess-with-coral-reef-food-webs-1283294/">How Invasive Rats Mess with Coral Reef Food Webs</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>A new technique reveals human evolution was rife with interbreeding</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/youre-carrying-ghost-dna-from-extinct-hominins-1283291/">You’re Carrying “Ghost DNA” From Extinct Hominins</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The fungal puppet master has been living a secret life</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/the-bizarre-life-cycle-of-zombie-ant-fungus-gets-a-new-twist-1283287/">The Bizarre Life Cycle of “Zombie-Ant” Fungus Gets a New Twist</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>The features of fish that have passed through the Suez Canal provide clues</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/which-fish-species-will-invade-the-mediterranean-next-1283283/">Which Fish Species Will Invade the Mediterranean Next?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>For women of every race, age, and size</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/high-blood-pressure-in-pregnant-women-is-rising-across-the-country-1283279/">High Blood Pressure in Pregnant Women Is Rising Across the Country</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is requiring service members to screen for low testosterone levels. Ironically, the military lifestyle itself is more likely to lower T levels.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://nautil.us/more-testosterone-wont-make-a-better-soldier-or-a-tougher-man-aggression-and-strength-drive-t-levels-not-the-other-way-around-1283226/">More Testosterone Won’t Make a Better Soldier or a Tougher Man—Aggression and Strength Drive T Levels, Not the Other Way Around</a> appeared first on <a href="https://nautil.us">Nautilus</a>.</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The Arctic is heating faster than the rest of the planet. New data illustrate how dire that is</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Dry conditions and climate change are putting forests across the country at risk for disaster</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>These deaths were reported by Michigan, which has seen more than 11,000 cases of cyclosporiasis emerge since late June</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>These proposed changes have seen significant bipartisan pushback and have been criticized by scientists across disciplines</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>The bright, red-orange stain on Antarctica&rsquo;s ice-covered landscape may trace back to ancient oceans</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>Some female daddy longlegs will perform fellatio, perhaps to avoid potential violence from males, while males of another species entice females with a secretion on their penises</p>

Aug 3, 2026

<p>An outbreak of Cyclospora infections tied to produce spreads across multiple states as new research challenges the protein maxxing craze</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>A high-profile court case is calling attention to this rare and understudied condition</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>An M.I.T. Ph.D. student and two University of California system cryptographers used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra in different ways, raising new questions about independent discovery and scientific credit</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>While &ldquo;protein maxxing&rdquo; is all the rage, reducing your protein intake could add years to your life</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>Lakes of liquid methane on Titan, Saturn&rsquo;s largest moon, could offer exhilarating&mdash;and terrifying&mdash;opportunities for otherworldly surfing</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>Frothy rock floating on the ocean near Papua New Guinea is the sign scientists needed that, hidden from view, an underwater volcano was erupting</p>

Jul 31, 2026

<p>Historian Craig Fehrman unpacks the science, politics and human stories behind one of America&rsquo;s most famous expeditions</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<p>David Haskell brings readers through millions of years of botanical history for his latest book, <i>How Flowers Made Our World</i></p>

Jul 30, 2026

<p>Centuries-old DNA that was found in these mummies belongs to an extinct viral lineage of smallpox that was brought across the Atlantic during European colonization of the Americas</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<p>Scientists analyzing modern genomes may have found a long-lost branch of the human family tree</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<p>The U.S. has been pummeled with heat waves this summer. Here&rsquo;s how hot overnight temperatures can get in the way of a good night&rsquo;s rest&mdash;in three charts</p>

Jul 30, 2026

<p>Space agencies around the globe are coordinating missions to visit the asteroid Apophis during a close encounter with Earth in 2029</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>The extreme conditions of atomic bomb explosions create &ldquo;uncontrolled microexperiments&rdquo; that, in Hiroshima, forged a never-before-seen metallic alloy</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>Many of these structures date to around C.E. 100&ndash;300, during the time of the Aquiry civilization, and may have been used for ceremonial purposes</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>A newly discovered change in ribosomal RNA makes protein production more precise, potentially safeguarding these cephalopods&rsquo; complex nervous systems</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>Giant black holes adrift in deep space are normally invisible&mdash;unless they&rsquo;re dining on stars</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>A private spacecraft launched to boost the decaying orbit of NASA&rsquo;s Swift Observatory is now suffering from potentially mission-ending malfunctions</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>Smell can bring back vivid childhood memories&mdash;the so-called Proust&rsquo;s madeleine phenomenon&mdash;and neuroscientists now think they know why</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>New work explains how avocado trees coordinate a complex reproductive strategy, switching every day between male and female</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p><i>SciAm</i> books editor Bri Kane shares her favorite science books for every summer mood</p>

Jul 29, 2026

<p>Discovered by an amateur mathematician in 2022, this strange construct can tile an infinite surface without repeating. But can it be useful in the real world?</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<p>Physicists, mathematicians and philosophers have been exploring the possibility of going forward to the future or back to the past</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<p>Neuroscientists show how the brain weighs effort against reward when we're mentally fatigued</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<p>This quake, which has caused damage to several roads and buildings, occurred along a strike-slip fault</p>

Jul 28, 2026

<p>After decades of hints and speculation, scientists have at last unveiled the hidden companion to the iconic star Betelgeuse</p>

Jul 27, 2026

<p>In searches for past and present Martian life, some scientists say we&rsquo;ve been too cautious to see what&rsquo;s right in front of us</p>

Jul 27, 2026

<p>Magnetoreception is one of the most controversial animal senses. And several bee species might have it</p>

Jul 27, 2026

<p>From ecohorror to science-inspired poetry, discover the books <i>Scientific American</i> staffers are recommending this summer</p>

Jul 26, 2026

<p>Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli painted Simonetta Vespucci as Venus rising from the waves. Now scientists think they&rsquo;ve solved how she died</p>

Jul 25, 2026

<p>When the roads get crowded, many drivers start changing lanes. Mathematics suggests this intuition is typically wrong</p>

Jul 25, 2026

<p>Starship demonstrated key abilities on its path to becoming a fully reusable transport to take astronauts to the moon</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>This biodegradable textile is alive and can host engineered microbes that can change its color or add UV protection</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>After fatal crashes in which occupants or rescuers could not open Tesla doors, federal regulators are considering rules that would require obvious mechanical releases&mdash;but any new standard could take years</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Thousands of people have gotten sick from <i>Cyclospora</i>. Experts can&rsquo;t agree whether the end is in sight</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>The European continent is facing a dual reckoning this summer&mdash;extreme heat is killing thousands and draining its rivers, soils and reservoirs at a record pace</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Joan Birman popularized the Burau representation problem decades ago. Now she and two colleagues have a proof that reveals brand new insights into the geometry of braids</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Smell is one of the most complex and least understood senses</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Using the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, astronomers are beginning the largest and deepest survey of the sky. What will they see?</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Could sunlight actually improve your health? New research suggests we may need to rethink total sun avoidance</p>

Jul 24, 2026

<p>Thousands of shipping containers vanish every year&mdash;what becomes of them?</p>

Jul 23, 2026

<p>Iran&rsquo;s Pickaxe Mountain, or <i>Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La </i>in Persian, is part of a volcanic arc that formed tens of millions of years ago and is made of a tough-to-penetrate rock</p>

Jul 23, 2026

<p>The history of testicular transplants is long and often sordid, but this successful procedure offers hope for survivors of cancer and other diseases that affect fertility</p>

Jul 23, 2026

<p>If approved, this deal would give SpaceX hundreds of acres that are currently part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for private land</p>

Jul 23, 2026

<p>During a lost &lsquo;golden age&rsquo; of language, humans may have spoken tens of thousands of different tongues, a new study suggests</p>