IEEE Spectrum

As technology evolves at warp speed, so must engineers

Will metamaterials improve optical chips?

Kamigami is a fast, durable, and easy-to-build hexapod that you can buy for under $50

Software that has proven itself as capable as many human data scientists could speed up the Big Data revolution

Biocompatible optical fibers could deliver light inside human tissue

The new laser center will house the most powerful laser on Earth

Jason Matheny, former leader of the Office for Anticipating Surprise, hopes to cast a wide net to help solve spy-agency problems

Utility-scale solar projects are poorly sited from an environmental perspective, say scientists

Getting a drone for the holidays? You may have to register it with the government

Deep blue lights could make smartphones, flat panel displays more energy effficient

Automated crowd-counting software can reduce the time needed from up to a week to just half an hour

Why and how we're looking back at a decade's worth of IT debacles

Trying to replace multiple systems with one can lead to none

Explore the many ways in which IT failures have squandered money, wasted time, and generally disrupted people’s lives

Reality takes a back seat to designers' imaginings in the 2015 Electrolux Challenge

It has to, now that its diesels are dead. Maybe it can make good on its claims of an impending battery breakthrough

The best robot videos of the week are here!

A small reversible gas generator could solve soft robotics' actuation problem

Unique geometry of carbon nanotubes provides basis for a flexible pressure sensor

Most mental health apps aren't clinically validated

Flexible graphene-coated fabric is more sensitive to gas molecules than those built on a solid substrate

Robots falling over is an inevitability, so let's teach them how to do it without smashing themselves into pieces

Terahertz pulses could help compact devices out-accelerate building-size machines

Another diversity push starts at Pinterest

You can't hide from MIT's microwaves, which will spot you on the other side of a wall while slowly cooking you

A specialized processor analyzes entire genomes of desperately ill babies in record time

New insights into how metal ions move could make better resistive RAM

Engineers explain Qualcomm’s SceneDetect ahead of the release of the smartphone processor that runs it

Three separate research teams offer novel ways of producing skyrmions that bring them closer to real-world applications

QRoSS can bounce around and then extend four legs to walk over rough terrain

Australian scientists will look for industry partners to help move toward a million-qubit processor

All autonomous vehicle makers will be on the hook for mistakes, not just Volvo

This week's best robot videos are here!

Stimulating cardiac tissue with light points the way toward an optogenetic pacemaker

The world's largest automaker plans to make some of its cars capable of autonomous highway driving by 2020

Watson goes west looking to make some new friends. It can start in its neighborhood

Device using a silver nanowire can produce a current from light

$1700 will get you 16 lenses, 52 megapixels, and a lot of clever computing in a box the size of a smart phone

You wouldn't want to try this with any other drone

New report shows that the foreign-born account for an increasing share of a growing science and engineering workforce

Anodes built from mushrooms could make batteries greener

An Israeli team is the first to show a launch contract, officially extending the race to 2017

Worst-case scenarios could involve blackouts, meltdowns

The ITU is sorting through likely approaches to the next-generation mobile standard

Researchers discover a way to create a circuit that changes over time and now are looking for an application

The defense agency announces funding for 7 projects under its new ElectRx program

Physicists showed that subatomic particles oscillate between types, a blow to the Standard Model

Spiders use silk tethers to help them make controlled jumps, and now robots do too

The new transistor consumes 90 percent less power than conventional devices