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Imagine you’re at a bustling dinner party filled with laughter, music, and clinking silverware. You’re trying to follow a conversation across the table, but every word feels like it’s wrapped in noise. For most people, these types of party scenarios, where it’s difficult to filter out extraneous sounds and focus on a single source, are an occasional annoyance. For millions with hearing loss, they’re a daily challenge—and not just in busy settings.Today’s hearing aids aren’t great at determining which sounds to amplify and which to igno

Thanks to Hollywood, whenever I think of a Dictaphone, my imagination immediately jumps to a mid-20th-century office, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing ad copy into a desktop machine. A perfectly coiffed woman from the secretarial pool then takes the recordings and neatly types them up, with carbon copies of course.I had no idea the Dictaphone actually had its roots in the 19th century and a rivalry between two early tech giants: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And although it took decades to take hold in the modern office, it found novel uses in other fields.Who invented the Dictaphone?The Dictaphone was born from the competition and the cooperation of Bell and Edison and

The Trump administration has given corporations plenty of convenient excuses to retreat from their climate commitments, with its moves to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, roll back emissions regulations, and scale back clean energy incentives.But will the world’s largest corporations follow its lead?Some multinational companies have indeed scaled back. For instance, Wells Fargo dropped its goal for the companies the bank finances to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, saying the conditions necessary for meeting that goal, such as policy certainty,

If a data center is moving in next door, you probably live in the United States. More than half of all upcoming global data centers—as indicated by land purchased for data centers not yet announced, those under construction, and those whose plans are public—will be developed in the United States.And these figures are likely underselling the near-term data-center dominance of the United States. Power usage varies widely among data centers, depending on land availability and whether the facility will provide x

When it comes to viewing nebulae, galaxies, and other deep-sky objects, amateur astronomers on a budget have had two options. They can view with the naked eye through a telescope and perceive these spectacular objects as faint smudges that don’t even begin to capture their majesty, or they can capture long-exposure images with astrocameras and display the results on a view screen or computer, which robs the immediacy of the stargazing experience.Stand-alone telescope eyepieces with active light amplification do exist for a real-time viewing, but commercial products are pricey, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars. I wanted something I could use for the public-astronomy observat

In a few days, Las Vegas will be inundated with engineers, executives, investors, and members of the press—including me—for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest tech events of the year. If you can dream it, there’s a good chance it’ll be on display at CES 2026 (though admittedly, much of this tech won’t necessarily make it to the mainstream). There will be a range of AI toys, AI notetakers, and “AI companions,” exoskeletons and humanoid robots, and health tech to track your hormones, brain activity, and...

I know now how the sparks can climb,in broadening arcs of ions—the heat they grow inside themselveslike some permission or belief.But at ten, it seemed mystical;their frown, glowing, then invisible.Gone. Save the odor of ozone.I was young and scared and alone.But the buzz and brightness begananew in darker shades of blue. Thenelectrons leaping spoke to me,not in words, but in dignity:how they escaped the box where theywere born. Joined in a plasma haze,they rose unafraid. So it seemed.I imagined them as sunbeams,th

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjoy today’s videos! I always love seeing robots progress from research projects to commercial products.

When Sergey Antonovich rediscovered a childhood passion for music, he found an unexpected application for his skills as an embedded systems engineer: building bespoke digital accordions.Antonovich admits the accordion isn’t the coolest instrument. It was chosen for him by his mother when he was 8, and he quickly lost interest as a teenager. While growing up close to Moscow, his adolescent passions were instead channeled into electronics and tinkering with gadgets in after-school classes. This led to a career working on environmental-monitoring devices, sensors for commercial drones, and most recently, sensor systems at autonomous-vehicle develop

Every September as we plan our January tech forecast issue, IEEE Spectrum’s editors survey their beats and seek out promising projects that could solve seemingly intractable problems or transform entire industries.Often these projects fly under the radar of the popular technology press, which these days seems more interested in the personalities driving Big Tech companies than in the technology itself. We go our own way here, getting out into the field to bring you news of the hidden gems that genuinely—as the IEEE motto goes—advance technology for the benefit of humanity.A look back at th