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On a blustery November day, a Cessna turboprop flew over Pennsylvania at 5,000 meters, in crosswinds of up to 70 knots—nearly as fast as the little plane was flying. But the bumpy conditions didn’t thwart its mission: to wirelessly beam power down to receivers on the ground as it flew by.The test flight marked the first time power has been beamed from a moving aircraft. It was conducted by the Ashburn, Virginia-based startup Overview Energy, which emerged from stealth mode in December by announcing the feat.But the greater purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the feasibility of a much grander ambition: to beam power from space to Earth. Overview plans to launch s

For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium, planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world’s

Earlier this week, Nvidia surprise-announced their new Vera Rubin architecture (no relation to the recently unveiled telescope) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The new platform, set to reach customers later this year, is advertised to offer a ten-fold reduction in inference costs and a four-fold reduction in how many GPUs it would take to train certain models, as compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell

When two airplanes hit the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, no one could predict how the Twin Towers would react structurally. The commercial jet airliners severed columns and started fires, weakening steel beams, and causing a “pancaking,” progressive collapse.Skyscrapers had not been designed or constructed with that kind of catastrophic structural failure in mind. IEEE Senior Member Sena Kizildemir is changing that through disaster simulation, one scenario at a time.Sena KizildemirEmployerThornton Tomase

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! We’re excited to announce the product version of our Atlas® robot. This enterprise-grade humanoid robot offers impressive strength and range of motion, pr

This whitepaper provides MEMS engineers, biomedical device developers, and multiphysics simulation specialists with a practical AI-accelerated workflow for optimizing piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs), enabling you to explore complex design trade-offs between sensitivity and bandwidth while achieving validated performance improvements in minutes instead of days using standard cloud infrastructure.What you will learn about:MultiphysicsAI combines cloud-based FEM simulation with neural surrogates to transform PMUT design from trial-and-error iteration into systematic inverse optimizationTraining on 10,000 randomized geometries produces AI surrogates with 1% mean error and sub-millisecond inference for key performance indicators: transmit sensitivity, c

In recent months, I’ve noticed a troubling trend with AI coding assistants. After two years of steady improvements, over the course of 2025, most of the core models reached a quality plateau, and more recently, seem to be in decline. A task that might have taken five hours assisted by AI, and perhaps ten hours without it, is now more commonly taking seven or eight hours, or even longer. It’s reached the point where I am sometimes going back and using older versions of large language models (LLMs).I use LLM-generated code extensively in my role as CEO of

The IEEE Board of Directors has nominated IEEE Senior Member David Alan Koehler and IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” J. Schindler as candidates for 2027 IEEE president-elect.IEEE Senior Member Gerardo Barbosa and IEEE Life Senior Member Timothy T. Lee are seeking nomination by petition. A separate article will be published in The Institute at a later date.The winner of this year’s election will serve as IEEE president in 2028. For more information about the election, president-elect candidates, and the petition process, visit the ieee.org/elections.IEEE Senior Member David Alan Koehler

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 ig

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 an