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Happy 80th anniversary, ENIAC! The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer, helped shape our world.On 15 February 1946, ENIAC—developed in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia—was publicly demonstrated for the first time. Although

Every time you unlock your smartphone or start your connected car, you are generating a trail of digital evidence that can be used to track your every move.In Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, just published by NYU Press, law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson exposes how the Internet of Things has quietly transformed into a vast surveillance network,

As electronics demand higher energy density, one component has proved challenging to shrink: the capacitor. Making a smaller capacitor usually requires thinning the dielectric layer or electrode surface area, which has often resulted in a reduction of power. A new polymer material could help change that.In a study published 18 February in Nature, a Pennsylvania State University-led team reported a capacitor crafted from a polymer blend that can operate at temperatures up to 250 °C while storing roughly four times as much energy as conventional polymer capacitors. Today’s advanced polymer capacitors typically function only up to about 100 °C, meaning engineers oft

Looming over the internet lasers and firestarting phones companies were touting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, was a more nebulous but much larger announcement: a pan-European cloud called EURO-3C.EURO-3C’s backers – Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica, dozens of other European companies, and the European Commission (EC) – aim to fill a gap. U.S.-based cloud giants dominate in the EU

In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the

The America’s Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age report, published last year by the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, and Labor, identified a significant engineering and skills gap. The 27-page report concluded that the shortage of talent in essential areas—including advanced manuf

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! All legged robots deployed “in the wild” to date were given a body plan that was predefined by human designers and could not be redefined in situ. The manual and permanent na

Raquel Urtasun has spent 16 years in the self-driving space, long enough to navigate every metaphorical glorious hill and plunging valley. She took the trip from the early “pipe dream” dismissals, to the “we’re this close” certainty, and back again.The industry is now riding a new wave of optimism and investment, including at Waabi Innovation Inc., the autonomous trucking c

Engineering is so much more than solving problems or writing efficient code. It is about creating solutions that affect billions of lives and contributing to a profession built on innovation, responsibility, and collaboration. Although technical skills remain critical, what truly will accelerate the growth of the next generation of engineers is community and professional involvement.Learning from communitiesUniversity programs provide a strong foundation in theory and practice, but they cannot capture the complexity of real-world engineering. As an IEEE senior member, I believe professional communities such as IEEE can help bridge the gap by offering:Practical experience through

Every generation of mobile networks, from 1G to 5G, has rewritten the rules of how the world lives and works. The coming 6G revolution, by decade’s end, will represent a new direction still, toward a universal data fabric where millions of agents collaborate in real-time across the digital and physical worlds.The story of wireless connectivity is often told in speeds and standards—megabits per second, latency, and spectrum bands. But these generational shifts in device specs obscure a deeper pattern. Each generation, from 1G to 5G, rewrote the relationships between three elements: the D