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Dizzy Gillespie was a fan. Frank Sinatra bought one for himself and gave them to his Rat Pack friends. Hugh Hefner acquired one for the Playboy Mansion. Clairtone Sound Corp.’s Project G high-fidelity stereo system, which debuted in 1964 at the National Furniture Show in Chicago, was squarely aimed at trendsetters. The intent was to make the sleek, modern stereo an object of desire.By the time the Project G was introduced, the Toronto-based Clairtone was already well respected for its beautiful, high-end stereos. “Everyone knew about Clairtone,” Peter Munk, president and cofounder of the company, boasted to a newsp

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! One of my favorite parts of robotics is watching research collide with non-roboticists in the real (or real-ish) world.

Strong leadership is essential for IEEE to advance technology for humanity. The organization depends on the dedicated service of its volunteers to advance its mission. Each year, the Nominations and Appointments (N&A) Committee is responsible for recommending candidates to the Board of Directors and the IEEE Assembly for volunteer leadership positions, including president-elect, corporate officers, committee chairs, and committee members. See below for the complete list. By nominating q

Much has been made of the excessive power demands of AI, but solutions are sparse. This has led engineers to consider completely new paradigms in computing: optical, thermodynamic, reversible—the list goes on. Many of these approaches require a change in the materials used for computation, which would demand an overhaul in the CMOS fabrication techniques used today.Over the past decade, Hector De

Thousands of satellites are tightly packed into low Earth orbit, and the overcrowding is only growing. Scientists have created a simple warning system called the CRASH Clock that answers a basic question: If satellites suddenly couldn’t steer around one another, how much time would elapse before there was a crash in orbit? Their current answer: 5.5 days. The CRASH Clock metric was introduced in a paper originally published on the Arxiv physics preprint server in December and is currently under consideration for publication. The team’s research measures how quickly a catastrophic collision could occur if satellite operators lost

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s

Hoang Pham has spent his career trying to ensure that some of the world’s most critical systems don’t fail, including commercial aircraft engines, nuclear facilities, and massive data centers that underpin AI and cloud computing.A professor of industrial and systems engineering at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and a longtime volunteer for IEEE, Pham, an IEEE Life Fellow, is internationally recognized for advancing the mathematical foundations of reliability engineering. His work earned him

Isolation dictates where we go to see into the far reaches of the universe. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the vast expanse of the Australian Outback—these are where astronomers and engineers have built the great observatories and radio telescopes of modern times. The skies are usually clear, the air is arid, and the electronic din of civilization is far away.

The thunderous roar that echoed across Huntsville, Alabama, on 10 January wasn’t a rocket launch but something equally momentous: the end of an era. Two massive test stands at Marshall Space Flight Center that helped send humans to the moon collapsed in carefully choreographed implosions, their steel frameworks crumbling in seconds after decades standing as monuments to U.S. spaceflight achievement.The Dynamic Test Stand and the

The AI data center construction boom continues unabated, with the demand for power in the United States potentially reaching 106 gigawatts by 2035, according to a December report from research and analysis company BloombergNEF. That’s a 36 percent jump from the company’s previous outlook, published just seven months earlier. But there are severe constraints in power availability, material, equipment, and—perhaps most significantly—a lack of engineers, technicians, and skilled craftsmen that could turn the data center boom into a bust.