IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
One of the singular features of Baotou, an industrial city of 2 million people in Inner Mongolia, is a 10-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) lake that is among the most polluted in the world. The artificial lake, referred to by the name of the dam associated with it, Weikuang Dam (or Baogang Tailings Dam), has for decades collected the effluent from minerals processing for China’s globally dominant iron, steel, and rare-earths industries. Built in the late 1950s, the lake contains a highly toxic s
Rare-earth-production
Weikuang-dam
Monazite-ore
Heavy-mineral-sands
Shenghe-resources
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to wrest share from Chinese firms, which control roughly 90 percent of the markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals. Rare earths are the ingredients on which vast and crucial
Rare-earths
Monazite-ore
Mining
Electric-motors
Thorium-reactors
Radioactivity
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
This White Paper shows RF and microwave engineers and technicians how compact analog signal generators support core amplifier and receiver test tasks, from gain and distortion measurements to blocker rejection, power calibration, and local oscillator substitution. What you will learn about: How to measure amplifier gain and gain compression, including the P1dB point that marks the transition from linear operation into saturation. How two-tone intermodulation distortion testing reveals unwanted s
Type-whitepaper
Analog
Microwave
Amplifier-gain
Measurement
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
Progress continues in restructuring IEEE’s geographic regions, as outlined in The Institute’s February 2023 article “ IEEE Is Realigning Its Geographic Regions .” The “Region 1” designation will no longer be used. The new Region 2 will merge what is currently Region 1 (Northeastern U.S.) with the current Region 2 (Eastern U.S.). It will be called Region 2 (Northeastern and Eastern U.S.). The current Region 10 (Asia Pacific) will be divided into two separate regions. The new Region 10 wi
Type-ti
Ieee-news
Region-realignment
Ieee-member-and-geographic-activ
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
If you’ve ever wondered how Claude and similar AI agents can answer complex questions in seconds and where they get the information, you’re not alone. Gurmeet Saran works to find that answer every day as an engineer at Anthropic in San Francisco, the AI research company behind Claude. The IEEE senior member is developing an infrastructure to understand the mechanics behind the chatbot’s behavior and to ensure its underlying architecture produces reliable outputs. Gurmeet Saran Employer Ant
Ieee-member-news
Artificial-intelligence
Chatbots
Careers
Anthropic
Type-ti
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
This article was originally published by Canary Media . The geothermal startup Fervo Energy is now selling power to the grid from its Cape Station project in Utah—marking the first time a utility-scale, next-generation geothermal facility has achieved such a feat worldwide. The Houston-based firm turned on an initial 33-megawatt unit late last week and has been testing and ramping up output since. On Thursday, Fervo will officially begin commercial operations, supplying carbon-free el
Geothermal
Advanced-geothermal
Geothermal-energy
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
This White Paper provides roboticists and control engineers with a comprehensive overview of how motion planning and motion tracking can be decoupled to preserve professional athletic style in humanoid robots, and why adaptive, speed-aware control is essential for closing the gap between simulation and real-world deployment. What you will learn about: Why combining a professional athlete’s motion style with reliable task performance remains an open challenge in humanoid ball-sports robotics, an
Type-whitepaper
Humanoid-robots
Motion-tracking
Motion-planning
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
Today’s engineers face an unprecedented acceleration in AI hardware complexity, as explained in the recent research article “ Revisiting Edge AI: Opportunities and Challenges .” The article examines the rapid growth of edge AI and the challenges it creates, including resource constraints, model architecture limitations, and network demands across edge-AI deployments. The acceleration is driven by a fundamental shift in how modern AI models are built and scaled. As the models have become much lar
Ieee-products-and-services
Artificial-intelligence
Ai
Education
Careers
Type-ti
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
In mid-September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined a growing group of researchers calling for the AI industry to slow down. While some have questioned these researchers’ motivation for voicing concerns about the rapid pace of development, the plea highlighted a key tension between safety and speed. The underlying problem is not simply a technical error, but a sociotechnical failure: Pressure to move quickly has made it hard for engineers to fully assess and manage new risks of increasingly
Engineering-ethics
Engineering-education
Responsible-innovation
Tech-ethics
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
By 2028, genetic engineering and gene therapy will be used frequently to treat a variety of diseases, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, according to the recently released 2030 Technology Megatrends Report from IEEE. “We are seeing a fundamental shift in how technology evolves,” says IEEE Fellow Dejan Milojicic , chair of the IEEE Future Directions Committee ’s Industry Advisory Board, the group responsible for the report. “ Artificial intelligence is no longer operating in a va
Ieee-news
Ieee-technology-megatrends
Ieee-future-directions
Artificial-intelligence
Careers
Type-ti
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! When I changed careers at 30 to become a software engineer, I expected it to be hard. I expected to struggle to fit in, and I expected to bomb a lot of interviews (I did). What I didn’t expect was how few people would support me. As a parent,
Careers-newsletter
Tech-careers
Job-market
Hiring-trends
Future-of-work
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
This White Paper gives robotics researchers and engineers an overview of a new large-scale motion capture dataset built to close the data gap limiting humanoid robot learning. It also shows how policies trained on the dataset transfer to a real humanoid robot. What you will learn about: Why humanoid robot learning, a central problem in embodied AI and Physical AI, needs data that internet video and existing motion capture datasets cannot provide. How FrameNet , a linguistic framework for huma
Type-whitepaper
Motion-capture
Physical-ai
Humanoid-robots
Robotics
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
Happy IEEE Day 2026! IEEE Day is an annual event that celebrates the first time in history when engineers worldwide gathered to share their technical ideas in 1884. One of the IEEE Day’s objectives is to show the ways IEEE members, in local communities, join together to collaborate on ideas that leverage technology for a better tomorrow. IEEE Day 2026 - October 6, 2026. Stay tuned as we continue this journey of innovation, connection, and global celebration. IEEE Celebrate IEEE Day with col
Ieee-member-news
Ieee
Ieee-day
Ieee-products-services
Type-ti
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
For the first 10 years of my career, I worked in product management and data analytics by myself. I wrote database queries that pulled numbers out of corporate systems, built statistical models to predict what customers would buy, and shipped data pipelines that moved information between business systems. I built and scaled analytics teams at Best Buy and Target , studying how customers shop and what stores should stock. Today I lead enterprise AI transformation at Lowe’s , the Fortune 100 h
Ieee-member-news
Governance
Ai
Artificial-intelligence
Careers
Type-ti
IEEE Spectrum
US
2026-10-16
Christos Cassandras has spent more than 40 years studying how computers and machines make decisions. Lately, his work has focused on a problem nearly every driver knows well: sitting at a red light with no cross traffic in sight, wondering why it takes so long for the light to turn green. Cassandras, an IEEE Life Fellow, is a professor at Boston University , where he headed its systems engineering division , a graduate program he helped create. Christos Cassandras Employer Boston University
Ieee-member-news
Type-ti
Autonomous-vehicles
Game-theory
Event-driven-systems
Cyber-physical-systems
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
The news of the past couple of weeks has seen the ESP32 turned into an software-defined radio (SDR) thanks to a hidden baseband mode, an exciting development by anyone’s standards. …read more
Radio Hacks
LR2021
radio
sdr
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
Determining the shape of an object which can change dynamically is a bit of a challenge, one that especially vexes those who are really into Virtual Reality. Sensing the orientation …read more
Science
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
In the 8-bit home computer boom of the early 1980s, Sir Clive Sinclair’s machines were always among the cheapest on the market, often packing a surprising level of sophistication in …read more
Retrocomputing
Ferranti
sinclair
ULA
ZX Spectrum
zx81
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
Since we last covered the way that the Linux Kernel project has been dealing with the influx of code created using LLM-based coding assistants, all the way back in April, …read more
Linux Hacks
News
linux kernel
llm-assisted project
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
If you want to play old Commodore games, there are C-64 emulators available for just about any platform– but most of them are so high level, they’re really meant for …read more
Retrocomputing
circuit simulation
commodore 64
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
Vampires aren’t as common as they once were, but in most places they aren’t fully protected and it’s still possible to get a tag for legal hunting come October — …read more
Tool Hacks
manual machining
pencil sharpener
steak pointer
Hackaday
US
2026-10-16
Perhaps the most exciting news of the past few weeks in the world of hardware hacking has been the unlocking of hidden SDR functionality in the Wi-Fi radios found on …read more
Engineering
Featured
Radio Hacks
ESP32
receive converter
sdr