IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876754
Edd Gent
{"title":"AI's Green Thumb: Agritech Apps are Providing Personalized Advice to India's Small Farmers","authors":"Edd Gent","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876754","url":null,"abstract":"Farming in India is tough work—and it's only getting tougher. Water shortages, a rapidly changing climate, disorganized supply chains, and difficulty accessing credit make every growing season a calculated gamble. But farmers like Harish B. are finding that new AI-powered tools can take some of the unpredictability out of the endeavor. (Editor's note: Instead of a surname, Indian given names are often combined with initials that can represent the name of the person's father or village.)","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 2","pages":"32-39"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143361390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876757
Ivan Amato
{"title":"A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War: The Parcae Project Revolutionized Electronic Eavesdropping","authors":"Ivan Amato","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876757","url":null,"abstract":"IN THE EARLY 1970s, the Cold War had reached a particularly frigid moment, and U.S. military and intelligence officials had a problem. The Soviet Navy was becoming a global maritime threat-and the United States did not have a global ocean-surveillance capability. Adding to the alarm was the emergence of a new Kirov class of nuclear-powered guided-missile battle cruisers, the largest Soviet vessels yet. For the United States, this situation meant that the perilous equilibrium of mutual assured destruction, MAD, which so far had dissuaded either side from launching a nuclear strike, could tilt in the wrong direction.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 2","pages":"40-47"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143361266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829736
Samuel K. Moore;Emily Waltz;Matthew S. Smith;Emily Waltz;Yu-Tzu Chiu
{"title":"Top Tech 2025: Underwater Living, Reversible Computing, Actorless Cinema, and Other Things to Watch for in the Year Ahead","authors":"Samuel K. Moore;Emily Waltz;Matthew S. Smith;Emily Waltz;Yu-Tzu Chiu","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829736","url":null,"abstract":"This issue will take you around the world, into the sea, and deep underground—not necessarily in that order. Let's start underground, where lie the precious rare earth minerals that make the world of technology go round. New tech is in the offing that could break China's lock on the global supply. China has the same concerns about its supply of uranium, which is why it's pioneering thorium-fueled nuclear energy.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"21-31"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142938287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829737
Dina Genkina;Ned Potter;Lawrence Ulrich;Katherine Bourzac
{"title":"Reversible Computing Escapes the Lab: Startup Plans the First Chip Based on this Peculiar Power-Saving Scheme","authors":"Dina Genkina;Ned Potter;Lawrence Ulrich;Katherine Bourzac","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829737","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Frank has spent his career as an academic researcher working over three decades in a very peculiar niche of computer engineering. According to Frank, that peculiar niche's time has finally come. “I decided earlier this year that it was the right time to try to commercialize this stuff,” Frank says. In July 2024, he left his position as a senior engineering scientist at Sandia National Laboratories to join a startup, U.S.- and U.K.-based Vaire Computing.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"32-41"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142938289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829735
Liam Critchley;Glenn Zorpette;Edd Gent
{"title":"Making Humans Aquatic Again: In 2025, People will Try Living in Deep's Underwater Habitat","authors":"Liam Critchley;Glenn Zorpette;Edd Gent","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10829735","url":null,"abstract":"The future of human habitation in the sea is taking shape in an abandoned quarry on the border of Wales and England. There, the ocean-exploration organization Deep has embarked on a multiyear quest to enable scientists to live on the seafloor at depths up to 200 meters for weeks, months, and possibly even years.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"42-53"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142938179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824232
David Schneider
{"title":"A Better DIY Seismometer: This Design is Compact But Still Detects Faraway Earthquakes","authors":"David Schneider","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824232","url":null,"abstract":"In September of 2023, I wrote in these pages about using a Raspberry Pi-based seismometer—a Raspberry Shake—to record earthquakes. But as time went by, I found the results disappointing. In retrospect, I realize that my creation was struggling to overcome a fundamental hurdle.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"16-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142918234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824229
Margo Anderson
{"title":"5 Questions: Todd Humphreys: GPS Spoofing Threatens Airliners","authors":"Margo Anderson","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824229","url":null,"abstract":"In 2023, at least 20 civilian aircraft flying through the Middle East were misled by their onboard GPS units into flying near Iranian airspace without clearance—situations that could have provoked an international incident. These planes were victims of GPS spoofing, in which deceptive signals from the ground, disguised as signals from GPS satellites in orbit, trick an aircraft's instruments into reporting the aircraft's location as some-where that it isn't. Spoofing is a more sophisticated tactic than GPS jamming, in which malicious signals overwhelm a targeted GPS receiver until it can no longer function.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"15-15"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10824229","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142918231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-01-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824228
Edd Gent
{"title":"Careers: Joppe Bos: The Cryptographer Designs Encryption that Even Quantum Hardware Can't Crack","authors":"Edd Gent","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10824228","url":null,"abstract":"Users of Google's Chrome browser can rest easy knowing that their surfing is secure, thanks in part to cryptographer Joppe Bos. He's coauthor of a quantum-secure encryption algorithm that was adopted as a standard by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August and is already being implemented in a wide range of technology products, including Chrome.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 1","pages":"19-20"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10824228","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142918233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}