IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683582
Gwendolyn Rak
{"title":"Careers: The Adaptable Engineer: While AI Reshapes Technical Tools, Core Skills are Constant","authors":"Gwendolyn Rak","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683582","url":null,"abstract":"The AI boom has disrupted the way engineers work, introducing new tools to learn, raising expectations for what teams can achieve in a workday, and making it harder to get hired in the first place. This makes it difficult to advise students on which specific coding languages or technical skills they should learn. So amidst the uncertainty, advice for young professionals often turns to a common refrain: Be adaptable. But what does adaptability look like in practice?","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"17-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11683582","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148903216","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 : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683580
Allison Marsh
{"title":"Past Forward: The First Battery","authors":"Allison Marsh","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683580","url":null,"abstract":"The Italian physicist Alessandro Volta disagreed with the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani about a frog, and their ensuing debate changed the course of electrical history.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"68-68"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11683580","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902728","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 : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683615
James Brown
{"title":"Mechanical TV Goes Portable: And Wide-Screen Too","authors":"James Brown","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683615","url":null,"abstract":"Inever intended to join the cutting edge of electromechanical television. I just wanted to make a nice clock. But sometimes you have to go where the engineering takes you, and in my case it took me to the Scanwheel, a pocket-size wide-screen electromechanical TV with a resolution of 4,096 by 20 pixels. Yup, that's 4K by 20.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"14-16"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902793","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 : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683613
Harry Goldstein
{"title":"Noodling on Nuclear Engines: What Began as a Napkin Sketch Might Open Up Interplanetary Exploration","authors":"Harry Goldstein","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683613","url":null,"abstract":"One day in 1982, Joseph “Rod” Canion and two colleagues from Texas Instruments sat down at the House of Pies in Houston and used a placemat to sketch out what would become Compaq's portable PC. In 1996, Felix Zandman, founder of Vishay Intertechnology, dined at Husker Steak House in Columbus, Neb., grabbed a napkin and drafted a design for a power metal strip resistor, which became crucial to power-management components in industrial, automotive, and consumer applications. Now that wispy piece of paper resides at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Perhaps most famously, Robert Metcalfe, working at Xerox PARC in 1973, roughed out some early designs for what would become Ethernet, though contrary to popular belief, no napkin was involved.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"2-2"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11683613","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902645","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 : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683617
Peter Capek
{"title":"The Lost History of IBM's Cold-War Code Breaker: Custom-Built for the NSA, the Room-Size Harvest Computer had Its Own Bespoke Programming Language—and no Equal","authors":"Peter Capek","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683617","url":null,"abstract":"AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn't know it existed. It ran up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency's main cryptographic processor in operation from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 through the Vietnam War and on past the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The machine stopped running only when its moving parts finally gave out. • The Harvest computer mattered because of what it was as well as when it ran. For 14 years, it was the engine processing the NSA's most sensitive intercepts at a time when signals intelligence was as close to a strategic weapon as anything short of a warhead. • Designed and built by IBM for the NSA, Harvest was one of the first machines made to apply operations to enormous datasets rushing past, a precursor to the computers today that manage continuous video streams and security systems in real time. It was also one of the first machines built as an add-on—a specialized helper intended to do one job exceptionally well, bolted onto a general computer. Harvest's modular design is like a 1960s version of today's graphics chips that CPUs use to run intensive video-game and AI processing loads.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"44-50"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902678","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 : 2026-09-01Epub Date: 2026-09-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683579
Ariel Bleicher
{"title":"How to Get Hydrogen from a Stone: The Quest to Save the Hydrogen Economy Moves Underground","authors":"Ariel Bleicher","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2026.11683579","url":null,"abstract":"In a tranquil Boston suburb, on the far edge of a horse farm, where pasture gives way to woods, a crane lowers an enormous electrode into a borehole. The electrode, a half-meter-long cylinder with copper-tipped arms to ensure good contact with the borehole walls, descends—deeper, deeper—through layers of spongy sandstone to the hard, marbled roots of an ancient mountain range hundreds of meters below ground. Here the rock is tight; there are few cracks for water or gases to flow. But that's about to change.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"63 9","pages":"28-35"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902753","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}