This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its second year, has prompted a great deal of debate and reflection on the tension between personal civil liberties and the collective good. A […]
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its second year, has prompted a great deal of debate and reflection on the tension between personal civil liberties and the collective good. A surprising amount […]
Photo: CIA Museum CIA roboticists designed Catfish Charlie to take water samples undetected. Why they wanted a spy fish for such a purpose remains classified. In 1961, Tom Rogers of the Leo Burnett Agency created Charlie the Tuna, a jive-talking cartoon mascot and spokesfish for the StarKist brand. The popular ad campaign ran for several […]
What’s not to love about a good flexible health sensor? Someday technology based on such bendable electronic tech might well replace some of those chunky wearables in the marketplace today with sleek, golden skin patches. Now, a team at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors has created a stretchy skin patch that combines electrochemical sensors for alcohol, caffeine, glucose, […]
Artificial muscles, once a tangle of elaborate servomotors, and hydraulic and pneumatic actuators, is now a thing of shape-memory alloys and hair-thin carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers. Bionics are, in brief, getting smaller—though perhaps not simpler. Electrochemical CNT muscles are also energy efficient, and they provide larger muscle strokes as well. Recently, a group of researchers […]
One of COVID-19’s nastiest tricks is the way it can infect someone and not cause any symptoms. This allows the virus to proliferate under the radar of contact tracers. But new artificial intelligence could help track down these silent carriers. In a paper published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at Synergies Intelligent Systems and Universität […]
3D printing living tissue—including corneas, blood vessels and skin—is no easy task. But at least it’s all living tissue. Bone, by contrast, is a mixture of living and inorganic compounds in a highly structured mineral matrix. 3D printing bone, in other words, is a challenge within a challenge. Which is why bioengineers have tried so many different materials for their […]
In 2015, a group of neuroscientists and engineers assembled to watch a man play the video game Guitar Hero. He held the simplified guitar interface gingerly, using the fingers of his right hand to press down on the fret buttons and his left hand to hit the strum bar. What made this mundane bit of […]
Other than Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout around the world has had a rocky start. Some like Canada and the European Union have suffered stumbles so far. Others like the United States have been in a state of chaos since the vaccines were first approved at the end of last year. Many in the […]
As new variants of the coronavirus continue to spring up like wildfires across the planet, researchers have been frantically trying to determine which new strains might outwit our brand new vaccines. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to help. In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, researchers at MIT described a machine learning algorithm that can predict which mutations pose the […]