Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quan…
AI has driven an explosion of new number formats—the ways in which numbers are represented digitally. Engineers are looking at every possible way to save computation time and energy, including shortening the number of bits used to represent data. But …
When Alan DeKok began a side project in network security, he didn’t expect to start a 27-year career. In fact, he didn’t initially set out to work in computing at all.DeKok studied nuclear physics before making the switch to a part of network computin…
There’s an interesting development in amateur ballooning: using so-called superpressure balloons, which float high in the atmosphere indefinitely rather than simply going up and up and then popping like a normal weather balloon. Superpressure balloons…
As fairies for the Irish or leeks for Welsh,it’s the secret lives of small hidden machines,their junctures, and networks that inspire me:Mystic hidden functionaries that makeour made world live, brave little servo motors,whose couplers, whose eccentri…
In the 1990s, astronomers confirmed the first planets orbiting stars beyond our sun. Since then, the tally has risen steadily, and last year it crossed a striking milestone: more than 6,000 known exoplanets. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive has captured not j…
More than 97 percent of the new cars Norwegians registered in November 2025 were electric, almost reaching the country’s goal of 100 percent. As a result, the government has begun removing some of the many carrots it used to encourage its successful E…
Thanks to Hollywood, whenever I think of a Dictaphone, my imagination immediately jumps to a mid-20th-century office, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing ad copy into a desktop machine. A perfectly coiffed woman from the secretarial pool th…
When it comes to viewing nebulae, galaxies, and other deep-sky objects, amateur astronomers on a budget have had two options. They can view with the naked eye through a telescope and perceive these spectacular objects as faint smudges that don’t even …
I know now how the sparks can climb,in broadening arcs of ions—the heat they grow inside themselveslike some permission or belief.But at ten, it seemed mystical;their frown, glowing, then invisible.Gone. Save the odor of ozone.I was young and scared a…