Category: Engineering

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16, home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and

“Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.” These directions seem simple enough, and yet I have messed up many, many pots of rice over the years. My sympathies to anyone who’s ever had to boil rice on a stovetop,…

Manu Prakash spoke with IEEE Spectrum shortly after returning to Stanford University from a month aboard a research vessel off the coast of California, where he was testing tools to monitor oceanic carbon sequestration. The associate professor…

Marina Umaschi Bers has long been at the forefront of technological innovation for kids. In the 2010s, while teaching at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, she codeveloped the ScratchJr programming language and KIBO robotics kits, both…

The teachings of Mahatma Gandhi were arguably India’s greatest contribution to the 20th century. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar has borrowed some of that wisdom to devise a frugal new form of innovation he calls “Gandhian engineering.” Coming…

Duncan Turner is the managing director at Hax, a startup accelerator that specializes in “hard tech”—innovations in physical science and engineering. Hax offers up to US $500,000 in funding alongside resources that include chemical,…

In the last decade, Meta has embarked on a quest to blend the physical and virtual realms. The tech giant is bringing that fusion to fruition with the recent unveiling of what it calls its first pair of “true” augmented reality (AR) glasses,…

Emteq Labs wants eyewear to be the next frontier of wearable health technology.

The Brighton, England-based company introduced today its emotion-sensing eyewear, Sense. The glasses contain nine optical sensors distributed across the rims that…

Steve Blank came of age as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, when it was truly about the silicon, and by the 1990s he had founded or worked at four high-tech startups. He eventually drew on this experience to create a model of…