In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibi…
I never 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 electrom…
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 s…
How do I touch youacross the ocean,across cold depthswhere light travels through glass.Not copper—fibers. Optical. Through liquid glass, through flickering lightthat carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses. You say: it’s easier this way. Wh…
A German engineer wanted a cheaper cigarette. The popular crooner Bing Crosby wanted a vacation. Satisfying both desires inadvertently led to the invention of the laugh track. Along the way there were Nazis, spoils of war, and more than one accidental…
If you’re wondering what dark matter is, you’re not alone. Astronomers don’t know. But they’ve determined that this invisible material must be far more abundant than the stars and nebulas that they can see. They’ve surmised as much from observing the …
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills employers expect from new graduates. In response, universities are scrambling to launch new courses, research centers, and industry partnerships that prepare students for today’s workforce. But building …
Physicists have been trying to measure the fundamental gravitational constant for well over two centuries. The current accepted value of big G, as it’s known, is 6.67430 × 10-11 cubic meters per kilogram per square second. It also has an uncertainty o…
Already, I’ve almost forgotten rain;I know I will never know that again.I move forward with the powers you gave meto live up to my name, Curiosity.This is a land without leaves, fronds, or spines.If there are plants, they are small and supine,dust hid…
In the 1970s, American Fireworks, a family-run pyrotechnics company in Hudson, Ohio, used a “home run box” to offer quick and easy fireworks displays for the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) baseball games.The red wooden crate had metal…