Like many a nerd, I have a certain fascination with locks. This originates in reading the memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman as a teenager, in which Richard Feynman recounts picking locks and cracking combinations while at his day job working on…
I step into the warm moist airamong the columns of the pines,their net of twigs and rootscomplex as any lines of code.The trees purify and anchor.Their branches balance my restlessness.Their calling is to be present,mine to develop apps. Our tasksverg…
When San Antonio–based software engineer Nikhil Jathar first went to Washington, D.C., to advocate for federal support for technology education and research funding, he was in awe of the opportunity. It was spring of 2025, not long after Jathar settle…
Ellia Lebleu is a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, a volunteer effort launched in 2023 to find and remove AI-generated material from Wikipedia that breaks the website’s guidelines. When the cleanup began, AI writing was often betrayed by…
I’ve seen two total solar eclipses and have been duly impressed by what happens as the moon casts its shadow on Earth. But recently I’ve become even more intrigued by a similar phenomenon that doesn’t involve the sun or the moon—something called an as…
Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too.After starting her career as a biologist, a chance opportunity saw Mazzolai s…
Shortwave radios offer a way to connect one location on Earth to practically anywhere else with minimal infrastructure. But these radios come with some drawbacks—a significant one being that, unlike satellite communications, their transmission rates f…
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…