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It was the end of 2008, October, right before the holiday shopping season. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey released her highly anticipated Favorite Things list, with the Amazon Kindle topping the gadget category. • This is the moment that the concept of electronic paper, or e-paper, went mainstream. • But this black-and-white, reflective display that always appeared to be on was invented well before the Amazon Kindle made it famous. Its story began a decade earlier, in 1997, at the MIT Media Lab, when it was created by two students, J.D. Albert and Barrett Comiskey, who were inspired by their professor Joseph Jacobson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bad things happen when demand outstrips supply. We learned that lesson too well at the start of the pandemic, when demand for toilet paper, disinfecting wipes, masks, and ventilators outstripped the available supply. Today, chip shortages continue to disrupt the consumer electronics, automobile, and other sectors. Clearly, balancing the supply and demand of goods is critical for a stable, normal, functional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE YEAR IS 2028. IT'S 8 P.M. ON A Wednesday night and you're famished. You're staring wistfully at the only remaining item in your refrigerator: a package of sausages with an unappetizing grayish hue. Ugh. Did they always look like that? Are they still safe to eat? In 2018, you'd have to rely on your sense of smell and take a gamble. But in 2028, you might simply wave your smartphone over the package. The smartphone interrogates the package's embedded sensor, which measures the concentration of gases associated with meat decomposition. The smartphone displays the message "Safe to eat within the next 20 hours," and then offers a list of recipes for cooking with sausages. Too hungry to bother with the recipes, you tear open the package, toss the sausages into a frying pan, and discard the package-along with its sensor technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newsha Ghaeli reached down an open manhole one morning in April and grabbed a hose dangling in the rushing streams of the sewer below. As she pulled up the hose, she spotted a wad of toilet paper clinging to its end and recoiled in disgust, accidentally splashing a few drops of dirty water on strands of exposed hair sticking out from her face mask. A Cambridge, Mass., sanitation worker offered comfort: "A little caca won't hurt you," he said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deep learning is now being used to translate between languages, predict how proteins fold, analyze medical scans, and play games as complex as Go, to name just a few applications of a technique that is now becoming pervasive. Success in those and other realms has brought this machine-learning technique from obscurity in the early 2000s to dominance today. • Although deep learning's rise to fame is relatively recent, its origins are not. In 1958, back when mainframe computers filled rooms and ran on vacuum tubes, knowledge of the interconnections between neurons in the brain inspired Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell to design the first artificial neural network, which he presciently described as a “pattern-recognizing device.” But Rosenblatt's ambitions outpaced the capabilities of his era—and he knew it. Even his inaugural paper was forced to acknowledge the voracious appetite of neural networks for computational power, bemoaning that “as the number of connections in the network increases…the burden on a conventional digital computer soon becomes excessive.” • Fortunately for such artificial neural networks—later rechristened “deep learning” when they included extra layers of neurons—decades of Moore's Law and other improvements in computer hardware yielded a roughly 10-million-fold increase in the number of computations that a computer could do in a second. So when researchers returned to deep learning in the late 2000s, they wielded tools equal to the challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an analysis of economic data from many countries and concluded that when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross national product, a nation's economic growth is threatened. With debt that high, expect growth to become negative, they argued. □ This analysis was done shortly after the 2008 recession, so it had enormous relevance to policymakers, many of whom were promoting high levels of debt spending in the interest of stimulating their nations' economies. At the same time, conservative politicians, such as Olli Rehn, then an EU commissioner, and U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, used Reinhart and Rogoff's findings to argue for fiscal austerity. □ Three years later, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, discovered an error in the Excel spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff had used to make their calculations. The significance of the blunder was enormous: When the analysis was done properly, Herndon showed, debt levels in excess of 90 percent were associated with average growth of positive 2.2 percent, not the negative 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff had found. □ Herndon could easily test the Harvard economists' conclusions because the software that they had used to calculate their results—Microsoft Excel—was readily available. But what about much older findings for which the software originally used is hard to come by? □ You might think that the solution—preserving the relevant software for future researchers to use—should be no big deal. After all, software is nothing more than a bunch of files, and those files are easy enough to store on a hard drive or on tape in digital format. For some software at least, the all-important source code could even be duplicated on paper, avoiding the possibility that whatever digital medium it's written to could become obsolete. □ Saving old programs in this way is done routinely, even for decades-old software. You can find online, for example, a full program listing for the Apollo Guidance Computer—code that took astronauts to the moon during the 1960s. It was transcribed from a paper copy and uploaded to GitHub in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic tabletop microscope hasn't changed much in fundamental design in nearly 100 years. At least its design hadn't changed until a Stanford engineer started playing with innovative microscopy ideas in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I'll be honest: when the original AxiDraw came out from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in 2016, I thought it was cute but a curiosity. My thought was that if you were going to play around with reintroducing the venerable technology of the pen-and-paper X-Y plotter, why not do something really different, like the iBoardBot remote-controlled erasable miniature whiteboard? And the AxiDraw's US $475 price tag felt steep for a spindly-looking contraption that required the user to manually position each sheet of paper, one at a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gary Soto was hunkering down on the outskirts of San Juan. Soto, the operations manager of Puerto Rico's state-run utility, faced a daunting task: to keep the grid running and minimize damage from the storm. In the windowless, wood-paneled control center at the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), Soto and a dozen other engineers and supervisors worked at U-shaped desks littered with paper coffee cups, staring at computer monitors that displayed real-time conditions on the grid. One after another, transmission lines were failing, and the team hastily debated their course of action. In this fragile state, the network wouldn?t be able to absorb an oversupply of power, excess voltages, or swings in frequency. They could inject test currents into the downed lines, to see which ones could be restored, or else reduce the level of electricity being put on the grid, to protect the remaining transmission system. Hour after hour, the team's chatter filled the room with rising urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN BLOCKCHAINS first appeared nearly a decade ago as the technical backbone of Bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency, they seemed to offer the masses a way to cut out the financial middleman. But now the big banks and other industry players are finding ways to spin the new tool to their advantage. Their blockchains share a vision that is precisely the opposite of the one laid out in the Bitcoin white paper, published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Like Nakamoto himself (or herself), you can own bitcoins without even stating your real name; nobody is in charge; and anybody can check the history of any given transaction. The financial industry's blockchains, however, are closed or, in their jargon, permissioned; to join one you must reveal your identity to a system administrator, who must then approve you. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Painful exercises in basic arithmetic are a vivid part of our elementary school memories. A multiplication like 3,752 ? 6,901 carried out with just pencil and paper for assistance may well take up to a minute. Of course, today, with a cellphone always at hand, we can quickly check that the result of our little exercise is 25,892,552. Indeed, the processors in modern cellphones can together carry out more than 100 billion such operations per second. What's more, the chips consume just a few watts of power, making them vastly more efficient than our slow brains, which consume about 20 watts and need significantly more time to achieve the same result. Of course, the brain didn't evolve to perform arithmetic. So it does that rather badly. But it excels at processing a continuous stream of information from our surroundings. And it acts on that information-sometimes far more rapidly than we're aware of. No matter how much energy a conventional computer consumes, it will struggle with feats the brain finds easy, such as understanding language and running up a flight of stairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1960, Science published a paper by Heinz von Foerster predicting that on Friday, 13 November 2026, the “human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia.” Just a few years after this preposterous doomsday alarm, the annual growth of global population peaked at about 2.1 percent and immediately began to decline. By 2020 the growth rate stood at just a bit more than 1 percent, the result of the steadily declining total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children born to a woman during her reproductive period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information related to the functionality of robotic actuators, and mention the paper on "Harnessing Cascading Dominoes for Peristaltic Wave Motion" by Yichao Shi, Zhimin Jiang, and Pikul published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

WALK INTO THE CAMBRIDGE, ONT., OFFICE of health-care equipment company PrescientX and you probably wouldn't suspect you're entering one of the most sanitary places in North America. • In this otherwise-ordinary Toronto-area office suite, you can disinfect your keys, phone, and other portables at the reception area's ultraviolet-sterilization stand. In cooler months, the air you breathe is cleansed of mold and bacteria in UV-sterilized heating units as well as blasted by UV fixtures in the office air ducts to eliminate viruses. In-room UV fixtures pointing at the ceiling disinfect the air, while other UV lights that turn on only when no one's in the room zap pathogens on desks, keyboards, and high-touch surfaces in bathrooms and work spaces. • The office, says PrescientX founder and CEO Barry Hunt, represents a possible future in which pandemics like COVID-19 are more commonplace — but in which germicidal ultraviolet light is one of the most potent weapons we have to face them down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because we believe people catch Ebola through contact with infected animals, ecologists have long sought the animal ?reservoirs? that harbor the virus and pass it along (often without getting sick themselves). With every new outbreak of a zoonotic disease like Ebola, scientists race to identify the reservoirs so that public health officials can determine the method of transmission and perhaps prevent more "spillover events," in which the disease flows from animal reservoirs to people. Such is today's post hoc, reactive model of dealing with outbreaks. In Meliandou, the Ebola detectives interviewed villagers, studied primate populations in nearby forests, and collected bats in nets. In December 2014, they published a paper hypothesizing that little Emile had contracted Ebola from a colony of insect-eating bats that lived in a hollow tree, near where the local children often played. But the tree had caught fire before the team arrived in the village and the bats were gone, so the investigators couldn't say for sure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

MY ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL LIFE AS AN ENGINEER IS SPENT ON, OR ADJACENT TO, A GLOWING laptop. I use the same computer to code, research, design, and document, and even to waste time. Hour upon hour, every day of the week, every week. So I push to have my creative time be analog: Coming home to do some creative writing, only to sit down at the exact same computer, feels more exhausting than restful—oh joy, more screen time. • But while I find words as easy to read on paper as on a screen, writing does not translate to the analog world so well. After years of typing on a keyboard, writing in a notebook is slow and hand-crampingly painful. With the relatively recent availability of maker-friendly electronic-paper displays of the sort used by devices like the Amazon Kindle, I fantasized about a device that would bring together the best of both worlds, combining a keyboard with the static, daylight-readable surface of an electronic-paper screen. A device that would make me feel the same about writing as I did about picking up a book, with no eyestrain, notifications, or YouTube distractions. And I could do better than the old dedicated word processors of the 1990s—I'd blast past them with 10 gigabytes of SD card storage, triple the display size, and crisper contrast and custom formatting.•However, I quickly found that there were some serious issues I'd have to resolve before banging out a prototype. The first, and most glaring, was the dismal refresh rate of the e-paper screens I was buying— upwards of 2 seconds, if you used the original firmware. If you tried to go faster with custom firmware, you'd get persistent screen burn. It turned out that this was the major reason I hadn't seen my fantasy word processor already on the market—the few similar commercial attempts had received harsh user reviews regarding the lag between pressing a key and seeing a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEFORE SILICON GOT ITS OWN VALLEY, THIS mild-mannered element had to vanquish many other contenders to prove itself the premier semiconductor technology. It did so in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, carbon is poised at a similar crossroads, with carbon-based technologies on the verge of transforming computing and boosting batterystorage capacities. Already, researchers have used these technologies to demonstrate paper-thin batteries, unbreakable touch screens, and terabit-speed wireless communications And on the farther horizon they envision such carbon-enabled wonders as space elevators, filters that can make seawater drinkable, bionic organs, and transplantable neurons. Whatever miracles emerge from Carbon Valley, its carbon-techtitans will surely think fondly upon their field's founding mother, Mildred Dresselhaus. This MIT professor of physics and engineering has, since the early 1960s, been laying the groundwork for networks of nanometerscale carbon sheets, lattices, wires, and switches. Future engineers will turn these things, fabricated from carbon-based materials such as graphene, into the systems that will carry computing into its next era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computer scientist David Blaauw pulls a small plastic box from his bag. He carefully uses his fingernail to pick up the tiny black speck inside and place it on the hotel caf? table. At 1 cubic millimeter, this is one of a line of the world's smallest computers. I had to be careful not to cough or sneeze, lest it blow away and be swept into the trash. Blaauw and his colleague Dennis Sylvester,both IEEE Fellows and computer science professors at the University of Michigan, were in San Francisco in February to present 10 papers related to these "micromote" computers at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). They've been presenting different variations on the tiny devices for a few years now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the above-named upcoming conference event. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIR CONDITIONING was devised not for comfort but for industry, specifically to control temperature and humidity in a color printing factory in Brooklyn. The process required feeding paper into the presses a number of times, once for each of the component colors, and the slightest misalignment caused by changes in humidity produced defective copies that had to be thrown away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European XFEL, or EuXFEL— currently the largest X-ray free-electron laser in the world-produced its first light in May 2017. The facility, built in a 3.4-kilometer tunnel near Hamburg, Germany, was commissioned in September of last year. And August 2018 brought another milestone—the publication of the first scientific paper based on experiments with the laser, which the authors used to probe the 3D structures of protein microcrystals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearing face coverings, practicing social distancing, washing hands, and shuttering schools and stores. These are some of the measures that have been implemented to protect people from catching the virus responsible for COVID-19. But just how effective have these interventions been? • Engineers at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton believe they have developed a mathematical modeling approach that could tell us. Their project, called “Modeling and Control of COVID-19 Propagation for Assessing and Optimizing Intervention Policies,” looks at various factors that can impact the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including virus mutations as well as preventive measures such as wearing masks. • H. Vincent Poor, an IEEE Life Fellow, is the principal investigator of the team. Also on the team are IEEE Senior Member Osman Yağan, an associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and mathematical biologists from Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania who study viral spread. • The model recently received a grant from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium funding projects that could reduce the effects of pandemics. Related projects on viral spread by Osman and Poor are also being funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and the United States' National Science Foundation. • The template for the new model was adapted from a mathematical theory the researchers developed in 2019 that investigated the process by which viruses and their mutations spread. In their paper, published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they compared how a virus spreads and mutates to how information changes as it's circulated by networks of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind an unmarked door in Hanover, Germany, a bearded young man with stylish glasses and a pierced lip is loading 350-year-old pieces of paper onto glass plates for digitization by a souped-up scanner. These pieces of paper are part of an immense puzzle. If solved, it could give insights into one of the greatest minds of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OFTEN LEAD TO wrong conclusions. I well remember receiving a friendly welcome at the residence of a European ambassador in Ottawa and, in the very next sentence, being told that this house was perfect to withstand Canadian winters because it was made of real brick and stone-not like those flimsy North American wooden things, with hollow walls. My hosts then swiftly moved to other matters and, in any case, I did not have the heart to belittle the insulating qualities of their handsome home. • The error is easy to understand, but mass and density are better indicators of sturdiness than of insulating capability. A brick wall obviously looks more substantial and protective than a wall framed with narrow wooden studs and covered on the outside with a sheet of thin plywood and aluminum siding and on the inside with vulnerable gypsum drywall. Angry European men do not make holes in brick walls. • Decades ago, when oil sold for US $2 a barrel, most pre-1960 North American houses usually had nothing more to keep out the cold than the air space between the plywood and drywall. Sometimes the space was filled with wood shavings or shredded paper. Yet, remarkably, even that feeble combination provided a bit more insulation than solid brick. • The insulating value, or thermal resistance, is measured in terms of R-value. It depends not only on the composition, thickness, and density of the insulation but also on the outdoor temperature and moisture. A framed wall from 1960 had roughly the following R values: aluminum siding (0.6), thin plywood (0.5), air space (0.9) and drywall (0.5). It all adds up to only about 2.5. Standard brick (0.8) plastered on both sides offered no more than 1.0. Hence even a flimsy 1960 mass-built North American wall insulated at least twice as well as did Europe's plastered brick. • Once energy prices began to rise and more rational building codes came into effect in North America, it became compulsory to incorporate plastic barriers and fiberglass batts-pillowlike rolls that can be packed between the wooden frames, or studs. Higher overall R-values were easily achieved by using wider studs (two-by-six) or, better yet, by double-studding, which involves building a sandwich from two frames, each one filled with insulation. (In North America, a softwood “two-by-six” is actually 1.5 by 5.5 inches, or 38 by 140 millimeters.) For a well- built North American wall this means adding insulation values of drywall (0.5), polyethylene vapor barrier (0.8), fiberglass batts (20), fiberboard sheathing (1.3), plastic house wrap (Tyvek ThermaWrap at 5) and beveled wood cladding (0.8). Adding the insulating value of interior air film brings the total R-value to about 29. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists have come up with two clever new ways to harness the programming power of DNA in living bacterial cells. In separate experiments published in Nature in July, researchers reported that they had successfully archived a movie and built a complex biological computer inside living E. coli cells. The experiments expand our ability to exploit DNA's encoding potential. "What these papers represent is just how good we are getting at harnessing that power," says Julius Lucks, a bioengineer at the Center for Synthetic Biology, at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in either report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a meeting in mid-town Manhattan, Kris Myny picks up what looks like an ordinary paper business card and, with little fanfare, holds it to his smartphone. The details of the card appear almost immediately on the screen inside a custom app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Shulaker and his colleagues made a splash in 2013 when they published a paper in Nature that described the first computer to use carbon-nanotube transistors. But, as with many research projects, that paper was the product of a lot of hard, unglamorous work. Months earlier, for example, team members pulled an all-nighter packing and moving test equipment, including a probe station [above], about 30 miles north, from their base at Stanford to the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The team had been invited to perform a live demonstration of a handshaking robot that uses carbon-nanotube circuitry, and they needed the gear to connect those circuits to the outside world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

X-Y plotters were once a common sight in places that needed high-quality hard copies of computer-generated line drawings. Blueprints and charts of all types could be produced with multiple colors on large pieces of paper, with perfectly smooth lines and curves. But eventually pixel-based laser and inkjet printers increased sufficiently in resolution-and decreased sufficiently in price-to make plotters something of a rarity. . Still, some things were lost in this particular march of progress. One casualty was the distinctive lines of vector-based graphics and text. Another was fun: Watching a laser printer print is about as interesting as watching a refrigerator, while there's something mesmerizing in seeing the head of a plotter spring to life and construct an image line by line through confident sweeps and arcs. The US $171 iBoardbot from JJRobots is intended to bring back some of the romance of the plotter, but with a contemporary twist-it's cloud controlled and self-erasable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If you follow discussions about the Internet of Things, you've probably heard this stunning prediction at least once: The world will have 50 billion Internet-connected devices by 2020. Ericsson's former CEO, Hans Vestburg, was among the first to toss out that number, when he gave a 2010 presentation to shareholders. The following year, Dave Evans, who worked for Cisco at the time, published the same prediction in a white paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

September 14, 2000, is a date which will live in, well, "nonfamy," if I may be permitted such a neologism. That day, Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, its most forgettable operating system. It was also the day I posted the entry p-book to my Word Spy site, along with the following prognostication: "Within a few years, using the word 'book' without any kind of modifier will be confusing because people won't know if you?re talking about a book printed on paper or one that's printed on electrons (so to speak). So I predict that 'p-book'...will become a common noun that will help us distinguish between the paper and electronic formats." · For a while it looked like I couldn't have been more wrong. The number of citations for "p-book" (as well as "pbook") in the Nexis media database went from 20 in 2000 and 19 in 2001 to just 1 in 2003 and 2 in 2004. But as e?books have become more popular, the word p-book has been showing renewed signs of life, with 20 citations in 2010, 24 in 2011, and 28 in 2012. · Language prediction is a mug's game, but it's certain that digital books (as opposed to printed analog books) are here to stay. Sales of e-books (also known as ebooks or eBooks; there is much hand-wringing in the industry over the correct spelling) have slowed down recently, but they remain the fastest growing (or, for some companies, the only growing) segment of the publishing industry. The past few years have seen a steady increase in the number of writers?amateurs as well as professionals?who are getting into digital publishing (or e-publishing). For many writers, breaking into DIY publishing is a simple matter of saving a word processing document as a PDF, then putting up that file on a website along with a PayPal donation form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some 100 boxes of correspondence, speeches, and other documents produced by William Hewlett and David Packard as they built the company considered to be the original Silicon Valley startup were reduced to ashes by the massive fires that took place in Sonoma County, Calif., last fall. These documents- the collected papers of Hewlett and Packard, containing records of the Hewlett-Packard Co. going as far back as 1937-were assembled before HP began the first of several splits starting in 1999. In recent years, the collection was stored in a modular building on the campus of Keysight Technologies, in Santa Rosa, Calif. (Keysight got custody of the documents when it spun out of Agilent Technologies, which had previously split off from HP.) The collection was hard to access by historians, had yet to be digitized, and was, as we now know, vulnerable to fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 12 August 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, IBM unveiled its entrant into the nascent personal computer market: the IBM PC. With that, the preeminent U.S. computer maker launched another revolution in computing. Soon the world began embracing little computers by the millions, with IBM dominating those sales. Other companies, including Apple and Tandy Corp., were already making personal computers, but no other machine carried the revered IBM name. IBM's essential contributions were to position the technology as suitable for wide use and to set a technical standard. Rivals were compelled to meet a demand that they had all grossly underestimated. As such, IBM had a greater impact on the personal computer's acceptance than did Apple, Compaq, Dell, and even Microsoft. And yet IBM's lead in this new market would last only a few years, and the eclipse of the IBM PC came to mirror the decline of Big Blue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many years ago in the offices here at IEEE Spectrum, we had a "Wheel of Excuse" pinned to the outside wall of a cubicle. Made from paper and cardboard in the style of a small lottery wheel, it could be spun to suggest plausible excuses to luckless editors seeking to explain a blown deadline. The wheel had its limitations, however, chief among them being the small number of excuses that could be squeezed onto a disk just 25 centimeters across, and a tendency to fall off the wall if spun with too much vigor or desperation. · Spectrum's offices were renovated this year, the dingy cubicle walls swept away for a modern office layout. So I thought it might be time for an updated Wheel of Excuses–a digital one, naturally. I wanted a one-touch system that would show an animation of a spinning wheel, followed by the display of a randomly selected excuse from an extended list. · Initially, I thought I would make the new wheel using an Arduino and a touch-screen add-on shield. But the speed at which graphics could be drawn on the touch screen proved too slow for the kind of animation I wanted, and the 2.8-inch screen was on the small side in any case. · So I turned to the US $35 Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which had the final release of its first generation in July–the Model B+. Among other changes, the Model B+ has two more USB ports than the Model B along with an expanded general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connector, and it relies more heavily on HDMI for video output. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rumpelstiltskin had the admirable ability to convert low-cost straw into valuable gold. Today, display manufacturers are starting to reap the benefits of their own photonic alchemy, converting the light from cheap sources into the precise wavelengths needed for more efficient displays that can show sharper colors. This magic is accomplished using what are known as quantum dots. These are semiconductor nanocrystals that exhibit a range of unusual electrical and optical properties, but for decades they were largely confined to research laboratories. Now, quantum dots are being used in mass-produced displays for the consumer market, including such items as Sony flat-screen televisions and Amazon.com's Kindle Fire HDX e-reader. And the field is still rapidly growing and evolving. At the Display Week 2014 conference of the Society for Information Display this past June in San Diego, quantum dots were a hot topic, both in the exhibit hall and in presented papers; the symposium schedule included three separate sessions dedicated to the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tucked within Norway's fjord-riddled coast, nearly 3,500 fish pens corral upwards of 400 million salmon and trout. Norway exports more such fish than any other country in the world (1.1 million tons in 2018), and farmed salmon is one of its top three exports. With the global industry expected to quintuple by 2050, farmed salmon is a fine kettle of fish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our lives are immeasurably easier and more connected than we could ever have imagined just 20 years ago. But to reap these benefits, we've had to cozy up to our tech. So close, in fact, that it has become personal, almost a part of who we are. But every now and then, that closeness enables us to see a darker side of the relationship: Sometimes, it seems, our devices are actively working against us. The phone that spontaneously reboots just when you need it most; the computer that crashes only when you have unsaved changes; a bug that suddenly appears when you demo your code. · This tendency for things not just to fail but to seemingly fail out of spite was labeled Resistentialism by the British humorist Paul Jennings back in the 1960s, but similar terms have been coined in the years since. We are often FOBIO (frequently outwitted by inanimate objects) or FOILED (frequently outwitted by inanimate, lame electronic devices). The editor and writer Edward Tenner coined the phrase revenge effect to refer to an unintended and negative consequence of some new or modified technology: Get everyone on e-mail and the result isn't a paperless utopia but soaring consumption of office paper; give everyone faster Internet connections and the result isn't a boom in leisure time but a dearth of time away from work. Programmers talk of Heisenbugs, software errors that disappear or change their behavior when the programmer tries to trace them or examine them (incorrectly named after the physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose Uncertainty Principle states that we can never know perfectly the position or momentum of a particle beyond a certain minimum level, and which is often confused with the Observer Effect, where the act of observing a particle alters its properties). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jack Copeland and Andre A. Haeff collaborated on this month?s feature ?The True History of the Traveling- Wave Tube.? How these two men, who have very different backgrounds and live 11,000 kilometers apart, ended up writing the article together is an interesting story in itself. Copeland [above left], a Distinguished Professor of Arts at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, developed an interest in computability theory, which eventually led him to study the history of computing, including the hardware of early electronic computers. While researching a primitive form of computer memory called the Williams tube, Copeland stumbled on a patent for another kind of computer-memory tube invented by A.V. Haeff, a name he didn?t recognize. Seeking to learn about this mysterious tube, Copeland began an investigation of Haeff?s work. ?I discovered he hadn?t just invented the memory tube?he?d invented all these other things, including the traveling-wave tube,? says Copeland. But he pieced together very little about Haeff?s personal life until a student brought him a CD containing music by Haeff?s brother, Alexei. That in turn led Copeland to Haeff?s son, Andre, a retired physician who by good fortune had preserved his father?s papers. The collection occupies ?cubic meters, a completely pristine archive,? Copeland says. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paper punch cards, each representing a line of code or data, were how programmers got information into computers from the 1950s on. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When James Rautio was building up his company, Sonnet Software, in the mid-1990s, he needed some noncopyrighted imagery to use in his marketing materials. A friend lent him an 1882 copy of a biography of physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Rautio scanned a portrait in the book, and that image of Maxwell became the fledgling company's emblem. Rautio picked the picture of Maxwell largely because it was in the public domain. But it was also a fitting choice: His software, which is used to design radio-frequency circuitry, relies on the four equations, known as Maxwell's equations, that describe the fundamental rules of electromagnetism. Rautio says he knew little about Maxwell himself at the time. But he read up on Maxwell's life and was soon hooked. Over the past decade, Rautio has become a champion of Maxwell and his legacy. He's given 116 talks to date on Maxwell's life and work at conferences, workshops, and IEEE chapter meetings. In 2007, after a visit to Maxwell's ancestral home, Glenlair, in southwest Scotland, he convinced the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society to contribute matching funds to help restore the building, which was heavily damaged in a 1929 fire. Rautio says he has come to realize that Maxwell's theory is not just about "equations on a piece of paper. It's a four-dimensional story." That "fourth dimension" is a reference to the several dozen years it took for Maxwell's ideas to be developed and confirmed. He describes that time in "The Long Road to Maxwell's Equations," in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on major developments in the history of Kodak camera and the company Eastman Kodak. Topics mentioned include the awarding of the U.S. Patent Number 388,850 for the Kodak camera on September 4, 1988, the introduction of safety film made of cellulose acetate in 1908, the sales success of the Kodak Instamatic in 1970, and the company's filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012.

In 1958, the Parker Pen Company developed the "Atomic Pen," which later made a cameo appearance in Stanley Kubrick?s 2001: A Space Odyssey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hang around the Web long enough and you'll see more than your share of cartoons mocking the Internet of Things. (I refer, of course, to the collection of uniquely identifiable devices that are connected to the Internet and are capable of transmitting and receiving data over that connection.) "We have to go out for dinner," runs one typical caption. "The refrigerator isn't speaking to the stove." It's easy to poke fun at gadgets such as video-enabled toothbrushes and smart tampons, but don't let these facepalmworthy devices distract you from the serious side of IoT. Market research firm Gartner predicts that over 6 billion IoT nodes will be connected this year, while a report from DHL Trend Research and Cisco Consulting Services puts the number at 15 billion. That's a lot of "things," and the only trend everyone can agree on is that these numbers are going to get bigger. The good news for language watchers is that as the IoT grows, so does the lingo surrounding it. A full glossary of IoT-related terms would fill a year's worth of columns, so I'll just spend the rest of this column looking at a few noteworthy coinages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]