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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]

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]

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]

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]

As I read the newest papers about DNA-based computing, I had to confront a rather unpleasant truth. Despite being a geneticist who also majored in computer science, I was struggling to bridge two concepts—the universal Turing machine, the very essence of computing, and the von Neumann architecture, the basis of most modern CPUs. I had written C++ code to emulate the machine described in Turing's 1936 paper, and could use it to decide, say, if a word was a palindrome. But I couldn't see how such a machine—with its one-dimensional tape memory and ability to look at only one symbol on that tape at a time-could behave like a billion-transistor processor with hardware features such as an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), program counter, and instruction register.

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]

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]

Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend. Lossy algorithms are used to get music into the popular MP3 format and turn a digital image into a standard JPEG file. They do this by selectively removing bits, taking what scientists know about the way we see and hear to determine which bits we'd least miss. But no one can make the case that the resulting file is a perfect replica of the original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was 1995. Advances in chip technology continued apace with Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, generally because of the shrinking size of those transistors. [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]

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.

It's Tuesday night. In front of your house sits a large blue bin, full of newspaper, cardboard, bottles, cans, foil take-out trays, and empty yogurt containers. You may feel virtuous, thinking you're doing your part to reduce waste. But after you rinse out that yogurt container and toss it into the bin, you probably don't think much about it ever again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I've been recently engaged with some fairly serious projects, building up my garage semiconductor fab. I wanted to take a break and build something entertaining I could share with other people without the complicated explanations that things like a laser interferometer often require. So I decided to make a digital camera that's purposely got a lower resolution than a smartphone cam but is a lot more fun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

The article presents that the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI revealed DALL-E 2. It describe how DALL-E 2 works which create images or arts from text description, its strength and its weakness including struggles to place comprehensible text in its image, drawback in understanding the scientific concepts, and DALL-E 2 is considered a multimodal artificial intelligence system.

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]

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]

The global semiconductor shortage has made life tough for anyone using microcontrollers, with lead times now sometimes quoted in years. But there has been one bright spot: the US $4 Pi Pico, a micro-controller based on the new RP2040 chip. Not only does the RP2040 have lots of compute power, it hasn't suffered the kind of shortages afflicting other chips. So when I decided to build a cheap DIY scintillating gamma spectrometer, it was the natural choice—although I didn't realize I'd find myself navigating around teething problems of the sort that often affect a first-generation integrated circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Adam Voorhes and Robin Finlay, were having lunch on the sunny patio outside their photography studio in Austin, Texas, including the married couple known professionally as The Voorhes, was taking a break, and their biggest concern how ice rapidly melting in their margaritas.

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]

IT CAN SOMETIMES SEEM AS THOUGH there's a gaping chasm between theory and reality. But G. David Forney Jr., the recipient of this year's IEEE Medal of Honor, masterfully straddles both realms, his colleagues say. A key figure in the development of the high-speed modem, a device that opened up the Internet and all its associated world-changing technologies, Forney has balanced the practical and the theoretical throughout his career. Over the years, he has not only made critical contributions to communications and information theory but also put some of this recondite mathematical theory into practice. And as a result, he can claim a key role in the greatest communications revolution in modern history. · "He's one of the people who gets to the heart of abstract subjects very quickly," says Thomas Kailath, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford and the 2007 IEEE Medal of Honor recipient. "But uniquely, when needed, he also designed and built circuits, wrote code, and got things working. Everything Dave does, he does well." · And yet, as an underclassman at Princeton in the late 1950s, Forney wasn't necessarily set on a career in engineering. He did ultimately decide to pursue a bachelor of science in engineering, but not out of any burning desire to invent or design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

Quantum computers will turbocharge the algorithm that underpins much of modern tech [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture at Caltech in 1959, physicist Richard Feynman urged his audience to make the microscope ever more powerful so that biologists could explore the “staggeringly small world” beyond. It would be a lot easier to answer fundamental biological questions if we could “just look at the thing,” he said. [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]

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]

Sweat, ick. It betrays our nervousness, leaves unsightly blotches on our clothes, drips down our faces, and makes us stink. Sure, it cools us when we overheat, but most of the time we think of it purely as an inconvenience. We may soon, however, learn to like our sweat a lot more–or at least what it can reveal about our health. We'd certainly prefer giving a doctor a little sweat to being punctured for a blood test–or even providing a urine sample–as long as we didn't have to run a mile or sit in a sauna to do it. And if sweat could provide constant updates about our bodies' reactions to a medication, or track head trauma in athletes, we might just start to appreciate it. Sweat contains a trove of medical information and can provide it in almost real time. And now you can monitor your sweat with a wearable gadget that stimulates and collects it using a small patch and analyzes it using a smartphone–that is, if you visit my lab. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advertisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summer, a video game became available by prescription in the United States. This first-ever FDA-approved digital treatment builds on a tradition of gaming as a therapeutic tool that extends back more than a decade. Its game play gets good reviews, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While editing an article about skin cancer early in my career, I learned many not-so-cheerful facts about how ultraviolet light causes molecular disruptions in DNA-how the damage is typically incurred early in life, and how people are particularly susceptible when they live closerto the equator than theirfore-bears, as I do.Sincethen, I've tended to avoid the sun rather than revel in it. Now, however, with a little bit of home-brewed technological help, I have a device that lets me get the major benefit of solar rays without worrying about iII effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drones have revolutionized how scientiots conduct environmental and biological studies, sending back pictures and other information from areas whose climate, terrain, or indigenous wildlife make in-person treks hazardous. Now, researchers at the University of Washington and Universite Grenoble Alpes have improved an alternative tool for surveying large, remote areas: swarms of miniature wireless robots called microfliers. These tiny paper gliders, designed to change shape in midair as they descend from their drop-off point, previously depended on batteries to power their onboard actuators. But the American and French collaborators have demonstrated a batteryless glider whose actuator runs on energy collected by a solar panel on its top surface. Because the changes in shape allow a measure of control over a microflier's landing spot, researchers can count on the supercheap sensor nodes being dispersed evenly across the area to be surveilled.

IT WAS 1975, and Kurt Petersen was a smart young researcher, fresh out of the Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at MIT and working in the optics group at IBM's Almaden, Calif., research center. And he was bored. Roaming the massive complex one day, he came across a huge black stain on the linoleum tiles of an otherwise nondescript hallway. That stain would change his life and the course of an entire industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DESPITE THE UBIQUITY of computers in modern society, the vast majority of today's students never study computer science or computer programming. Those who are exposed to these subjects typically learn low-level skills rather than undertaking any deeper exploration of computational concepts or theory. In earlier decades, a few countries did promote computer education at the national level. In the 1980s, for example, the British government launched a popular and quite successful initiative that brought thousands of BBC Micros into classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two years ago, Amazon reportedly scrapped a secret artificial-intelligence hiring tool after realizing that the system had learned to prefer male job candidates while penalizing female applicants—the result of the AI training on resumes that mostly male candidates had submitted to the company. The episode raised concerns over the use of machine learning in hiring software that would perpetuate or even exacerbate existing biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Consumer technology is often a story of revolutionary leaps followed by a descent into familiarity. The first computers advanced so quickly that new models went obsolete while they were still on store shelves. Today, any US $500 laptop will be relevant for a decade. A similar story can be told of smartphones, TVs, even cars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"SPRING FESTIVAL. New virus. Spreading person to person. This one has everything." That's the whole of an email message that I dashed off to a friend, a fellow China watcher, on 21 January, after reading a BBC story about China's then-tiny COVID-19 epidemic. Something in that story rang alarm bells in my head. [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]