Fixing the Future

Nick Brown, vice-president of product at Truepic, describes how the company's technology and standards developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is fighting fakes and other forms of image tampering, by securing data from the camera lens to the users' screens. 

Patients who have traumatic nerve injuries can face significant paralysis, including paraplegia and quadriplegia. Chad Bouton's research is on developing devices that can decode and recode the electrical signals that normally flow between a limb and the brain, allowing damage to be bypassed. 

One potential path to tackling climate change due to rising carbon dioxide levels is to lock the carbon dioxide away in geological reservoirs deep underground. Deep learning AI technologies can produce better models of these reservoirs, essential if they are to be used at a big enough scale to make a difference.

Britt S. Young talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about her investigation into high-tech prosthetic hand design: "We are caught in a bionic-hand arms race. But are we making real progress? It’s time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish. Each new multigrasping bionic hand tends to be more sophisticated but also more expensive than the...

Silver Lining's executive direction Kelly Wanser explains why rising temperatures are behind the push to geoengineer the world's climate, the most plausible technologies, and why we need a lot more research to find out if it's a good idea, and if so, how to do it on a global scale. Hosted by IEEE Spectrum editor Eliza Strickland.

Hospitals are where we go to get cured of infections and diseases, but sadly, sometimes tragically, and ironically, they are also places we go to get them. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “On any given day, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.”   Yet, according to Dr Lee Harrison, “The current method used by hospitals to find and stop in...

Rare diseases are, well, rare. In two not unrelated ways. By definition, they’re diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people. But because, in the world of big business, in particular big pharma, that’s not enough to bother with, that is, it’s not profitable enough to bother with, rare diseases are rarely worked, to say nothing of cured.    For example, hypertryptophanemia is a rare condition t...

Like a lot of people, you may be thinking about trading in your car. Me too. The case, morally and even financially, for an all-electric car is becoming stronger and stronger.  And yet, what about recharging?  What’s it like going from, say Pittsburgh to New York’s Hudson Valley—a trip that doesn’t even have a solid cellular connection? What about a road trip my partner to Yosemite and back? And e...

IBM is a remarkable company, known for many things—the tabulating machines that calculated the 1890 U.S. Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizing the person computer, and developing the software that beat the best in the world at chess and then Jeopardy. The company is, though, even more remarkable for the businesses it departed—often while they were still highly profitable—and pivoting to new...

There’s no question that computers don’t understand sarcasm—or didn’t, until some researchers at the University of Central Florida starting them on a path to learning it. Software engineers have been working on various flavors of sentiment analysis for quite some time. Back in 2005, I wrote an article in Spectrum about call centers automatically scanning conversations for anger—either by the calle...

The most honest and inadvertently funny marketing message I ever saw was at a gas station that was closed for remodeling; it had been an Amaco station before that company was bought by BP . The sign said, “Rebranding, to serve you better.”    I’m afraid we’re a bit guilty of that here at Spectrum . This is the 30th episode of IEEE Spectrum’s relaunched podcast series, but the first under a new nam...

Today’s startup invites us to rethink nuclear energy. Their plan? To put cheap, portable nuclear reactors onto barges and float them out to sea. What could go wrong? According to today’s guest, basically nothing. The reactor design avoids the type of fuel rods that gave us the fictional meltdown in The China Syndrome and the real-life ones in Chernobyl and Fukushima. In fact, my guest will claim h...

A few months ago, we had on the show an economist who specialized in the energy sector. She noted that while the Trump administration had put drilling rights the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge, or ANWAR, on the block, there wasn’t much interest from the oil industry, and, more generally, the Arctic and other cold climes, presented logistical—and therefore financial—problems for oil companies.    T...

When horses were replaced by engines, for work and transportation, we didn’t need to rethink our legal frameworks. So when a fixed-in-place factory machine is replaced by a free-standing AI robot, or when human truck driver is replaced by autonomous driving software, do we really need to make any fundamental changes to the law?    My guest today seems to think so. Or perhaps more accurately, he th...

As we begin to finally address climate change in a serious way, we need to look at our cities in a serious way. And not just first-tier cities like, well, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and not just flashy growing cities like Las Vegas, Austin, Atlanta, and Columbus. We need to look at cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St Louis—cities that hav...

I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the context of a region of the United States. The region is northern Appalachia, comprising 22 counties in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. And the curse is, as it so often is in...

In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then another. As University of Waterloo Ph. D. researcher Brokoslaw Laschowski puts it, “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.”    But Laschowski and his fellow researchers...

Has there been any technology more widely talked about and yet still less understood than 5G? Qualcomm’s Vice President of Engineering, Our guest, John Smee, holds dozens of patents in wireless technologies; his designs and innovations range from CDMA and LTE to Wi-Fi and now 5G. He’ll explain the challenges of 5G—and what 6G will be like. A full transcript of this and all Radio Spectrum conversat...

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it just seem that way?    Surely we can all agree that the Industrial Revolution has changed everything. Or has it? One noted economist says there in fact were three industrial revolutions, and only one of them—the second one, from about 1870 to 1914, was im...

At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden , former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.”    Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and...

In the 2020 elections for the North Carolina State House, Democrats received 49 percent of the votes but won only 42.5 percent of the seats. In three-quarters of the state-level elections, the winning margin was more than 20 percentage points—in other words, landslides—even though statewide, the margins between the two main political parties is razor-thin—at the presidential level, Trump beat Bide...

Let’s face it. The United States, and, really, the entire world, has squandered much of the time that has elapsed since climate change first became a concern more than forty years ago. Increasingly, scientists are warning that taking coal plants offline, building wind and solar farms here and there, and planting trees, even everywhere, aren’t going to keep our planet from heating to the point of h...

Many things have changed in 2020, and it’s an open question which are altered permanently and which are transitory. Work-from-home may be here to stay; as might the shift from movie theatres and cable tv networks to streaming services; pet adoption rates are so high that some animal shelters are empty and global greenhouse gas emissions declined in record numbers.   That last fact has several caus...

Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and laptops to cars and planes.  Batteries all work the same: Chemical energy is converted to electrical energy by creating a flow of electrons from one material to another; that flow generates an electrical current.  Yet batteries are also wildly differ...

The saddest fact about the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the deaths it has already caused and the many more deaths to come before the world gets the virus under at least as much control as, say, chickenpox.    The second-saddest fact about the pandemic is the economic and educational havoc it has wrought.    Perhaps the third-saddest fact is the unfortunate lack of agreement about the best str...