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Imagine pulling up to a refueling station and filling your vehicle’s tank with liquid hydrogen, as safe and convenient to handle as gasoline or diesel, without the need for high-pressure tanks or cryogenic storage. This vision of a sustainable future could become a reality if a Calgary, Canada–based company, Ayrton Energy, can scale up its innovative method of hydrogen storage and distribution. Ayrton’s technology could make hydrogen a viable, one-to-one replacement for fossil fuels in existing infrastructure like pipelines, fuel tankers, rail cars, and trucks.

The company’s approach is to use liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs) to make it easier to transport and store hydrogen. The method chemically bonds hydrogen to carrier molecules, which absorb hydrogen molecules and make them more stable—kind of like hydrogenating cooking oil to produce margarine.

A researcher pours a sample of Ayrton’s LOHC fluid into a vial.Ayrton Energy

The approach would allow liquid hydrogen to be transported and stored in ambient conditions, rather than in the high-pressure, cryogenic tanks (to hold it at temperatures below -252 ºC) currently required for keeping hydrogen in liquid form. It would also be a big improvement on gaseous hydrogen, which is highly volatile and difficult to keep contained.

Founded in 2021, Ayrton is one of several companies across the globe developing LOHCs, including Japan’s Chiyoda and Mitsubishi, Germany’s Covalion, and China’s Hynertech. But toxicity, energy density, and input energy issues have limited LOHCs as contenders for making liquid hydrogen feasible. Ayrton says its formulation eliminates these trade-offs.

Safe, Efficient Hydrogen Fuel for Vehicles

Conventional LOHC technologies used by most of the aforementioned companies rely on substances such as toluene, which forms methylcyclohexane when hydrogenated. These carriers pose safety risks due to their flammability and volatility. Hydrogenious LOHC Technologies in Erlanger, Germany and other hydrogen fuel companies have shifted toward dibenzyltoluene, a more stable carrier that holds more hydrogen per unit volume than methylcyclohexane, though it requires higher temperatures (and thus more energy) to bind and release the hydrogen. Dibenzyltoluene hydrogenation occurs at between 3 and 10 megapascals (30 and 100 bar) and 200–300 ºC, compared with 10 MPa (100 bar), and just under 200 ºC for methylcyclohexane.

Ayrton’s proprietary oil-based hydrogen carrier not only captures and releases hydrogen with less input energy than is required for other LOHCs, but also stores more hydrogen than methylcyclohexane can—55 kilograms per cubic meter compared with methylcyclohexane’s 50 kg/m³. Dibenzyltoluene holds more hydrogen per unit volume (up to 65 kg/m³), but Ayrton’s approach to infusing the carrier with hydrogen atoms promises to cost less. Hydrogenation or dehydrogenation with Ayrton’s carrier fluid occurs at 0.1 megapascal (1 bar) and about 100 ºC, says founder and CEO Natasha Kostenuk. And as with the other LOHCs, after hydrogenation it can be transported and stored at ambient temperatures and pressures.

Judges described [Ayrton's approach] as a critical technology for the deployment of hydrogen at large scale.” —Katie Richardson, National Renewable Energy Lab

Ayrton’s LOHC fluid is as safe to handle as margarine, but it’s still a chemical, says Kostenuk. “I wouldn’t drink it. If you did, you wouldn’t feel very good. But it’s not lethal,” she says.

Kostenuk and fellow Ayrton cofounder Brandy Kinkead (who serves as the company’s chief technical officer) were originally trying to bring hydrogen generators to market to fill gaps in the electrical grid. “We were looking for fuel cells and hydrogen storage. Fuel cells were easy to find, but we couldn’t find a hydrogen storage method or medium that would be safe and easy to transport to fuel our vision of what we were trying to do with hydrogen generators,” Kostenuk says. During the search, they came across LOHC technology but weren’t satisfied with the trade-offs demanded by existing liquid hydrogen carriers. “We had the idea that we could do it better,” she says. The duo pivoted, adjusting their focus from hydrogen generators to hydrogen storage solutions.

“Everybody gets excited about hydrogen production and hydrogen end use, but they forget that you have to store and manage the hydrogen,” Kostenuk says. Incompatibility with current storage and distribution has been a barrier to adoption, she says. “We’re really excited about being able to reuse existing infrastructure that’s in place all over the world.” Ayrton’s hydrogenated liquid has fuel-cell-grade (99.999 percent) hydrogen purity, so there’s no advantage in using pure liquid hydrogen with its need for subzero temperatures, according to the company.

The main challenge the company faces is the set of issues that come along with any technology scaling up from pilot-stage production to commercial manufacturing, says Kostenuk. “A crucial part of that is aligning ourselves with the right manufacturing partners along the way,” she notes.

Asked about how Ayrton is dealing with some other challenges common to LOHCs, Kostenuk says Ayrton has managed to sidestep them. “We stayed away from materials that are expensive and hard to procure, which will help us avoid any supply chain issues,” she says. By performing the reactions at such low temperatures, Ayrton can get its carrier fluid to withstand 1,000 hydrogenation-dehydrogenation cycles before it no longer holds enough hydrogen to be useful. Conventional LOHCs are limited to a couple of hundred cycles before the high temperatures required for bonding and releasing the hydrogen breaks down the fluid and diminishes its storage capacity, Kostenuk says.

Breakthrough in Hydrogen Storage Technology

In acknowledgement of what Ayrton’s nontoxic, oil-based carrier fluid could mean for the energy and transportation sectors, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) at its annual Industry Growth Forum in May named Ayrton an “outstanding early-stage venture.” A selection committee of more than 180 climate tech and cleantech investors and industry experts chose Ayrton from a pool of more than 200 initial applicants, says Katie Richardson, group manager of NREL’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, which organized the forum. The committee based its decision on the company’s innovation, market positioning, business model, team, next steps for funding, technology, capital use, and quality of pitch presentation. “Judges described Ayrton’s approach as a critical technology for the deployment of hydrogen at large scale,” Richardson says.

As a next step toward enabling hydrogen to push gasoline and diesel aside, “we’re talking with hydrogen producers who are right now offering their customers cryogenic and compressed hydrogen,” says Kostenuk. “If they offered LOHC, it would enable them to deliver across longer distances, in larger volumes, in a multimodal way.” The company is also talking to some industrial site owners who could use the hydrogenated LOHC for buffer storage to hold onto some of the energy they’re getting from clean, intermittent sources like solar and wind. Another natural fit, she says, is energy service providers that are looking for a reliable method of seasonal storage beyond what batteries can offer. The goal is to eventually scale up enough to become the go-to alternative (or perhaps the standard) fuel for cars, trucks, trains, and ships.

Every invention begins with a problem—and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs.

Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn’t come from some innate genius, it’s not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kindergarten to community college.

We’re biased, but we hope that little girl grows up to be an engineer. By the time she comes of age, the act of invention may be something entirely new—reflecting the adoption of novel tools and the guiding forces of new social structures. Engineers, with their restless curiosity and determination to optimize the world around them, are continuously in the process of reinventing invention.

In this special issue, we bring you stories of people who are in the thick of that reinvention today. IEEE Spectrum is marking 60 years of publication this year, and we’re celebrating by highlighting both the creative act and the grindingly hard engineering work required to turn an idea into something world changing. In these pages, we take you behind the scenes of some awe-inspiring projects to reveal how technology is being made—and remade—in our time.

Inventors Are Everywhere

Invention has long been a democratic process. The economist B. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College has noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has always endeavored to allow essentially anyone to try their hand at invention. From the beginning, the patent examiners didn’t care who the applicants were—anyone with a novel and useful idea who could pay the filing fee was officially an inventor.

This ethos continues today. It’s still possible for an individual to launch a tech startup from a garage or go on “Shark Tank” to score investors. The Swedish inventor Simone Giertz, for example, made a name for herself with YouTube videos showing off her hilariously bizarre contraptions, like an alarm clock with an arm that slapped her awake. The MIT innovation scholar Eric von Hippel has spotlighted today’s vital ecosystem of “user innovation,” in which inventors such as Giertz are motivated by their own needs and desires rather than ambitions of mass manufacturing.

But that route to invention gets you only so far, and the limits of what an individual can achieve have become starker over time. To tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, inventors need a deep-pocketed government sponsor or corporate largess to muster the equipment and collective human brainpower required.

When we think about the challenges of scaling up, it’s helpful to remember Alexander Graham Bell and his collaborator Thomas Watson. “They invent this cool thing that allows them to talk between two rooms—so it’s a neat invention, but it’s basically a gadget,” says Eric Hintz, a historian of invention at the Smithsonian Institution. “To go from that to a transcontinental long-distance telephone system, they needed a lot more innovation on top of the original invention.” To scale their invention, Hintz says, Bell and his colleagues built the infrastructure that eventually evolved into Bell Labs, which became the standard-bearer for corporate R&D.

In this issue, we see engineers grappling with challenges of scale in modern problems. Consider the semiconductor technology supported by the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, a policy initiative aimed at bolstering domestic chip production. Beyond funding manufacturing, it also provides US $11 billion for R&D, including three national centers where companies can test and pilot new technologies. As one startup tells the tale, this infrastructure will drastically speed up the lab-to-fab process.

And then there are atomic clocks, the epitome of precision timekeeping. When researchers decided to build a commercial version, they had to shift their perspective, taking a sprawling laboratory setup and reimagining it as a portable unit fit for mass production and the rigors of the real world. They had to stop optimizing for precision and instead choose the most robust laser, and the atom that would go along with it.

These technology efforts benefit from infrastructure, brainpower, and cutting-edge new tools. One tool that may become ubiquitous across industries is artificial intelligence—and it’s a tool that could further expand access to the invention arena.

What if you had a team of indefatigable assistants at your disposal, ready to scour the world’s technical literature for material that could spark an idea, or to iterate on a concept 100 times before breakfast? That’s the promise of today’s generative AI. The Swiss company Iprova is exploring whether its AI tools can automate “eureka” moments for its clients, corporations that are looking to beat their competitors to the next big idea. The serial entrepreneur Steve Blank similarly advises young startup founders to embrace AI’s potential to accelerate product development; he even imagines testing product ideas on digital twins of customers. Although it’s still early days, generative AI offers inventors tools that have never been available before.

Measuring an Invention’s Impact

If AI accelerates the discovery process, and many more patentable ideas come to light as a result, then what? As it is, more than a million patents are granted every year, and we struggle to identify the ones that will make a lasting impact. Bryan Kelly, an economist at the Yale School of Management, and his collaborators made an attempt to quantify the impact of patents by doing a technology-assisted deep dive into U.S. patent records dating back to 1840. Using natural language processing, they identified patents that introduced novel phrasing that was then repeated in subsequent patents—an indicator of radical breakthroughs. For example, Elias Howe Jr.’s 1846 patent for a sewing machine wasn’t closely related to anything that came before but quickly became the basis of future sewing-machine patents.

Another foundational patent was the one awarded to an English bricklayer in 1824 for the invention of Portland cement, which is still the key ingredient in most of the world’s concrete. As Ted C. Fishman describes in his fascinating inquiry into the state of concrete today, this seemingly stable industry is in upheaval because of its heavy carbon emissions. The AI boom is fueling a construction boom in data centers, and all those buildings require billions of tons of concrete. Fishman takes readers into labs and startups where researchers are experimenting with climate-friendly formulations of cement and concrete. Who knows which of those experiments will result in a patent that echoes down the ages?

Some engineers start their invention process by thinking about the impact they want to make on the world. The eminent Indian technologist Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, who has popularized the idea of “Gandhian engineering”, advises inventors to work backward from “what we want to achieve for the betterment of humanity,” and to create problem-solving technologies that are affordable, durable, and not only for the elite.

Durability matters: Invention isn’t just about creating something brand new. It’s also about coming up with clever ways to keep an existing thing going. Such is the case with the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally designed to last 15 years, it’s been in orbit for twice that long and has actually gotten better with age, because engineers designed the satellite to be fixable and upgradable in space.

For all the invention activity around the globe—the World Intellectual Property Organization says that 3.5 million applications for patents were filed in 2022—it may be harder to invent something useful than it used to be. Not because “everything that can be invented has been invented,” as in the apocryphal quote attributed to the unfortunate head of the U.S. patent office in 1889. Rather, because so much education and experience are required before an inventor can even understand all the dimensions of the door they’re trying to crack open, much less come up with a strategy for doing so. Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, has shown that the average age of great technological innovators rose by about six years over the course of the 20th century. “Great innovation is less and less the provenance of the young,” Jones concluded.

Consider designing something as complex as a nuclear fusion reactor, as Tom Clynes describes in “An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator.” Fusion researchers have spent decades trying to crack the code of commercially viable fusion—it’s more akin to a calling than a career. If they succeed, they will unlock essentially limitless clean energy with no greenhouse gas emissions or meltdown danger. That’s the dream that the physicists in a lab in Princeton, N.J., are chasing. But before they even started, they first had to gain an intimate understanding of all the wrong ways to build a fusion reactor. Once the team was ready to proceed, what they created was an experimental reactor that accelerates the design-build-test cycle. With new AI tools and unprecedented computational power, they’re now searching for the best ways to create the magnetic fields that will confine the plasma within the reactor. Already, two startups have spun out of the Princeton lab, both seeking a path to commercial fusion.

The stellarator story and many other articles in this issue showcase how one innovation leads to the next, and how one invention can enable many more. The legendary Dean Kamen, best known for mechanical devices like the Segway and the prosthetic “Luke” arm, is now trying to push forward the squishy world of biological manufacturing. In an interview, Kamen explains how his nonprofit is working on the infrastructure—bioreactors, sensors, and controls—that will enable companies to explore the possibilities of growing replacement organs. You could say that he’s inventing the launchpad so others can invent the rockets.

Sometimes everyone in a research field knows where the breakthrough is needed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to achieve. Case in point: the quest for a household humanoid robot that can perform domestic chores, switching effortlessly from frying an egg to folding laundry. Roboticists need better learning software that will enable their bots to navigate the uncertainties of the real world, and they also need cheaper and lighter actuators. Major advances in these two areas would unleash a torrent of creativity and may finally bring robot butlers into our homes.

And maybe the future roboticists who make those breakthroughs will have cause to thank Marina Umaschi Bers, a technologist at Boston College who cocreated the ScratchJr programming language and the KIBO robotics kit to teach kids the basics of coding and robotics in entertaining ways. She sees engineering as a playground, a place for children to explore and create, to be goofy or grandiose. If today’s kindergartners learn to think of themselves as inventors, who knows what they’ll create tomorrow?

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16, home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and steering wheels.

With this “re-buttonization,” as The Wall Street Journal describes it, demand for Rachel Plotnick’s expertise has grown. Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them. She studies the relationship between technology and society with a focus on everyday or overlooked technologies, and wrote the 2018 book Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (The MIT Press). Now, companies are reaching out to her to help improve their tactile controls.

Rachel Plotnick on...

• Researching the history of buttons
• The renaissance of physical controls
• Working with companies on “re-buttoning”

You wrote a book a few years ago about the history of buttons. What inspired that book?

Rachel Plotnick: Around 2009, I noticed there was a lot of discourse in the news about the death of the button. This was a couple years after the first iPhone had come out, and a lot of people were saying that, as touchscreens were becoming more popular, eventually we weren’t going to have any more physical buttons to push. This started to happen across a range of devices like the Microsoft Kinect, and after films like Minority Report had come out in the early 2000s, everyone thought we were moving to this kind of gesture or speech interface. I was fascinated by this idea that an entire interface could die, and that led me down this big wormhole, to try to understand how we came to be a society that pushed buttons everywhere we went.

Rachel Plotnick studies the ways we use everyday technologies and how they shape our relationships with each other and the world.Rachel Plotnick

The more that I looked around, the more that I saw not only were we pressing digital buttons on social media and to order things from Amazon, but also to start our coffee makers and go up and down in elevators and operate our televisions. The pervasiveness of the button as a technology pitted against this idea of buttons disappearing seemed like such an interesting dichotomy to me. And so I wanted to understand an origin story, if I could come up with it, of where buttons came from.

What did you find in your research?

Plotnick: One of the biggest observations I made was that a lot of fears and fantasies around pushing buttons were the same 100 years ago as they are today. I expected to see this society that wildly transformed and used buttons in such a different way, but I saw these persistent anxieties over time about control and who gets to push the button, and also these pleasures around button pushing that we can use for advertising and to make technology simpler. That pendulum swing between fantasy and fear, pleasure and panic, and how those themes persisted over more than a century was what really interested me. I liked seeing the connections between the past and the present.

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We’ve experienced the rise of touchscreens, but now we might be seeing another shift—a renaissance in buttons and physical controls. What’s prompting the trend?

Plotnick: There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen. Your car was a touchscreen, your refrigerator was a touchscreen. Over time, people became somewhat fatigued with that. That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t a really useful interface, I think they are. But on the other hand, people seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.

If you look at gamers playing video games, they want to push a lot of buttons on those controls. And if you look at DJs and digital musicians, they have endless amounts of buttons and joysticks and dials to make music. There seems to be this kind of richness of the tactile experience that’s afforded by pushing buttons. They’re not perfect for every situation, but I think increasingly, we’re realizing the merit that the interface offers.

What else is motivating the re-buttoning of consumer devices?

Plotnick: Maybe screen fatigue. We spend all our days and nights on these devices, scrolling or constantly flipping through pages and videos, and there’s something tiring about that. The button may be a way to almost de-technologize our everyday existence, to a certain extent. That’s not to say buttons don’t work with screens very nicely—they’re often partners. But in a way, it’s taking away the priority of vision as a sense, and recognizing that a screen isn’t always the best way to interact with something.

When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.

It also seems like there’s an accessibility issue when prioritizing vision in device interfaces, right?

Plotnick: The blind community had to fight for years to make touchscreens more accessible. It’s always been funny to me that we call them touchscreens. We think about them as a touch modality, but a touchscreen prioritizes the visual. Over the last few years, we’re seeing Alexa and Siri and a lot of these other voice-activated systems that are making things a little bit more auditory as a way to deal with that. But the touchscreen is oriented around visuality.

It sounds like, in general, having multiple interface options is the best way to move forward—not that touchscreens are going to become completely passé, just like the button never actually died.

Plotnick: I think that’s accurate. We see paradigm shifts over time with technologies, but for the most part, we often recycle old ideas. It’s striking that if we look at the 1800s, people were sending messages via telegraph about what the future would look like if we all had this dashboard of buttons at our command where we could communicate with anyone and shop for anything. And that’s essentially what our smartphones became. We still have this dashboard menu approach. I think it means carefully considering what the right interface is for each situation.

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Several companies have reached out to you to learn from your expertise. What do they want to know?

Plotnick: I think there is a hunger out there from companies designing buttons or consumer technologies to try to understand the history of how we used to do things, how we might bring that to bear on the present, and what the future looks like with these interfaces. I’ve had a number of interesting discussions with companies, including one that manufactures push-button interfaces. I had a conversation with them about medical devices like CT machines and X-ray machines, trying to imagine the easiest way to push a button in that situation, to save people time and improve the patient encounter.

I’ve also talked to people about what will make someone use a defibrillator or not. Even though it’s really simple to go up to these automatic machines, if you see someone going into cardiac arrest in a mall or out on the street, a lot of people are terrified to actually push the button that would get this machine started. We had a really fascinating discussion about why someone wouldn’t push a button, and what would it take to get them to feel okay about doing that.

In all of these cases, these are design questions, but they’re also social and cultural questions. I like the idea that people who are in the humanities studying these things from a long-term perspective can also speak to engineers trying to build these devices.

So these companies also want to know about the history of buttons?

Plotnick: I’ve had some fascinating conversations around history. We all want to learn what mistakes not to make and what worked well in the past. There’s often this narrative of progress, that things are only getting better with technology over time. But if we look at these lessons, I think we can see that sometimes things were simpler or better in a past moment, and sometimes they were harder. Often with new technologies, we think we’re completely reinventing the wheel. But maybe these concepts existed a long time ago, and we haven’t paid attention to that. There’s a lot to be learned from the past.

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Research expeditions conducted at sea using a rotating gravity machine and microscope found that the Earth’s oceans may not be absorbing as much carbon as researchers have long thought.

Oceans are believed to absorb roughly 26 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by drawing down CO₂ from the atmosphere and locking it away. In this system, CO₂ enters the ocean, where phytoplankton and other organisms consume about 70 percent of it. When these organisms eventually die, their soft, small structures sink to the bottom of the ocean in what looks like an underwater snowfall.

This “marine snow” pulls carbon away from the surface of the ocean and sequesters it in the depths for millennia, which enables the surface waters to draw down more CO₂ from the air. It’s one of Earth’s best natural carbon-removal systems. It’s so effective at keeping atmospheric CO₂ levels in check that many research groups are trying to enhance the process with geoengineering techniques.

But the new study, published on 11 October in Science, found that the sinking particles don’t fall to the ocean floor as quickly as researchers thought. Using a custom gravity machine that simulated marine snow’s native environment, the study’s authors observed that the particles produce mucus tails that act like parachutes, putting the brakes on their descent—sometimes even bringing them to a standstill.

The physical drag leaves carbon lingering in the upper hydrosphere, rather than being safely sequestered in deeper waters. Living organisms can then consume the marine snow particles and respire their carbon back into the sea. Ultimately, this impedes the rate at which the ocean draws down and sequesters additional CO₂ from the air.

The implications are grim: Scientists’ best estimates of how much CO₂ the Earth’s oceans sequester could be way off. “We’re talking roughly hundreds of gigatonnes of discrepancy if you don’t include these marine snow tails,” says Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University and one of the paper’s authors. The work was conducted by researchers at Stanford, Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Oceans Absorb Less CO₂ Than Expected

Researchers for years have been developing numerical models to estimate marine carbon sequestration. Those models will need to be adjusted for the slower sinking speed of marine snow, Prakash says.

The findings also have implications for startups in the fledgling marine carbon geoengineering field. These companies use techniques such as ocean alkalinity enhancement to augment the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon. Their success depends, in part, on using numerical models to prove to investors and the public that their techniques work. But their estimates are only as good as the models they use, and the scientific community’s confidence in them.

“We’re talking roughly hundreds of gigatonnes of discrepancy if you don’t include these marine snow tails.” —Manu Prakash, Stanford University

The Stanford researchers made the discovery on an expedition off the coast of Maine. There, they collected marine samples by hanging traps from their boat 80 meters deep. After pulling up a sample, the researchers quickly analyzed the contents while still on board the ship using their wheel-shaped machine and microscope.

The researchers built a microscope with a spinning wheel that simulates marine snow falling through sea water over longer distances than would otherwise be practical.Prakash Lab/Stanford

The device simulates the organisms’ vertical travel over long distances. Samples go into a wheel about the size of a vintage film reel. The wheel spins constantly, allowing suspended marine-snow particles to sink while a camera captures their every move.

The apparatus adjusts for temperature, light, and pressure to emulate marine conditions. Computational tools assess flow around the sinking particles and custom software removes noise in the data from the ship’s vibrations. To accommodate for the tilt and roll of the ship, the researchers mounted the device on a two-axis gimbal.

Slower Marine Snow Reduces Carbon Sequestration

With this setup, the team observed that sinking marine snow generates an invisible halo-shaped comet tail made of viscoelastic transparent exopolymer—a mucus-like parachute. They discovered the invisible tail by adding small beads to the seawater sample in the wheel, and analyzing the way they flowed around the marine snow. “We found that the beads were stuck in something invisible trailing behind the sinking particles,” says Rahul Chajwa, a bioengineering postdoctoral fellow at Stanford.

The tail introduces drag and buoyancy, doubling the amount of time marine snow spends in the upper 100 meters of the ocean, the researchers concluded. “This is the sedimentation law we should be following,” says Prakash, who hopes to get the results into climate models.

The study will likely help models project carbon export—the process of transporting CO₂ from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, says Lennart Bach, a marine biochemist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, who was not involved with the research. “The methodology they developed is very exciting and it’s great to see new methods coming into this research field,” he says.

But Bach cautions against extrapolating the results too far. “I don’t think the study will change the numbers on carbon export as we know them right now,” because these numbers are derived from empirical methods that would have unknowingly included the effects of the mucus tail, he says.

Marine snow may be slowed by “parachutes” of mucus while sinking, potentially lowering the rate at which the global ocean can sequester carbon in the depths.Prakash Lab/Stanford

Prakash and his team came up with the idea for the microscope while conducting research on a human parasite that can travel dozens of meters. “We would make 5- to 10-meter-tall microscopes, and one day, while packing for a trip to Madagascar, I had this ‘aha’ moment,” says Prakash. “I was like: Why are we packing all these tubes? What if the two ends of these tubes were connected?”

The group turned their linear tube into a closed circular channel—a hamster wheel approach to observing microscopic particles. Over five expeditions at sea, the team further refined the microscope’s design and fluid mechanics to accommodate marine samples, often tackling the engineering while on the boat and adjusting for flooding and high seas.

In addition to the sedimentation physics of marine snow, the team also studies other plankton that may affect climate and carbon-cycle models. On a recent expedition off the coast of Northern California, the group discovered a cell with silica ballast that makes marine snow sink like a rock, Prakash says.

The crafty gravity machine is one of Prakash’s many frugal inventions, which include an origami-inspired paper microscope, or “foldscope,” that can be attached to a smartphone, and a paper-and-string biomedical centrifuge dubbed a “paperfuge.”

Finished chips coming in from the foundry are subject to a battery of tests. For those destined for critical systems in cars, those tests are particularly extensive and can add 5 to 10 percent to the cost of a chip. But do you really need to do every single test?

Engineers at NXP have developed a machine-learning algorithm that learns the patterns of test results and figures out the subset of tests that are really needed and those that they could safely do without. The NXP engineers described the process at the IEEE International Test Conference in San Diego last week.

NXP makes a wide variety of chips with complex circuitry and advanced chip-making technology, including inverters for EV motors, audio chips for consumer electronics, and key-fob transponders to secure your car. These chips are tested with different signals at different voltages and at different temperatures in a test process called continue-on-fail. In that process, chips are tested in groups and are all subjected to the complete battery, even if some parts fail some of the tests along the way.

Chips were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests.

“We have to ensure stringent quality requirements in the field, so we have to do a lot of testing,” says Mehul Shroff, an NXP Fellow who led the research. But with much of the actual production and packaging of chips outsourced to other companies, testing is one of the few knobs most chip companies can turn to control costs. “What we were trying to do here is come up with a way to reduce test cost in a way that was statistically rigorous and gave us good results without compromising field quality.”

A Test Recommender System

Shroff says the problem has certain similarities to the machine learning-based recommender systems used in e-commerce. “We took the concept from the retail world, where a data analyst can look at receipts and see what items people are buying together,” he says. “Instead of a transaction receipt, we have a unique part identifier and instead of the items that a consumer would purchase, we have a list of failing tests.”

The NXP algorithm then discovered which tests fail together. Of course, what’s at stake for whether a purchaser of bread will want to buy butter is quite different from whether a test of an automotive part at a particular temperature means other tests don’t need to be done. “We need to have 100 percent or near 100 percent certainty,” Shroff says. “We operate in a different space with respect to statistical rigor compared to the retail world, but it’s borrowing the same concept.”

As rigorous as the results are, Shroff says that they shouldn’t be relied upon on their own. You have to “make sure it makes sense from engineering perspective and that you can understand it in technical terms,” he says. “Only then, remove the test.”

Shroff and his colleagues analyzed data obtained from testing seven microcontrollers and applications processors built using advanced chipmaking processes. Depending on which chip was involved, they were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests. Extending the analysis to data from other types of chips led to an even wider range of opportunities to trim testing.

The algorithm is a pilot project for now, and the NXP team is looking to expand it to a broader set of parts, reduce the computational overhead, and make it easier to use.

In physical books, yellowing pages are usually a sign of age. But brand-new users of Amazon’s Kindle Colorsofts, the tech giant’s first color e-reader, are already noticing yellow hues appearing at the bottoms of their displays.

Since the complaints began the trickle in, Amazon has reportedly suspended shipments and announced that it is working to fix the issue. (As of publication of this article, the US $280 Kindle had an average 2.6 star rating on Amazon.) It’s not yet clear what is causing the discoloration. But while the issue is new—and unexpected—the technology is not, says Jason Heikenfeld, an IEEE Fellow and engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati. The Kindle Colorsoft, which became available on 30 October, uses “a very old approach,” says Heikenfeld, who previously worked to develop the ultimate e-paper technology. “It was the first approach everybody tried.”

Amazon’s e-reader uses reflective display technology developed by E Ink, a company that started in the 1990s as an MIT Media Lab spin off before developing its now-dominant electronic paper displays. E Ink is used in Kindles, as well as top e-readers from Kobo, reMarkable, Onyx, and more. E Ink first introduced Kaleido—the basis of the Colorsoft’s display—five years ago, though the road to full-color e-paper started well before.

How E-Readers Work

Monochromatic Kindles work by applying voltages to electrodes in the screen that bring black or white pigment to the top of each pixel. Those pixels then reflect ambient light, creating a paper-like display. To create a full-color display, companies like E Ink added an array of filters just above the ink. This approach didn’t work well at first because the filters lost too much light, making the displays dark and low resolution. But with a few adjustments, Kaleido was ready for consumer products in 2019. (Other approaches—like adding colored pigments to the ink—have been developed, but these come with their own drawbacks, including a higher price tag.)

Given this design, it initially seemed to Heikenfeld that the issue would have stemmed from the software, which determines the voltages applied to each electrode. This aligned with reports from some users that the issue appeared after a software update.

But industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested in a post on X that the issue is due to the e-reader’s hardware. Amazon switched the optically clear adhesive (OCA) used in the Colorsoft to a material that may not be so optically clear. In its announcement of the Colorsoft, the company boasted “custom formulated coatings” that would enhance the color display as one of the new e-reader’s innovations.

In terms of resolving the issue, Kuo’s post also stated that “While component suppliers have developed several hardware solutions, Amazon seems to be leaning toward a software-based fix.” Heikenfeld is not sure how a software fix would work, apart from blacking out the bottom of the screen.

Amazon did not reply to IEEE Spectrum’s request for comment. In an email to IEEE Spectrum, E Ink stated, “While we cannot comment on any individual partner or product, we are committed to supporting our partners in understanding and addressing any issues that arise.”

The Future of E-Readers

It took a long time for color Kindles to arrive, and the future of reflective e-reader displays isn’t likely to improve much, according to Heikenfeld. “I used to work a lot in this field, and it just really slowed down at some point, because it’s a tough nut to crack,” Heikenfeld says.

There are inherent limitations and inefficiencies to working with filter-based color displays that rely on ambient light, and there’s no Moore’s Law for these displays. Instead, their improvement is asymptotic—and we may already be close to the limit. Meanwhile, displays that emit light, like LCD and OLED, continue to improve. “An iPad does a pretty damn good job with battery life now,” says Heikenfeld.

At the same time, he believes there will always be a place for reflective displays, which remain a more natural experience for our eyes. “We live in a world of reflective color,” Heikenfeld says.

This is story was updated on 12 November 2024 to correct that Jason Heikenfeld is an IEEE Fellow.

The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

This article features IEEE Board of Directors members ChunChe “Lance” Fung, Eric Grigorian, and Christina Schober.

IEEE Senior Member ChunChe “Lance” Fung

Director, Region 10: Asia Pacific

Joanna Mai Yie Leung

Fung has worked in academia and provided industry consultancy services for more than 40 years. His research interests include applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, and other techniques to solve practical problems. He has authored more than 400 publications in the disciplines of AI, computational intelligence, and related applications. Fung currently works on the ethical applications and social impacts of AI.

A member of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, Fung has been an active IEEE volunteer for more than 30 years. As a member and chair of the IEEE Technical Program Integrity and Conference Quality committees, he oversaw the quality of technical programs presented at IEEE conferences. Fung also chaired the Region 10 Educational Activities Committee. He was instrumental in translating educational materials to local languages for the IEEE Reaching Locals project.

As chair of the IEEE New Initiatives Committee, he established and promoted the US $1 Million Challenge Call for New Initiatives, which supports potential IEEE programs, services, or products that will significantly benefit members, the public, the technical community, or customers and could have a lasting impact on IEEE or its business processes.

Fung has left an indelible mark as a dedicated educator at Singapore Polytechnic, Curtin University, and Murdoch University. He was appointed in 2015 as professor emeritus at Murdoch, and he takes pride in training the next generation of volunteers, leaders, teachers, and researchers in the Western Australian community. Fung received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and the IEEE Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award.

IEEE Senior Member Eric Grigorian

Director, Region 3: Southern U.S. & Jamaica

Sean McNeil/GTRI

Grigorian has extensive experience leading international cross-domain teams that support the commercial and defense industries. His current research focuses on implementing model-based systems engineering, creating models that depict system behavior, interfaces, and architecture. His work has led to streamlined processes, reduced costs, and faster design and implementation of capabilities due to efficient modeling and verification. Grigorian holds two U.S. utility patents.

Grigorian has been an active volunteer with IEEE since his time as a student member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He saw it as an excellent way to network and get to know people. He found his personality was suited for working within the organization and building leadership skills. During the past 43 years as an IEEE member, he has been affiliated with the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems (AESS), IEEE Computer, and IEEE Communications societies.

As Grigorian’s career has evolved, his involvement with IEEE has also increased. He has been the IEEE Huntsville Section student activities chair, as well as vice chair, and chair. He also was the section’s AESS chair. He served as IEEE SoutheastCon chair in 2008 and 2019, and served on the IEEE Region 3 executive committee as area chair and conference committee chair, enhancing IEEE members’ benefits, engagement, and career advancement. He has significantly contributed to initiatives within IEEE, including promoting preuniversity science, technology, engineering, and mathematics efforts in Alabama.

Grigorian’s professional achievements have been recognized with numerous awards from employers and local technical chapters, including with the 2020 UAH Alumni of Achievement Award for the College of Engineering and the 2006 IEEE Region 3 Outstanding Engineer of the Year Award. He is a member of the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society.

IEEE Life Senior Member Christina Schober

Director, Division V

Katie Fears/Brio Art

Schober is an innovative engineer with a diverse design and manufacturing engineering background. With more than 40 years of experience, her career has spanned research, design, and manufacturing sensors for space, commercial, and military aircraft navigation and tactical guidance systems. She was responsible for the successful transition from design to production for groundbreaking programs including an integrated flight management system, the Stinger missile’s roll frequency sensor, and the designing of three phases of the DARPA atomic clock. She holds 17 U.S. patents and 24 other patents in the aerospace and navigation fields.

Schober started her career in the 1980s, at a time when female engineers were not widely accepted. The prevailing attitude required her to “stay tough,” she says, and she credits IEEE for giving her technical and professional support. Because of her experiences, she became dedicated to making diversity and inclusion systemic in IEEE.

Schober has held many leadership roles, including IEEE Division VIII Director, IEEE Sensors Council president, and IEEE Standards Sensors Council secretary. In addition to her membership in the IEEE Photonics Society, she is active with the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Sensors Council, IEEE Standards Association, and IEEE Women in Engineering.

She is also active in her local community, serving as an invited speaker on STEM for the public school system and was a volunteer at youth shelters. Schober has received numerous awards including the IEEE Sensors Council Lifetime Contribution Award and the IEEE Twin Cities Section’s Young Engineer of the Year Award. She is an IEEE Computer Society Gold Core member, a member of the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society and received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal.

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain key ingredients in the biological cookbook.

A ”once in a lifetime” comet is expected to light up the night sky as it passes by Earth.

In his latest book, The Blue on Fire: Hawaii, photographer Enzo Barracco hopes to inspire the world to protect the ocean.

A collaboration between a space company and a fashion company yields something elegant.

A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast.

More blazes break out where wild land and urban areas overlap.

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Why are there so many VPNs for Apple TV? Oh, right—geofencing.

M4 and M4 Pro get core count bumps; M4 Max relies on architectural improvements.

Home users can opt in for a single year of updates at $30 per PC—not 3 years.

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First Mac mini redesign in almost 15 years highlights how good the insides are.

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Researchers suspect the marine mammals may have been communicating across the vast distance

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An ecologist’s long walks and detailed observations allowed him to chronicle the shifts in an iconic habitat and grow a once-overlooked branch of science

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With no conclusive laboratory results, researchers are turning to other methods to find the elusive substance

From the busy cities to ocean waters, our need to illuminate the world has had some strange and tragic consequences

The pathogen takes over the brains of its hosts and controls them for its own sinister ends

From the formation of inner ear bones to the rise of hair to cover our bodies, these developments made us distinct from other animals