'Gutfeld!' panelists react to President-elect Trump's choice for 'border czar.'

In the first quarter of Monday's Dolphins-Rams game, ESPN reported that Tyreek Hill said a torn ligament in his wrist became worst after he was detained by police.

Australia’s leading media agencies have ducked questions about cash kickbacks.

Media outlets fear being dragged in to coronial inquests and forced to defend themselves whenever they report deaths.

Tech giant to pay $35.44 billion for social networking firm in surprise deal.

Delta Goodrem and her revolving chair have proved their star power, helping to reverse Nine’s horror start to the year.

Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality.

IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023, leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to attain a better path toward scalability.

Now researchers at MIT have been able to both reduce the size of the qubits and done so in a way that reduces the interference that occurs between neighboring qubits. The MIT researchers have increased the number of superconducting qubits that can be added onto a device by a factor of 100.

“We are addressing both qubit miniaturization and quality,” said William Oliver, the director for the Center for Quantum Engineering at MIT. “Unlike conventional transistor scaling, where only the number really matters, for qubits, large numbers are not sufficient, they must also be high-performance. Sacrificing performance for qubit number is not a useful trade in quantum computing. They must go hand in hand.”

The key to this big increase in qubit density and reduction of interference comes down to the use of two-dimensional materials, in particular the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The MIT researchers demonstrated that a few atomic monolayers of hBN can be stacked to form the insulator in the capacitors of a superconducting qubit.

Just like other capacitors, the capacitors in these superconducting circuits take the form of a sandwich in which an insulator material is sandwiched between two metal plates. The big difference for these capacitors is that the superconducting circuits can operate only at extremely low temperatures—less than 0.02 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C).

Superconducting qubits are measured at temperatures as low as 20 millikelvin in a dilution refrigerator.Nathan Fiske/MIT

In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications. To get around these material shortcomings, most superconducting circuits use what are called coplanar capacitors. In these capacitors, the plates are positioned laterally to one another, rather than on top of one another.

As a result, the intrinsic silicon substrate below the plates and to a smaller degree the vacuum above the plates serve as the capacitor dielectric. Intrinsic silicon is chemically pure and therefore has few defects, and the large size dilutes the electric field at the plate interfaces, all of which leads to a low-loss capacitor. The lateral size of each plate in this open-face design ends up being quite large (typically 100 by 100 micrometers) in order to achieve the required capacitance.

In an effort to move away from the large lateral configuration, the MIT researchers embarked on a search for an insulator that has very few defects and is compatible with superconducting capacitor plates.

“We chose to study hBN because it is the most widely used insulator in 2D material research due to its cleanliness and chemical inertness,” said colead author Joel Wang, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics.

On either side of the hBN, the MIT researchers used the 2D superconducting material, niobium diselenide. One of the trickiest aspects of fabricating the capacitors was working with the niobium diselenide, which oxidizes in seconds when exposed to air, according to Wang. This necessitates that the assembly of the capacitor occur in a glove box filled with argon gas.

While this would seemingly complicate the scaling up of the production of these capacitors, Wang doesn’t regard this as a limiting factor.

“What determines the quality factor of the capacitor are the two interfaces between the two materials,” said Wang. “Once the sandwich is made, the two interfaces are “sealed” and we don’t see any noticeable degradation over time when exposed to the atmosphere.”

This lack of degradation is because around 90 percent of the electric field is contained within the sandwich structure, so the oxidation of the outer surface of the niobium diselenide does not play a significant role anymore. This ultimately makes the capacitor footprint much smaller, and it accounts for the reduction in cross talk between the neighboring qubits.

“The main challenge for scaling up the fabrication will be the wafer-scale growth of hBN and 2D superconductors like [niobium diselenide], and how one can do wafer-scale stacking of these films,” added Wang.

Wang believes that this research has shown 2D hBN to be a good insulator candidate for superconducting qubits. He says that the groundwork the MIT team has done will serve as a road map for using other hybrid 2D materials to build superconducting circuits.

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“Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.” These directions seem simple enough, and yet I have messed up many, many pots of rice over the years. My sympathies to anyone who’s ever had to boil rice on a stovetop, cook it in a clay pot over a kerosene or charcoal burner, or prepare it in a cast-iron cauldron. All hail the 1955 invention of the automatic rice cooker!

How the automatic rice cooker was invented

It isn’t often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but in the story of the automatic rice cooker, a woman takes center stage. That happened only after the first attempts at electrifying rice cooking, starting in the 1920s, turned out to be utter failures. Matsushita, Mitsubishi, and Sony all experimented with variations of placing electric heating coils inside wooden tubs or aluminum pots, but none of these cookers automatically switched off when the rice was done. The human cook—almost always a wife or daughter—still had to pay attention to avoid burning the rice. These electric rice cookers didn’t save any real time or effort, and they sold poorly.

But Shogo Yamada, the energetic development manager of the electric appliance division for Toshiba, became convinced that his company could do better. In post–World War II Japan, he was demonstrating and selling electric washing machines all over the country. When he took a break from his sales pitch and actually talked to women about their daily household labors, he discovered that cooking rice—not laundry—was their most challenging chore. Rice was a mainstay of the Japanese diet, and women had to prepare it up to three times a day. It took hours of work, starting with getting up by 5:00 am to fan the flames of a kamado, a traditional earthenware stove fueled by charcoal or wood on which the rice pot was heated. The inability to properly mind the flame could earn a woman the label of “failed housewife.”

In 1951, Yamada became the cheerleader of the rice cooker within Toshiba, which was understandably skittish given the past failures of other companies. To develop the product, he turned to Yoshitada Minami, the manager of a small family factory that produced electric water heaters for Toshiba. The water-heater business wasn’t great, and the factory was on the brink of bankruptcy.

How Sources Influence the Telling of History

As someone who does a lot of research online, I often come across websites that tell very interesting histories, but without any citations. It takes only a little bit of digging before I find entire passages copied and pasted from one site to another, and so I spend a tremendous amount of time trying to track down the original source. Accounts of popular consumer products, such as the rice cooker, are particularly prone to this problem. That’s not to say that popular accounts are necessarily wrong; plus they are often much more engaging than boring academic pieces. This is just me offering a note of caution because every story offers a different perspective depending on its sources.

For example, many popular blogs sing the praises of Fumiko Minami and her tireless contributions to the development of the rice maker. But in my research, I found no mention of Minami before Helen Macnaughtan’s 2012 book chapter, “Building up Steam as Consumers: Women, Rice Cookers and the Consumption of Everyday Household Goods in Japan,” which itself was based on episode 42 of the Project X: Challengers documentary series that was produced by NHK and aired in 2002.

If instead I had relied solely on the description of the rice cooker’s early development provided by the Toshiba Science Museum (here’s an archived page from 2007), this month’s column would have offered a detailed technical description of how uncooked rice has a crystalline structure, but as it cooks, it becomes a gelatinized starch. The museum’s website notes that few engineers had ever considered the nature of cooking rice before the rice-cooker project, and it refers simply to the “project team” that discovered the process. There’s no mention of Fumiko.

Both stories are factually correct, but they emphasize different details. Sometimes it’s worth asking who is part of the “project team” because the answer might surprise you. —A.M.

Although Minami understood the basic technical principles for an electric rice cooker, he didn’t know or appreciate the finer details of preparing perfect rice. And so Minami turned to his wife, Fumiko.

Fumiko, the mother of six children, spent five years researching and testing to document the ideal recipe. She continued to make rice three times a day, carefully measuring water-to-rice ratios, noting temperatures and timings, and prototyping rice-cooker designs. Conventional wisdom was that the heat source needed to be adjusted continuously to guarantee fluffy rice, but Fumiko found that heating the water and rice to a boil and then cooking for exactly 20 minutes produced consistently good results.

But how would an automatic rice cooker know when the 20 minutes was up? A suggestion came from Toshiba engineers. A working model based on a double boiler (a pot within a pot for indirect heating) used evaporation to mark time. While the rice cooked in the inset pot, a bimetallic switch measured the temperature in the external pot. Boiling water would hold at a constant 100 °C, but once it had evaporated, the temperature would soar. When the internal temperature of the double boiler surpassed 100 °C, the switch would bend and cut the circuit. One cup of boiling water in the external pot took 20 minutes to evaporate. The same basic principle is still used in modern cookers.

Yamada wanted to ensure that the rice cooker worked in all climates, so Fumiko tested various prototypes in extreme conditions: on her rooftop in cold winters and scorching summers and near steamy bathrooms to mimic high humidity. When Fumiko became ill from testing outside, her children pitched in to help. None of the aluminum and glass prototypes, it turned out, could maintain their internal temperature in cold weather. The final design drew inspiration from the Hokkaidō region, Japan’s northernmost prefecture. Yamada had seen insulated cooking pots there, so the Minami family tried covering the rice cooker with a triple-layered iron exterior. It worked.

How Toshiba sold its automatic rice cooker

Toshiba’s automatic rice cooker went on sale on 10 December 1955, but initially, sales were slow. It didn’t help that the rice cooker was priced at 3,200 yen, about a third of the average Japanese monthly salary. It took some salesmanship to convince women they needed the new appliance. This was Yamada’s time to shine. He demonstrated using the rice cooker to prepare takikomi gohan, a rice dish seasoned with dashi, soy sauce, and a selection of meats and vegetables. When the dish was cooked in a traditional kamado, the soy sauce often burned, making the rather simple dish difficult to master. Women who saw Yamada’s demo were impressed with the ease offered by the rice cooker.

Another clever sales technique was to get electricity companies to serve as Toshiba distributors. At the time, Japan was facing a national power surplus stemming from the widespread replacement of carbon-filament lightbulbs with more efficient tungsten ones. The energy savings were so remarkable that operations at half of the country’s power plants had to be curtailed. But with utilities distributing Toshiba rice cookers, increased demand for electricity was baked in.

Within a year, Toshiba was selling more than 200,000 rice cookers a month. Many of them came from the Minamis’ factory, which was rescued from near-bankruptcy in the process.

How the automatic rice cooker conquered the world

From there, the story becomes an international one with complex localization issues. Japanese sushi rice is not the same as Thai sticky rice which is not the same as Persian tahdig, Indian basmati, Italian risotto, or Spanish paella. You see where I’m going with this. Every culture that has a unique rice dish almost always uses its own regional rice with its own preparation preferences. And so countries wanted their own type of automatic electric rice cooker (although some rejected automation in favor of traditional cooking methods).

Yoshiko Nakano, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a book in 2009 about the localized/globalized nature of rice cookers. Where There Are Asians, There Are Rice Cookers traces the popularization of the rice cooker from Japan to China and then the world by way of Hong Kong. One of the key differences between the Japanese and Chinese rice cooker is that the latter has a glass lid, which Chinese cooks demanded so they could see when to add sausage. More innovation and diversification followed. Modern rice cookers have settings to give Iranians crispy rice at the bottom of the pot, one to let Thai customers cook noodles, one for perfect rice porridge, and one for steel-cut oats.

My friend Hyungsub Choi, in his 2022 article “Before Localization: The Story of the Electric Rice Cooker in South Korea,” pushes back a bit on Nakano’s argument that countries were insistent on tailoring cookers to their tastes. From 1965, when the first domestic rice cooker appeared in South Korea, to the early 1990s, Korean manufacturers engaged in “conscious copying,” Choi argues. That is, they didn’t bother with either innovation or adaptation. As a result, most Koreans had to put up with inferior domestic models. Even after the Korean government made it a national goal to build a better rice cooker, manufacturers failed to deliver one, perhaps because none of the engineers involved knew how to cook rice. It’s a good reminder that the history of technology is not always the story of innovation and progress.

Eventually, the Asian diaspora brought the rice cooker to all parts of the globe, including South Carolina, where I now live and which coincidentally has a long history of rice cultivation. I bought my first rice cooker on a whim, but not for its rice-cooking ability. I was intrigued by the yogurt-making function. Similar to rice, yogurt requires a constant temperature over a specific length of time. Although successful, my yogurt experiment was fleeting—store-bought was just too convenient. But the rice cooking blew my mind. Perfect rice. Every. Single. Time. I am never going back to overflowing pots of starchy water.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Automatic Rice Cooker’s Unlikely Inventor.”

References

Helen Macnaughtan’s 2012 book chapter, “Building up Steam as Consumers: Women, Rice Cookers and the Consumption of Everyday Household Goods in Japan,” was a great resource in understanding the development of the Toshiba ER-4. The chapter appeared in The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850-2000, edited by Penelope Francks and Janet Hunter (Palgrave Macmillan).

Yoshiko Nakano’s book Where There are Asians, There are Rice Cookers (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) takes the story much further with her focus on the National (Panasonic) rice cooker and its adaptation and adoption around the world.

The Toshiba Science Museum, in Kawasaki, Japan, where we sourced our main image of the original ER-4, closed to the public in June. I do not know what the future holds for its collections, but luckily some of its Web pages have been archived to continue to help researchers like me.

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.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

We’re hoping to get more on this from Boston Dynamics, but if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s electric Atlas doing something productive (and autonomous!).

And why not do it in a hot dog costume for Halloween, too?

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Ooh, this is exciting! Aldebaran is getting ready to release a seventh generation of NAO!

[ Aldebaran ]

Okay I found this actually somewhat scary, but Happy Halloween from ANYbotics!

[ ANYbotics ]

Happy Halloween from the Clearpath!

[ Clearpath Robotics Inc. ]

Another genuinely freaky Happy Halloween, from Boston Dynamics!

[ Boston Dynamics ]

This “urban opera” by Compagnie La Machine took place last weekend in Toulouse, featuring some truly enormous fantastical robots.

[ Compagnie La Machine ]

Thanks, Thomas!

Impressive dismount from Deep Robotics’ DR01.

[ Deep Robotics ]

Cobot juggling from Daniel Simu.

[ Daniel Simu ]

Adaptive-morphology multirotors exhibit superior versatility and task-specific performance compared to traditional multirotors owing to their functional morphological adaptability. However, a notable challenge lies in the contrasting requirements of locking each morphology for flight controllability and efficiency while permitting low-energy reconfiguration. A novel design approach is proposed for reconfigurable multirotors utilizing soft multistable composite laminate airframes.

[ Environmental Robotics Lab paper ]

This is a pitching demonstration of new Torobo. New Torobo is lighter than the older version, enabling faster motion such as throwing a ball. The new model will be available in Japan in March 2025 and overseas from October 2025 onward.

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

I’m not sure what makes this “the world’s best robotic hand for manipulation research,” but it seems solid enough.

[ Robot Era ]

And now, picking a micro cat.

[ RoCogMan Lab ]

When Arvato’s Louisville, Ky. staff wanted a robotics system that could unload freight with greater speed and safety, Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robot stood out. Stretch is a first of its kind mobile robot designed specifically to unload boxes from trailers and shipping containers, freeing up employees to focus on more meaningful tasks in the warehouse. Arvato acquired its first Stretch system this year and the robot’s impact was immediate.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to capture the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, as it passed in front of the Sun on Sept. 30, 2024, the 1,285th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

[ NASA ]

Students from Howard University, Moorehouse College, and Berea College joined University of Michigan robotics students in online Robotics 102 courses for the fall ‘23 and winter ‘24 semesters. The class is part of the distributed teaching collaborative, a co-teaching initiative started in 2020 aimed at providing cutting edge robotics courses for students who would normally not have access to at their current university.

[ University of Michigan Robotics ]

Discover the groundbreaking projects and cutting-edge technology at the Robotics and Automation Summer School (RASS) hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory. In this exclusive behind-the-scenes video, students from top universities work on advanced robotics in disciplines such as AI, automation, machine learning, and autonomous systems.

[ Los Alamos National Laboratory ]

This week’s Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute Seminar is from Princeton University’s Anirudha Majumdar, on “Robots That Know When They Don’t Know.”

Foundation models from machine learning have enabled rapid advances in perception, planning, and natural language understanding for robots. However, current systems lack any rigorous assurances when required to generalize to novel scenarios. For example, perception systems can fail to identify or localize unfamiliar objects, and large language model (LLM)-based planners can hallucinate outputs that lead to unsafe outcomes when executed by robots. How can we rigorously quantify the uncertainty of machine learning components such that robots know when they don’t know and can act accordingly?

[ Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute ]

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.

[Back to top]

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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This is a sponsored article brought to you by BESydney.

In July 2024, Sydney woman Katherine Bennell-Pegg made history as the first astronaut to graduate under the Australian flag and the first female astronaut in Australia. Her journey, marked by determination and discipline, showcases Australia’s growing prominence in space exploration and research.

From her academic achievements at the University of Sydney (USYD) to her rigorous training at the European Space Agency (ESA), Bennell-Pegg’s success has paved a path forward for aspiring space and aerospace professionals in Australia and globally.

A journey to the stars begins in Sydney

Katherine Bennell-Pegg was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and grew up in the Northern Beaches area. Her fascination with space began at an early age.

“I always dreamed of being an astronaut,” Bennell-Pegg shared in her “Insights from an Australian Astronaut” Space Forum Speech in July 2024. “When I was young, it was for the adventure, but after more than a decade working in space, it’s now because I know the role it plays in tackling real-world problems and developing new knowledge that can benefit our society, environment and science.”

Sydney: A Hub for Space Innovation

Sydney, the vibrant heart of the state of New South Wales (NSW), stands at the forefront of aerospace innovation in Australia. With its world-class research facilities, leading academic institutions and strategic geographic positioning, Sydney is not only Australia’s gateway to the Indo-Pacific but also a burgeoning hub for international aerospace endeavours.

NSW is home to more than 40 per cent of Australia’s aerospace industry. Substantial investments from both the state and federal governments support this concentration of capabilities, underpinning Sydney’s role as a leader in aerospace. From advanced manufacturing and cybersecurity to quantum technologies and space exploration, this progressive city is truly thriving.

Sydney’s appeal as a desirable location for hosting aerospace conferences and business events is bolstered by its comprehensive infrastructure, vibrant startup community and strategic position as a transport hub.

Sydney’s track record of successfully hosting events highlights the city’s ability to organise impactful international gatherings, including:

• Australian Space Summit
• New Horizons Summit
• CubeSatPlus2024 - NEW SPACE: Unbounded Skies

Sydney will also host the 76th International Astronautical Congress from 29 September to 3 October 2025 and the 34th Congress of the International Council for the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) to be held 13 to 17 September 2026. Both will take place at ICC Sydney, further solidifying Sydney’s status as a central hub for aerospace events.

Would you like to know more about Sydney’s credentials in Aerospace? Download our Aerospace eBook or visit besydney.com.au

Sydney proved to be the ideal location for Bennell-Pegg’s journey to begin. She studied at the University of Sydney, where she earned a Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) in Aeronautical Engineering (Space) and a Bachelor of Science (Advanced) in Physics.

Sydney’s universities are at the forefront of aerospace education and research. Institutions such as the University of Sydney (USYD), the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) attract students from around the world. UNSW Sydney, with its School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Mechatronic Engineering, is renowned for its innovative research in space technology and satellite systems, while UTS provides cutting-edge programs in aerospace engineering and physics, emphasizing practical applications and industry partnerships. USYD excels in aeronautical engineering and space science, supported by advanced facilities and strong ties to major aerospace organisations. Together, these universities offer comprehensive programs that integrate theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience, preparing students for dynamic careers in the rapidly evolving aerospace and space sectors.

Having excelled in her studies at USYD, Bennell-Pegg was awarded the Charles Kuller Graduation Prize for her top-placed undergraduate thesis. Subsequently, her quest for knowledge took her to Europe, where she earned two Master of Science degrees: one in Astronautics and Space Engineering from Cranfield University and another in Space Technology from Luleå University of Technology.

Reflecting on her educational path, Bennell-Pegg stated, “With the encouragement of my parents, I researched what it would take to become an astronaut and worked hard at school, participating in everything from aerobatic flying lessons to amateur astronomy.”

Inside the rigorous training regimen of an astronaut

Bennell-Pegg’s professional career began with roles at Airbus UK, where she contributed to numerous space missions and concept studies, such as Martian in-situ resource utilisation and space debris removal. Her expertise led her to the Australian Space Agency, where she became the Director of Space Technology.

In 2021, Bennell-Pegg was invited by the European Space Agency (ESA) to undertake Basic Astronaut Training at the European Astronaut Centre in Germany. When the ESA application opened in 2021, it was the first opening in 15 years. Bennell-Pegg jumped at the opportunity to apply alongside over 22,000 others from 22 countries. She endured six knock-out rounds, including medical, psychometrics, psychology and technical tests and made it to the group of 25 who passed.

This historic invitation marked the first time an international astronaut candidate was offered training by the ESA.

“The training was demanding, but it was also an incredible opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the field and to be part of a team that is pushing the boundaries of human exploration.”—Katherine Bennell-Pegg

Bennell-Pegg’s training regimen was intense, encompassing physical conditioning, complex simulations, and theoretical classes designed to prepare candidates for long-duration missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and beyond. This included:

• Studies in biology, astronomy, earth sciences, meteorology, materials, medical and fluids, both in theory and in labs.
• Radiation research – an area of expertise for Australia. This will increase as humans travel back to the Moon.
• Medical operations: Astronauts need to be able to perform medical procedures on themselves and others.
• Training for expeditions: This included honing team dynamics through behavioral training, ocean and winter survival training, rescue and firefighting.

Sharing her thoughts on this transformative experience, Bennell-Pegg said, “The training was demanding, but it was also an incredible opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the field and to be part of a team that is pushing the boundaries of human exploration.”

In April 2024, Bennell-Pegg completed her training, graduating with her ESA classmates from “The Hoppers” group. Upon graduation, she became fully qualified for assignments on long-duration missions to the ISS, making her the first Australian female astronaut and the first person to train as an astronaut under the Australian flag.

“I want to use this experience to open doors for Australian scientists and engineers to utilize space for their discoveries,” Bennell-Pegg said. “I hope to inspire the pursuit of STEM careers and show all Australians that they too can reach for the stars.”

Elevating Australia’s role in space exploration

Katherine Bennell-Pegg’s achievements represent a significant milestone. Her journey from the University of Sydney to the rigorous training programs at the European Astronaut Centre showcases the potential of Australian talent in the global space community.

“Being the first astronaut trained under the Australian flag is an incredible honor,” Bennell-Pegg said. “I’m grateful for the support that has fueled me through intense training and opened doors for more Australians in space exploration. Whether I fly or not, there is much to accomplish here on Earth. I’m excited to leverage this experience to inspire future generations in STEM and elevate Australia’s presence in the global space community. Becoming an astronaut is just the beginning.”

Bennell-Pegg’s dream to become an Australian astronaut is more than just a personal triumph; it is a win for anyone who aspires to a career in space or aerospace. Sydney, with its world-class educational institutions, advanced manufacturing facilities scheduled for the Western Sydney Aerotropolis and expanding opportunities in aerospace and defence, is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to make their mark in these sectors.

Would you like to know more about Sydney’s credentials in Aerospace? Download our Aerospace eBook or visit besydney.com.au

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.”

EPICS in IEEE, a service learning program for university students supported by IEEE Educational Activities, offers students opportunities to engage with engineering professionals and mentors, local organizations, and technological innovation to address community-based issues.

The following two environmentally focused projects demonstrate the value of teamwork and direct involvement with project stakeholders. One uses smart biodigesters to better manage waste in Colombia’s rural areas. The other is focused on helping Turkish olive farmers protect their trees from climate change effects by providing them with a warning system that can identify growing problems.

No time to waste in rural Colombia

Proper waste management is critical to a community’s living conditions. In rural La Vega, Colombia, the lack of an effective system has led to contaminated soil and water, an especially concerning issue because the town’s economy relies heavily on agriculture.

The Smart Biodigesters for a Better Environment in Rural Areas project brought students together to devise a solution.

Vivian Estefanía Beltrán, a Ph.D. student at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, addressed the problem by building a low-cost anaerobic digester that uses an instrumentation system to break down microorganisms into biodegradable material. It reduces the amount of solid waste, and the digesters can produce biogas, which can be used to generate electricity.

“Anaerobic digestion is a natural biological process that converts organic matter into two valuable products: biogas and nutrient-rich soil amendments in the form of digestate,” Beltrán says. “As a by-product of our digester’s operation, digestate is organic matter that can’t be transferred into biogas but can be used as a soil amendment for our farmers’ crops, such as coffee.

“While it may sound easy, the process is influenced by a lot of variables. The support we’ve received from EPICS in IEEE is important because it enables us to measure these variables, such as pH levels, temperature of the reactor, and biogas composition [methane and hydrogen sulfide]. The system allows us to make informed decisions that enhance the safety, quality, and efficiency of the process for the benefit of the community.”

The project was a collaborative effort among Universidad del Rosario students, a team of engineering students from Escuela Tecnológica Instituto Técnico Central, Professor Carlos Felipe Vergara, and members of Junta de Acción Comunal (Vereda La Granja), which aims to help residents improve their community.

“It’s been a great experience to see how individuals pursuing different fields of study—from engineering to electronics and computer science—can all work and learn together on a project that will have a direct positive impact on a community.” —Vivian Estefanía Beltrán

Beltrán worked closely with eight undergraduate students and three instructors—Maria Fernanda Gómez, Andrés Pérez Gordillo (the instrumentation group leader), and Carlos Felipe Vergara-Ramirez—as well as IEEE Graduate Student Member Nicolás Castiblanco (the instrumentation group coordinator).

The team constructed and installed their anaerobic digester system in an experimental station in La Vega, a town located roughly 53 kilometers northwest of Bogotá.

“This digester is an important innovation for the residents of La Vega, as it will hopefully offer a productive way to utilize the residual biomass they produce to improve quality of life and boost the economy,” Beltrán says. Soon, she adds, the system will be expanded to incorporate high-tech sensors that automatically monitor biogas production and the digestion process.

“For our students and team members, it’s been a great experience to see how individuals pursuing different fields of study—from engineering to electronics and computer science—can all work and learn together on a project that will have a direct positive impact on a community. It enables all of us to apply our classroom skills to reality,” she says. “The funding we’ve received from EPICS in IEEE has been crucial to designing, proving, and installing the system.”

The project also aims to support the development of a circular economy, which reuses materials to enhance the community’s sustainability and self-sufficiency.

Protecting olive groves in Türkiye

Türkiye is one of the world’s leading producers of olives, but the industry has been challenged in recent years by unprecedented floods, droughts, and other destructive forces of nature resulting from climate change. To help farmers in the western part of the country monitor the health of their olive trees, a team of students from Istanbul Technical University developed an early-warning system to identify irregularities including abnormal growth.

“Almost no olives were produced last year using traditional methods, due to climate conditions and unusual weather patterns,” says Tayfun Akgül, project leader of the Smart Monitoring of Fruit Trees in Western Türkiye initiative.

“Our system will give farmers feedback from each tree so that actions can be taken in advance to improve the yield,” says Akgül, an IEEE senior member and a professor in the university’s electronics and communication engineering department.

“We’re developing deep-learning techniques to detect changes in olive trees and their fruit so that farmers and landowners can take all necessary measures to avoid a low or damaged harvest,” says project coordinator Melike Girgin, a Ph.D. student at the university and an IEEE graduate student member.

Using drones outfitted with 360-degree optical and thermal cameras, the team collects optical, thermal, and hyperspectral imaging data through aerial methods. The information is fed into a cloud-based, open-source database system.

Akgül leads the project and teaches the team skills including signal and image processing and data collection. He says regular communication with community-based stakeholders has been critical to the project’s success.

“There are several farmers in the village who have helped us direct our drone activities to the right locations,” he says. “Their involvement in the project has been instrumental in helping us refine our process for greater effectiveness.

“For students, classroom instruction is straightforward, then they take an exam at the end. But through our EPICS project, students are continuously interacting with farmers in a hands-on, practical way and can see the results of their efforts in real time.”

Looking ahead, the team is excited about expanding the project to encompass other fruits besides olives. The team also intends to apply for a travel grant from IEEE in hopes of presenting its work at a conference.

“We’re so grateful to EPICS in IEEE for this opportunity,” Girgin says. “Our project and some of the technology we required wouldn’t have been possible without the funding we received.”

A purpose-driven partnership

The IEEE Standards Association sponsored both of the proactive environmental projects.

“Technical projects play a crucial role in advancing innovation and ensuring interoperability across various industries,” says Munir Mohammed, IEEE SA senior manager of product development and market engagement. “These projects not only align with our technical standards but also drive technological progress, enhance global collaboration, and ultimately improve the quality of life for communities worldwide.”

For more information on the program or to participate in service-learning projects, visit EPICS in IEEE.

On 7 November, this article was updated from an earlier version.

Azerbaijan next week will garner much of the attention of the climate tech world, and not just because it will host COP29, the United Nation’s giant annual climate change conference. The country is promoting a grand, multi-nation plan to generate renewable electricity in the Caucasus region and send it thousands of kilometers west, under the Black Sea, and into energy–hungry Europe.

The transcontinental connection would start with wind, solar, and hydropower generated in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and off-shore wind power generated in the Caspian Sea. Long-distance lines would carry up to 1.5 gigawatts of clean electricity to Anaklia, Georgia, at the east end of the Black Sea. An undersea cable would move the electricity across the Black Sea and deliver it to Constanta, Romania, where it could be distributed further into Europe.

The scheme’s proponents say this Caspian-Black Sea energy corridor will help decrease global carbon emissions, provide dependable power to Europe, modernize developing economies at Europe’s periphery, and stabilize a region shaken by war. Organizers hope to build the undersea cable within the next six years at an estimated cost of €3.5 billion (US $3.8 billion).

To accomplish this, the governments of the involved countries must quickly circumvent a series of technical, financial, and political obstacles. “It’s a huge project,” says Zviad Gachechiladze, a director at Georgian State Electrosystem, the agency that operates the country’s electrical grid, and one of the architects of the Caucasus green-energy corridor. “To put it in operation [by 2030]—that’s quite ambitious, even optimistic,” he says.

Black Sea Cable to Link Caucasus and Europe

The technical lynchpin of the plan falls on the successful construction of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine cable in the Black Sea. It’s a formidable task, considering that it would stretch across nearly 1,200 kilometers of water, most of which is over 2 km deep, and, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, littered with floating mines. By contrast, the longest existing submarine power cable—the North Sea Link—carries 1.4 GW across 720 km between England and Norway, at depths of up to 700 meters.

As ambitious as Azerbaijan’s plans sound, longer undersea connections have been proposed. The Australia-Asia PowerLink project aims to produce 6 GW at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and send about a third of it to Singapore via a 4,300-km undersea cable. The Morocco-U.K. Power Project would send 3.6 GW over 3,800 km from Morocco to England. A similar attempt by Desertec to send electricity from North Africa to Europe ultimately failed.

Building such cables involves laying and stitching together lengths of heavy submarine power cables from specialized ships—the expertise for which lies with just two companies in the world. In an assessment of the Black Sea project’s feasibility, the Milan-based consulting and engineering firm CESI determined that the undersea cable could indeed be built, and estimated that it could carry up to 1.5 GW—enough to supply over 2 million European households.

But to fill that pipe, countries in the Caucasus region would have to generate much more green electricity. For Georgia, that will mostly come from hydropower, which already generates over 80 percent of the nation’s electricity. “We are a hydro country. We have a lot of untapped hydro potential,” says Gachechiladze.

Azerbaijan and Georgia Plan Green Energy Corridor

Generating hydropower can also generate opposition, because of the way dams alter rivers and landscapes. “There were some cases when investors were not able to construct power plants because of opposition of locals or green parties” in Georgia, says Salome Janelidze, a board member at the Energy Training Center, a Georgian government agency that promotes and educates around the country’s energy sector.

“It was definitely a problem and it has not been totally solved,” says Janelidze. But “to me it seems it is doable,” she says. “You can procure and construct if you work closely with the local population and see them as allies rather than adversaries.”

For Azerbaijan, most of the electricity would be generated by wind and solar farms funded by foreign investment. Masdar, the renewable-energy developer of the United Arab Emirates government, has been investing heavily in wind power in the country. In June, the company broke ground on a trio of wind and solar projects with 1 GW capacity. It intends to develop up to 9 GW more in Azerbaijan by 2030. ACWA Power, a Saudi power-generation company, plans to complete a 240-MW solar plant in the Absheron and Khizi districts of Azerbaijan next year and has struck a deal with the Azerbaijani Ministry of Energy to install up to 2.5 GW of offshore and onshore wind.

CESI is currently running a second study to gauge the practicality of the full breadth of the proposed energy corridor—from the Caspian Sea to Europe—with a transmission capacity of 4 to 6 GW. But that beefier interconnection will likely remain out of reach in the near term. “By 2030, we can’t claim our region will provide 4 GW or 6 GW,” says Gachechiladze. “1.3 is realistic.”

COP29: Azerbaijan’s Renewable Energy Push

Signs of political support have surfaced. In September, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary created a joint venture, based in Romania, to shepherd the project. Those four countries in 2022 inked a memorandum of understanding with the European Union to develop the energy corridor.

The involved countries are in the process of applying for the cable to be selected as an EU “project of mutual interest,” making it an infrastructure priority for connecting the union with its neighbors. If selected, “the project could qualify for 50 percent grant financing,” says Gachechiladze. “It’s a huge budget. It will improve drastically the financial condition of the project.” The commissioner responsible for EU enlargement policy projected that the union would pay an estimated €2.3 billion ($2.5 billion) toward building the cable.

Whether next week’s COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, will help move the plan forward remains to be seen. In preparation for the conference, advocates of the energy corridor have been taking international journalists on tours of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Looming over the project are the security issues threaten to thwart it. Shipping routes in the Black Sea have become less dependable and safe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To the south, tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan remain after the recent war and ethnic violence.

In order to improve relations, many advocates of the energy corridor would like to include Armenia. “The cable project is in the interests of Georgia, it’s in the interests of Armenia, it’s in the interests of Azerbaijan,” says Agha Bayramov, an energy geopolitics researcher at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. “It might increase the chance of them living peacefully together. Maybe they’ll say, ‘We’re responsible for European energy. Let’s put our egos aside.’”

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.

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