The Institute

4 days ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Julianne Pepitone

Take a look around the airport during your travels this summer and you might spot a string of new technologies at every touchpoint: from pre-arrival, bag drop, and security to the moment you board the plane. In this new world, your face is your boarding pass, your electronic luggage tag transforms itself for each new flight, and gate scanners catch line cutters trying to sneak onto the plane early. It isn’t the future—it’s now.

4 days ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Elie Dolgin

The vagus nerve is a key communication line between the brain and organs like the heart and lungs—and stimulating it can ease conditions including epilepsy and arthritis. But this electrical therapy often hits the wrong neural fibers, causing side effects like coughing or voice changes. A new study finds that researchers can steer stimulation toward specific fibers and away from others by overlapping high-frequency currents inside the nerve.

5 days ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Shannon Cuthrell

In a development straight out of science fiction, Australian startup Cortical Labs has released what it calls the world’s first code-deployable biological computer. The CL1, which debuted in March, fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops. Designed as a tool for neuroscience and biotech research, the CL1 offers a new way to study how brain cells process and react to stimuli.

5 days ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Julia Tilton

When power went out across all of Puerto Rico on 16 April, a lot of the lights in the town of Adjuntas stayed on. There, nestled in the mountains on the midwestern side of the island, a combination of experimental microgrids, solar panels, and storage kept power on for many businesses and residents. The rest of the island waited over 24 hours, and in some cases longer, for electricity to be restored.

5 days ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Samuel K. Moore

Naveen Verma’s lab at Princeton University is like a museum of all the ways engineers have tried to make AI ultra-efficient by using analog phenomena instead of digital computing. At one bench lies the most energy-efficient magnetic-memory-based neural-network computer ever made. At another you’ll find a resistive-memory-based chip that can compute the largest matrix of numbers of any analog AI system yet. Neither has a commercial future, according to Verma.