Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724
Allison Marsh
It isn't often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but Fumiko Minami earned her place by helping her husband, Yoshitada, invent the first automatic rice cooker. Yoshitada operated a small factory that made electric water heaters for Toshiba, and so he understood the basic principles involved in controlling temperatures. But it was Fumiko who spent five years researching and testing the perfect recipe for rice. She found the key to automating the rice-cooking process was to turn off the cooker after exactly 20 minutes of boiling. Toshiba engineers eventually landed on a bimetallic switch that bent and cut the circuit when the cooker's internal temperature surpassed 100°C. Toshiba began selling the ER-4 denki-gama (electric pot) in December 1955. It was priced at a steep 3,200 yen-one third the average monthly salary in Japan at the time-and yet within the first year, the company was producing 200,000 rice cookers a month. Today, the worldwide annual market for rice cookers is nearly US $3 billion.
{"title":"Past Forward: The Automatic Rice Cooker's Unlikely Inventor","authors":"Allison Marsh","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724","url":null,"abstract":"It isn't often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but Fumiko Minami earned her place by helping her husband, Yoshitada, invent the first automatic rice cooker. Yoshitada operated a small factory that made electric water heaters for Toshiba, and so he understood the basic principles involved in controlling temperatures. But it was Fumiko who spent five years researching and testing the perfect recipe for rice. She found the key to automating the rice-cooking process was to turn off the cooker after exactly 20 minutes of boiling. Toshiba engineers eventually landed on a bimetallic switch that bent and cut the circuit when the cooker's internal temperature surpassed 100°C. Toshiba began selling the ER-4 denki-gama (electric pot) in December 1955. It was priced at a steep 3,200 yen-one third the average monthly salary in Japan at the time-and yet within the first year, the company was producing 200,000 rice cookers a month. Today, the worldwide annual market for rice cookers is nearly US $3 billion.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"76-76"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10749724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563
Ted C. Fishman
A ALONG THE COUNTRY ROAD that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks-and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition. ¶ To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank's ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material-mostly concrete-that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.
{"title":"Climate Tech: The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tonnnes of Concrete: Why Tech's Climate Pledges Require the Reinvention of Concrete","authors":"Ted C. Fishman","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563","url":null,"abstract":"A ALONG THE COUNTRY ROAD that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks-and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition. ¶ To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank's ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material-mostly concrete-that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"58-69"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560
Tom Clynes
FOR A MACHINE that's designed to replicate a star, the world's newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker. The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.
{"title":"Energy: An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator: Fast Prototyping Revives a 70-Year-Old Fusion Reactor Design","authors":"Tom Clynes","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560","url":null,"abstract":"FOR A MACHINE that's designed to replicate a star, the world's newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker. The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"28-39"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562
Eliza Strickland;Peter B. Meyer
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 kin-dergarten to community college.
{"title":"Introduction: Why the Art of Invention is Always Being Reinvented: As IEEE Spectrum Turns 60, We Celebrate Creativity and Chutzpah in Tech","authors":"Eliza Strickland;Peter B. Meyer","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562","url":null,"abstract":"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 kin-dergarten to community college.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"18-22"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10748562","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749728
Lucas Laursen
JUST OUTSIDE LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND, in a meeting room wallpapered with patent drawings, Ioannis Ierides faced a classic sales challenge: demonstrating his product's advantages within the short span of his customer's attention. Ierides is a business-development manager at Iprova, a company that sells ideas for invention with an element of artificial intelligence (AI). ¶ When Ierides gets someone to sign on the bottom line, Iprova begins sending their company proposals for patentable inventions in their area of interest. Any resulting patents will name humans as the inventors, but those humans will have benefited from Iprova'sAI tool. The software's primary purpose is to scan the literature in both the company's field and in far-off fields and then suggest new inventions made of old, previously disconnected ones. Iprova has found a niche tracking fast-changing industries and suggesting new inventions to large corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Telekom, and Panasonic. The company has even patented its own AI-assisted invention method. ¶ In this instance, Ierides was trying to demonstrate to me, an inquisitive journalist, that Iprova's services can accelerate the age-old engineers' quest for new inventions. “You want something that can transcribe interviews? Something that can tell who's speaking?” he asked. While such transcription tools already exist, there is plenty of room for improvement, and better transcription seemed a fine example for his purposes.
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence: Can We Automate Fureka Moments?: That'S The Goal of This Swiss Company's Ai-Powered Invention Tech","authors":"Lucas Laursen","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749728","url":null,"abstract":"JUST OUTSIDE LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND, in a meeting room wallpapered with patent drawings, Ioannis Ierides faced a classic sales challenge: demonstrating his product's advantages within the short span of his customer's attention. Ierides is a business-development manager at Iprova, a company that sells ideas for invention with an element of artificial intelligence (AI). ¶ When Ierides gets someone to sign on the bottom line, Iprova begins sending their company proposals for patentable inventions in their area of interest. Any resulting patents will name humans as the inventors, but those humans will have benefited from Iprova'sAI tool. The software's primary purpose is to scan the literature in both the company's field and in far-off fields and then suggest new inventions made of old, previously disconnected ones. Iprova has found a niche tracking fast-changing industries and suggesting new inventions to large corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Telekom, and Panasonic. The company has even patented its own AI-assisted invention method. ¶ In this instance, Ierides was trying to demonstrate to me, an inquisitive journalist, that Iprova's services can accelerate the age-old engineers' quest for new inventions. “You want something that can transcribe interviews? Something that can tell who's speaking?” he asked. While such transcription tools already exist, there is plenty of room for improvement, and better transcription seemed a fine example for his purposes.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"24-27"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749727
Samuel K. Moore
THERE'S A CERTAIN SAMENESS to spaces meant for tech startups: flexible cubicle arrangements, glass-encased executive offices, whiteboard walls awaiting equations and ideas, basement laboratories for the noisier and more dangerous parts of the process. In some ways the home of Ideal Semiconductor on the campus of Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Penn., is just like that. The most noticeable difference is a life-size statue of 18th-century inventor and electricity enthusiast Benjamin Franklin seated on the bench outside. ¶ Ideal cofounder and CEO Mark Granahan admits to having had a quiet moment or two with ole Benny Kite-and-Key, but it takes a lot more than inspiration from a founder of your home country to turn a clever idea into a valuable semiconductor company. Navigating from lightbulb moment to laboratory demo and finally to manufactured reality has always been the defining struggle of hardware startups. But Ideal's journey is particularly illustrative of the state of invention in the U.S. semiconductor industry today and, in particular, how the CHIPS and Science Act, a law the startup's founders personally and exhaustively advocated for, might change things for the better.
{"title":"Semiconductors: Will the U.S. CHIPS Act Speed the Lab-to-Fab Transition?: A Semiconductor Startup's Journey Shows How It Could Work","authors":"Samuel K. Moore","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749727","url":null,"abstract":"THERE'S A CERTAIN SAMENESS to spaces meant for tech startups: flexible cubicle arrangements, glass-encased executive offices, whiteboard walls awaiting equations and ideas, basement laboratories for the noisier and more dangerous parts of the process. In some ways the home of Ideal Semiconductor on the campus of Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Penn., is just like that. The most noticeable difference is a life-size statue of 18th-century inventor and electricity enthusiast Benjamin Franklin seated on the bench outside. ¶ Ideal cofounder and CEO Mark Granahan admits to having had a quiet moment or two with ole Benny Kite-and-Key, but it takes a lot more than inspiration from a founder of your home country to turn a clever idea into a valuable semiconductor company. Navigating from lightbulb moment to laboratory demo and finally to manufactured reality has always been the defining struggle of hardware startups. But Ideal's journey is particularly illustrative of the state of invention in the U.S. semiconductor industry today and, in particular, how the CHIPS and Science Act, a law the startup's founders personally and exhaustively advocated for, might change things for the better.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"52-57"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748559
Ned Potter
WHEN NASA DECIDED in the 1970s that the Hubble Space Telescope should be serviceable in space, the engineering challenges must have seemed nearly insurmountable. How could a machine that complex and delicate be repaired by astronauts wearing 130-kilogram suits with thick gloves? ¶ In the end, spacewalkers not only fixed the telescope, they regularly remade it. ¶ That was possible because Hubble is toroidal-its major systems laid out in wedge-shaped equipment bays that astronauts could open from the outside. A series of maintenance workstations on Hubble's outer surface ensured astronauts could have ready access to crucial telescope parts. ¶ On five space-shuttle servicing missions between 1993 and 2009, 16 spacewalkers replaced every major component except the telescope's mirrors and outer skin. They increased its electrical supply by 20 percent. And they tripled its ability to concentrate and sense light, job No.1 of any telescope. ¶ The orbital observatory was built to last 15 years in space. But with updates, it has operated for more than 30-a history of reinvention to make any engineering team proud. “Twice the lifetime,” says astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, who flew on Hubble's 1990 launch mission. “Just try finding something else that has improved with age in space. I dare you.”
{"title":"Aerospace: Nasa Made the Hubble Telescope to Be Remade: Spacewalk Repairs and Upgrades Were Always Part of The Plan","authors":"Ned Potter","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748559","url":null,"abstract":"WHEN NASA DECIDED in the 1970s that the Hubble Space Telescope should be serviceable in space, the engineering challenges must have seemed nearly insurmountable. How could a machine that complex and delicate be repaired by astronauts wearing 130-kilogram suits with thick gloves? ¶ In the end, spacewalkers not only fixed the telescope, they regularly remade it. ¶ That was possible because Hubble is toroidal-its major systems laid out in wedge-shaped equipment bays that astronauts could open from the outside. A series of maintenance workstations on Hubble's outer surface ensured astronauts could have ready access to crucial telescope parts. ¶ On five space-shuttle servicing missions between 1993 and 2009, 16 spacewalkers replaced every major component except the telescope's mirrors and outer skin. They increased its electrical supply by 20 percent. And they tripled its ability to concentrate and sense light, job No.1 of any telescope. ¶ The orbital observatory was built to last 15 years in space. But with updates, it has operated for more than 30-a history of reinvention to make any engineering team proud. “Twice the lifetime,” says astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, who flew on Hubble's 1990 launch mission. “Just try finding something else that has improved with age in space. I dare you.”","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"50-51"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749725
Dina Genkina
WALKING INTO Jun Ye's lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is a bit like walking into an electronic jungle. There are wires strung across the ceiling that hang down to the floor. Right in the middle of the room are four hefty steel tables with metal panels above them extending all the way to the ceiling. Slide one of the panels to the side and you'll see a dense mesh of vacuum chambers, mirrors, magnetic coils, and laser light bouncing around in precisely orchestrated patterns. ¶ This is one of the world's most precise and accurate clocks, and it's so accurate that you'd have to wait 40 billion years-or three times the age of the universe-for it to be off by one second. ¶ What's interesting about Ye's atomic clock, part of a joint endeavor between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is that it is optical, not microwave like most atomic clocks. The ticking heart of the clock is the strontium atom, and it beats at a frequency of 429 terahertz, or 429 trillion ticks per second. It's the same frequency as light in the lower part of the red region of the visible spectrum, and that relatively high frequency is a pillar of the clock's incredible precision. Commonly available atomic clocks beat at frequencies in the gigahertz range, or about 10 billion ticks per second. Going from the microwave to the optical makes it possible for Ye's clock to be tens of thousands of times as precise.
{"title":"Quantum Tech: Squeezing an Optical Atomic Clock Into a Briefcase: A Mind-Set Shift Propelled the Leap from Basic Science to Invention","authors":"Dina Genkina","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749725","url":null,"abstract":"WALKING INTO Jun Ye's lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is a bit like walking into an electronic jungle. There are wires strung across the ceiling that hang down to the floor. Right in the middle of the room are four hefty steel tables with metal panels above them extending all the way to the ceiling. Slide one of the panels to the side and you'll see a dense mesh of vacuum chambers, mirrors, magnetic coils, and laser light bouncing around in precisely orchestrated patterns. ¶ This is one of the world's most precise and accurate clocks, and it's so accurate that you'd have to wait 40 billion years-or three times the age of the universe-for it to be off by one second. ¶ What's interesting about Ye's atomic clock, part of a joint endeavor between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is that it is optical, not microwave like most atomic clocks. The ticking heart of the clock is the strontium atom, and it beats at a frequency of 429 terahertz, or 429 trillion ticks per second. It's the same frequency as light in the lower part of the red region of the visible spectrum, and that relatively high frequency is a pillar of the clock's incredible precision. Commonly available atomic clocks beat at frequencies in the gigahertz range, or about 10 billion ticks per second. Going from the microwave to the optical makes it possible for Ye's clock to be tens of thousands of times as precise.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"44-70"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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