The Large Hadron Collider has transformed our understanding of physics since it began operating in 2008, enabling researchers to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Some 100 meters below the border between France and Switzerland, particles accelerate along the LHC’s 27-kilometer circumference, nearly reaching the speed of light before smashing together. The LHC is often described as the biggest machine ever built. And while the physicists who carry out experiments at the facility tend to garner most of the attention, it takes hundreds of engineers and technicians to ..read more

This sponsored article is brought to you by Purdue University. Companies large and small are seeking engineers with up-to-date, subject-specific knowledge in disciplines like computer engineering, automation, artificial intelligence, and circuit design. Mid-level engineers need to advance their skillsets to apply and integrate these technologies and be competitive. As applications for new technologies continue to grow, demand for knowledgeable electrical and computer engineers is also on the rise. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job outlook for electrical and electronics engine ..read more

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. These days, computer users take collaboration software for granted. Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and so on, are such a big part of many people’s daily lives that they hardly notice them. But they are the outgrowth of years of hard work done before the Internet became a thing, when there was a thorny problem: How could people collaborate effectively when everyone’s using a stand-alone personal computer? The answer was groupware, an early term for colla ..read more

This is a sponsored article brought to you by BESydney. Australia plays a crucial role in global scientific endeavours, with a significant contribution recognized and valued worldwide. Despite comprising only 0.3 percent of the world’s population, it has contributed over 4 percent of the world’s published research. Renowned for collaboration, Australian scientists work across disciplines and with international counterparts to achieve impactful outcomes. Notably excelling in medical sciences, engineering, and biological sciences, Australia also has globally recognized expertise in astronomy ..read more

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Elephant Robotics. Elephant Robotics has gone through years of research and development to accelerate its mission of bringing robots to millions of homes and a vision of “Enjoy Robots World”. From the collaborative industrial robots P-series and C-series, which have been on the drawing board since its establishment in 2016, to the lightweight desktop 6 DOF collaborative robot myCobot 280 in 2020, to the dual-armed, semi-humanoid robot myBuddy, which was launched in 2022, Elephant Robotics is launching 3-5 robots per year, and this year’s full-bod ..read more

A French cycling official confronts a rider suspected of doping, and ends up on the hood of a van making a high-speed getaway. This isn’t a tragicomedy starring Gérard Depardieu, sending up the sport’s well-earned reputation for cheating. This scenario played out in May at the Routes de l’Oise cycling competition near Paris, and the van was believed to contain evidence of a distinctly 21st-century cheat: a hidden electric motor. Cyclists call it “motor doping.” At the Paris Olympics opening on Friday, officials will be deploying electromagnetic scanners and x-ray imaging to combat it, as cyc ..read more

The dream of robotic floor care has always been for it to be hands-off and mind-off. That is, for a robot to live in your house that will keep your floors clean without you having to really do anything or even think about it. When it comes to robot vacuuming, that’s been more or less solved thanks to self-emptying robots that transfer debris into docking stations, which iRobot pioneered with the Roomba i7+ in 2018. By 2022, iRobot’s Combo j7+ added an intelligent mopping pad to the mix, which definitely made for cleaner floors but was also a step backwards in the sense that you had to rememb ..read more

Cochlear implants—the neural prosthetic cousins of standard hearing aids—can be a tremendous boon for people with profound hearing loss. But many would-be users are turned off by the device’s cumbersome external hardware, which must be worn to process signals passing through the implant. So researchers have been working to make a cochlear implant that sits entirely inside the ear, to restore speech and sound perception without the lifestyle restrictions imposed by current devices. A new biocompatible microphone offers a bridge to such fully internal cochlear implants. About the size of a gr ..read more

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. ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a m ..read more

Since its launch in 2019, the IEEE Learning Network (ILN) has been instrumental in advancing professional development through its diverse array of courses and programs. From specialized technical training to broader skill development, ILN online courses cater to professionals at every stage of their career and equip them with tools they need to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving landscape. ILN is also achieving its original goal of becoming a one stop shop for education from across IEEE. Now more than 40 organizational units of IEEE have listed over 1,400 educational opportunities in ILN th ..read more