Fixing the Future IEEE Spectrum

Zipline originally established itself delivering medical supplies in rural Africa. Now, Zipline cofounder and CTO Keenan Wyrobek talks with senior editor Stephen Cass about recent milestones in bringing commercial drone delivery to the United States, including the development of Platform 2 and its tethered mini-droid that makes precision drop-offs possible in urban areas. 

Governments in America and Europe are pushing the deployment of heat pumps to reduce the energy demands of home heating and cooling. Spectrum's power and energy editor Emily Waltz talks with Stephen Cass about her reporting on new advances that will let heat pumps work in colder climates than before, expanding their range considerably.

IEEE Spectrum's semiconductor expert, Samuel K. Moore, talks with Stephen Cass about his visit to one of the key conferences in emerging integrated circuit technology, ISSCC. We talk about Meta's new 3D chip-stacking tech for faster AR, faster AI through in-memory computation, and security technology that can cause a chip to self-destruct if anyone tries to hack it.

In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's recent coverage, including a plea for programmers to stop producing bloated programs, a new transistor that could help make how we handle electrical power smarter, and the potential return of optical discs as a high-density date storage medium. 

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES_OS allows relatively simple robots to perform experiments, and develop new experiments based on the results. The AFRL's Benji Maruyama talks with IEEE Spectrum associate editor Dina Genkina about how he hopes the system becomes not just an invaluable helper for grad students, but opens up research to many more people outside traditional labs and enables progress in tackling hard problems like climate change. 

The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in transportation, and national security concerns, among many other things. What this expansion might mean for chip-making's carbon footprint? Can we make everything in our world smarter without worsening climate change? Lizzie Boakes is a lifecycle analyst at IMEC, the Belgium-based nanotech research organisation, and she speaks with senior editor Samuel K. Moore about her work on this problem.