Beyond the Microchip

Arduino.

Founded in Italy twenty years ago by a group of visionary educators and engineers, Arduino was born out of a desire to democratize electronics and make it accessible to everyone. Named after a bar in Ivrea, the platform started with hand-assembled circuit boards for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). The founders—Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino—made key...

Arduino.

Founded in Italy twenty years ago by a group of visionary educators and engineers, Arduino was born out of a desire to democratize electronics and make it accessible to everyone. Named after a bar in Ivrea, the platform started with hand-assembled circuit boards for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). The founders—Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino—made key...

The relationship between generations often shapes the trajectory of careers, with parents serving as role models, mentors, and sources of inspiration for their sons and daughters. Whether through direct guidance, inherited talent, or the values instilled during upbringing, the influence of one generation on the next can lead to extraordinary achievements. Across sports, entertainment, and politics, certain parent-child duos have ex...

The relationship between generations often shapes the trajectory of careers, with parents serving as role models, mentors, and sources of inspiration for their sons and daughters. Whether through direct guidance, inherited talent, or the values instilled during upbringing, the influence of one generation on the next can lead to extraordinary achievements. Across sports, entertainment, and politics, certain parent-child duos have ex...

You’ve probably seen the photo.

"Earthrise" is one of the most significant photographs in the history of human civilization, and certainly the most iconic in space exploration. Taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon, on December 24, 1968, this photograph captured the imagination of the world.

The image itself is remarkably simple, yet its impact was immediate an...

The term "greenwashing" was coined back in 1983 by environmentalist Jay Westerfeld while surfing in Fiji. He later published an essay in 1986 titled "It All Comes Out in the Greenwash," highlighting how companies were making misleading claims about their environmental practices. Fast forward to today, greenwashing has become a sophisticated art form and big business, with some of the world's largest corporations caught in the act.

Imagine living in complete comfort - a home that's perfectly warm in winter and delightfully cool in summer, all while your energy bills shrink and your carbon footprint fades. This isn't just a dream; it's what every homeowner and business owner wants: A solution that aligns personal comfort with planetary wellbeing, while keeping more money in their pockets.

But here's the challenge we face: traditional heating and cooling syst...

“We hold patents on a few gadgets we confiscated from visitors. Velcro, microwave ovens, liposuction.”

- Tommy Lee Jones as "K", describing how the Men in Black fund their exploits

Very amusing concept for science fiction, but the boundary between space exploration and everyday life blurs in reality, where innovations born in the cold vacuum of space find their way into our homes, transforming how we live and work.

This is the stor...

“We hold patents on a few gadgets we confiscated from visitors. Velcro, microwave ovens, liposuction.”

- Tommy Lee Jones as "K", describing how the Men in Black fund their exploits

Very amusing concept for science fiction, but the boundary between space exploration and everyday life blurs in reality, where innovations born in the cold vacuum of space find their way into our homes, transforming how we live and work.

This is the stor...

Our insatiable appetite for information has gone digital. Once upon a time, knowledge seekers ventured into libraries, thumbing through card catalogs and dusty volumes. Today, we simply speak our questions in the form of a prompt, and artificial minds spring to life with answers. But this convenience comes with a hidden cost - one measured in terawatts.

In the sprawling datacenters that power our AI revolution, rows upon rows of se...

On the banks of the Susquehanna River in Columbia County, in the northeast corner of the state of Pennsylvania, just outside the town of Berwick; population 10,355; lies a nuclear power plant. As you drive down route 11, you can see the steam pouring out of its mammoth towers over the tops of the trees. This is the single source of power in the area for a 20-mile radius. That means the 2500 megawatts of power it generates must cove...

The service station is a staple of America’s love affair with the automobile. Now it’s going away as the rise of electric vehicles and e-mobility takes over for internal combustion engines. How will this transition affect car culture and what’s involved with onboard charging? How can we invert a process that’s over 100 years old?

One little linchpin of the entire process is the gate driver, which helps to make residential chargin...

The Internet of Things is nothing short of a modern miracle. The ability to connect devices across a network and control them remotely, gathering data, performing routine maintenance, and saving countless hours of preparation time and direct human interaction. It gave rise to the need for Smart, Connected, and Secure technology solutions. That’s great for the residential home or the industrial plant across town. Could that level of...

Picture if you will, a source of energy, so radiant, that it holds the key to our energy future. The sun, a source of limitless potential, emits almost 4 octillion watts of energy every second. That’s a 10 with 26 zeros behind it. If we could harness just a fraction of this power, it would be enough to meet the world's energy needs many times over.

In emerging markets like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Kenya, the race to capture the sun...

Machines that build machines. It’s a curious paradox. Whenever you consider something that builds itself, physically, it could conjure thoughts of an infinity loop or an M.C. Escher painting. The never-ending loop of technology.

The extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, a marvel of modern engineering, etches patterns onto silicon wafers with unparalleled precision, giving birth to the microchips that power our world. A mac...

“Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery.”

Jonathan Pryce’s villain Elliot Carver says to James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies right before he manipulates a GPS signal to make a British destroyer begin a confrontation with the Chinese military, may seem like the realm of pop culture; the idea of manipulating GPS signals and disrupting communications has long been a staple of spy thrillers like our favorite James Bond f...

“Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery.”

Jonathan Pryce’s villain Elliot Carver says to James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies right before he manipulates a GPS signal to make a British destroyer begin a confrontation with the Chinese military, may seem like the realm of pop culture; the idea of manipulating GPS signals and disrupting communications has long been a staple of spy thrillers like our favorite James Bond f...

It’s no secret the world turns. Its 24-hour rotation on its axis gives us the definition of a day. Our moon, recently eclipsed in North America, orbits around us. We, in turn, orbit around our sun along with the other planets, and our entire solar system orbits around the Milky Way galaxy. These cosmic revolutions make up the foundation of our existence.

But whether we realize it or not, there is another set of revolutions happenin...

Picture a world where the hum of electricity permeates every aspect of our lives, from the devices we hold in our hands to the vehicles that transport us across vast distances. This is the world of the electrification of everything, a paradigm shift that promises to reshape our relationship with energy and power.

As once analog and unpowered items are augmented with electrical systems, we find ourselves at the precipice of a new er...