IEEE Spectrum June 2021

Most recent stories in IEEE Spectrum June 2021

• Today, stretchable sensors stick onto skin, but you need a smartphone's display to read their output. That's about to change, with flexible, stretchable, wearable displays.

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  Skin Displays Will Give Wearables Their Independence

  ieee.org - Takao Someya

  An elderly woman, living alone in a small mountain village, relaxes in the afternoon after finishing lunch. A square sheet of thin rubber clings to …

• Clandestine, nano-meter scale anti-counterfeiting markers could help thwart the biggest criminal enterprise it the world.

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  How Nanotech Can Foil Counterfeiters

  ieee.org - Roozbeh Tabrizian

  What’s the largest criminal enterprise in the world? Narcotics? Gambling? Human trafficking?Nope. The biggest racket is the production and trade of …

• You produce fewer carbon emissions burning natural gas than coal, but sporadic leakages of gas tend to offset the gain. We can solve the problem—and reduce global warming.

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  Natural Gas Is (Mostly) Good for Global Warming

  ieee.org - Vaclav Smil

  As it comes up inside a production steel pipe, natural gas is usually a mixture of the lightest alkanes, which are hydrocarbons of the CnH2n+2 …

• Prices of #lithium-ion batteries fell by 30x from 1991 to 2018. A new study of multiple battery price studies finds consistent predictions: Prices should within 5 years dip below $100/kWH, the thresho … More

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  Chart: Behind the Three-Decade Collapse of Lithium-Ion Battery Costs

  ieee.org - Rahul Rao

  Behind clean energy today is a sharp, continuing drop in photo­voltaic solar-cell prices. And behind the scenes, the prices of lithium-ion batteries …

• Another contender in the COVID-19 vaccine market, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is in clinical trials with a device that looks rather like an electric toothbrush. The gadget uses a technique called electrop … More

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  Inovio’s Electrical Device Zaps a COVID-19 Vaccine Into the Body

  ieee.org - Emily Waltz

  It took a global pandemic to accomplish one of the most significant advances in the history of vaccinology: widespread, commercial deployment of …

• Home-brew CPUs made out of basic logic chips are fun to build, but they’re rarely more than toys. Filip Szkandera built a 32-bit CPU that’s RISC-V compliant.

  

  IEEE Spectrum

  

  Build a RISC-V CPU From Scratch

  ieee.org - Filip Szkandera

  It’s a certain kind of itch that drives people to voluntarily build their own CPU. We start thinking about the papered-over gap in our understanding, …