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One day in 1982, Joseph “Rod” Canion and two colleagues from Texas Instruments sat down at the House of Pies in Houston and used a napkin to sketch out what would become Compaq’s portable PC. In 1996, Felix Zandman, founder of Vishay Intertechnology, dined at Husker Steak House in Columbus, Neb., grabbed a napkin and drafted a design for a power metal strip resistor, which became crucial to power-management components in industrial, automotive, and consumer applications. Now that wispy piece of paper resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Perhaps most famously, Robert Metcalfe, working at Xerox PARC in 1973, roughed out some early designs for what would become the [?] Ethernet, though contrary to popular belief, no napkin was involved. Yet another napkin was pressed into service last year, when Kurt Polzin, chief engineer of the space nuclear propulsion project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, met Robert Schleicher of General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems at a conference and started talking about nuclear rocket design. “They did the classic let’s-sketch-out-an-idea-on-a-napkin,” says IEEE Spectrum’s Special Projects Editor and our in-house spaceflight expert Stephen Cass. “This rocket engine is still at the paper-planning stage, which, to be fair, is where most of NASA’s humans-to-Mars planning has been for the last 60 years.”Meanwhile, the world’s richest person is pushing for humans to colonize Mars in time for him to escape our hospitable blue marble for a completely barren red planet. One big problem with this idea: It takes a long time in hostile space to get there. “Here’s our napkin. Noodle on this with us and tell us what you think.” —Stephen CassThere’s an old saw, mostly used in the context of road safety, that speed kills. But when it comes to sending humans on interplanetary missions, the faster the better. As Cass pointed out, “Once you get outside the Van Allen belts, there’s so much natural radioactivity—that’s the real killer.” Nuclear electric propulsion could both minimize launch costs and the time fragile human bodies are subjected to microgravity and radiation. […]

While walking to school as a child, Jernej Barbič would marvel at how beautiful his home was. He was born and raised in a picturesque village in northwestern Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), located in the European Alps. Surrounded by alpine and beech trees, Barbic dreamed of replicating their swaying in the wind for others to enjoy.At the time, he didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create a system that could do that, but it sparked his interest in computer graphics, he says.Jernej BarbičEmployer University of Southern California, in Los AngelesTitle Professor of computer scienceMember grade Senior memberAlma maters University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia; Carnegie MellonTwenty years later, in 2016, Barbič, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, made his mark. His Ziva VFX software system allows for the creation of realistic muscle, fat, and skin simulations for 3D digital humans and creatures.The technology was launched in 2016 by a startup he helped found, Ziva Dynamics, headquartered in Vancouver. It was acquired in 2021 by Unity Technologies of San Francisco.Ziva VFX has been used in more than 60 movies including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom; Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.For the design and development of Ziva VFX, Barbič, an IEEE senior member, received a 2025 technical achievement Academy Award. It was a “tremendous honor,” he says, as the award recognizes technologies that have had a significant impact on motion picture production.“Computer graphics and simulation can sometimes feel like a specialized technical field,” he says, “but the award showed that these ideas affect not just science but also art and how stories are told on screen.“The digital characters enabled by mathematics become important parts of people’s lives.”Sparking an interest in computer graphicsBarbič says he was inspired to pursue engineering by his father, an engineer who headed a cement factory’s research department and invented a technology that uses magnetic resonance imaging to test the integrity of cement. His father’s work showed him that “mathematics and […]

I never intended to join the cutting edge of electromechanical television. I just wanted to make a nice clock. But sometimes you have to go where the engineering takes you, and in my case it took me to the Scanwheel, a pocket-size wide-screen electromechanical TV with a resolution of 4,096 by 20 pixels. Yup, that’s 4K by 20. The 3D-printed drum [top] is spun by a motor controlled by a driver board [second row, from top]. The driver board, in turn, is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico [middle], which also controls the LEDs [second row, from bottom], which are mounted in the 3D-printed casing [bottom] so that the holes pass over them as the drum turns.James ProvostElectromechanical television was the first form of practical television, developed by John Logie Baird in the 1920s. He used a so-called Nipkow disk, which has a spiral of holes punched through it. As the disk rotates, the holes pass one by one in front of a light source. By varying the brightness of the light as a hole travels across it, you can draw one scan line of a video frame. Spin the disk fast enough, and persistence of vision makes it look like an entire frame is being displayed simultaneously. Commercial electromechanical TV sets were produced in the United Kingdom, with regular broadcasts provided by the BBC in the 1930s.Although cathode-ray tubes replaced electromechanical televisions in the 1940s, hobbyists have continued to build them and even improve on the original technology. For example, in the June 2022 installment of IEEE Spectrum’s Hands On, Markus Mierse presented a desktop-size 3D-printed color version.I built an electromechanical display myself some years ago, but it had a traditional design with a Nipkow disk made from a vinyl record with holes drilled in it. Recently I started tinkering with electromechanical TV again as an outgrowth of my YouTube channel. There I’ve been focusing on developing volumetric displays, which create 3D pixels floating within a volume of space. In particular, I was interested in borrowing some ideas from plenoptic cameras, which use pinholes and lenses to capture multidimensional light fields of samples.I wondered if I could run the process […]

The IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) honor society is preparing to host the Innovating the Future event on 6 November.The inaugural one-day, in-person event is designed to provide a forum for IEEE and IEEE-HKN undergraduate and graduate student authors to present their original research papers. A keynote address and thematic presentation sessions are planned as well. Student attendees can network with their peers and gain firsthand experience with the academic publishing process.To present at the conference, students had to submit an abstract of their research before 1 May. Students whose work was accepted were assigned a volunteer IEEE member to mentor them and guide them through the research writing process, including presenting and publishing their original work.Those whose paper was accepted by 1 August were invited to present at the conference. The conference proceedings will be submitted for publication in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.Upholding research integrity in a changing landscapeIEEE Life Fellow Manuel Castro, the conference’s technical program chair, oversees IEEE-HKN’s Innovating the Future program committee. It manages the review process, organizes logistics, and handles the mentoring component.“This new conference is important to IEEE, as well as to IEEE-HKN,” Castro says, “because it allows student authors to grow in their skills and competencies, and be supported while turning their technical activities into publications.”“The conference offers me a chance to learn how to communicate my research to a broader audience, gain feedback from other student researchers beyond my institution, and see how my work can be made more accessible.” —David Kwabi-AddoIEEE Life Fellow Sorel Reisman, a California State University professor emeritus and an IEEE-HKN governor-at-large, says that because the academic research landscape is rapidly shifting, the conference is timely.“As AI increasingly threatens the integrity of research papers being published in leading journals and conference proceedings, it is essential that future scholars—many of them current IEEE-HKN students—grasp the established standards of legitimate, peer-reviewed […]

Summary NASA and industry engineers propose a synchronal bimodal nuclear rocket (S‑BNR) to dramatically cut transit times to destinations around the solar system, such as Mars, by combining nuclear thermal and electric propulsion. S‑BNR uses a single reactor with two independent fluid loops and correspondingly optimized fuel zones, eliminating complex mode-switching valves while providing both high thrust and continuous electric power. Major challenges include developing fuel elements that integrate well together, ground testing, nuclear launch safety, and multi-agency collaboration to mature the technology from modeling to in‑space demonstrations. The biggest threat to any crewed expedition to Mars is time. NASA’s shortest blueprint for sending people to the Red Planet and back requires spending 620 days in space and 30 days on Mars. Even setting aside the compounding challenges of building life-support systems that can operate without resupply for that long, or the fact that longer journeys leave more time for unlucky accidents, life in microgravity and solar and cosmic radiation will inexorably exact their cumulative toll on human bodies.We want to make it possible to dramatically reduce the length of time crews must spend in space—down to just 335 days in transit or less. This will both simplify many engineering challenges and keep astronauts healthier and safer. We believe the key to this time reduction is a new approach to building a holy grail of space exploration, the bimodal nuclear rocket. In the 1960s, U.S. open-air ground tests demonstrated much of the technology needed for nuclear thermal rockets as part of the NERVA and Rover projects.Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas Technicians at NASA’s Lewis Research Center test a nozzle design for a nuclear thermal rocket in 1965. GRC/NASA The prototype SNAP-10A, orbited in 1965, is to date still the only nuclear reactor launched into space by the United States. George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty ImagesWe are Kurt Polzin, chief engineer of NASA’s space nuclear propulsion project at the Marshall Space Flight Center, with over two decades of experience in advanced propulsion research, and Robert […]