The History and Mystery of Fireworks
The History and Mystery of Fireworks

In the 1970s, American Fireworks, a family-run pyrotechnics company in Hudson, Ohio, used a “home run box” to offer quick and easy fireworks displays for the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) baseball games.The red wooden crate had metal…

Poetry for Engineers: Nine Lives of Nikola Tesla
Poetry for Engineers: Nine Lives of Nikola Tesla

He was born into a storm, lightning split the summer sky, in avillage the world had not yet heard of.The midwife called it a bad omen, his mother called it a sign. Your firstlife began in a storm, under open sky.One winter night you ran your hand alon…

Make an Origami Circuit Board
Make an Origami Circuit Board

What could you do if you could make a circuit trace by just bending a piece of paper? How about bridging modern technologies and traditional handicrafts while providing opportunities for learning skills in both.As part of our interdisciplinary researc…

Why the U.S. Uses Only Half of Its Grid Capacity
Why the U.S. Uses Only Half of Its Grid Capacity

By most accounts, the United States appears poised to fall woefully short of meeting new electricity demand over the next five years as data centers and domestic manufacturing proliferate.Ian MagruderIan Magruder is the founder of Utilize Coalition an…

War Taught this Ukrainian Entrepreneur the Value of Resilience
War Taught this Ukrainian Entrepreneur the Value of Resilience

Salome Mikadze-Struk is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she built a software-development business as an undergraduate at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running despite the outbreak of war in her native Ukraine. Now…

This Power Grid Pioneer’s EV Prediction Came 100 Years Too Soon
This Power Grid Pioneer’s EV Prediction Came 100 Years Too Soon

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quan…

AI’s Math Tricks Don’t Work for Scientific Computing
AI’s Math Tricks Don’t Work for Scientific Computing

AI has driven an explosion of new number formats—the ways in which numbers are represented digitally. Engineers are looking at every possible way to save computation time and energy, including shortening the number of bits used to represent data. But …

This Former Physicist Helps Keep the Internet Secure
This Former Physicist Helps Keep the Internet Secure

When Alan DeKok began a side project in network security, he didn’t expect to start a 27-year career. In fact, he didn’t initially set out to work in computing at all.DeKok studied nuclear physics before making the switch to a part of network computin…

Explore the Stratosphere With a DIY Pico balloon
Explore the Stratosphere With a DIY Pico balloon

There’s an interesting development in amateur ballooning: using so-called superpressure balloons, which float high in the atmosphere indefinitely rather than simply going up and up and then popping like a normal weather balloon. Superpressure balloons…

Ode to Very Small Devices
Ode to Very Small Devices

As fairies for the Irish or leeks for Welsh,it’s the secret lives of small hidden machines,their junctures, and networks that inspire me:Mystic hidden functionaries that makeour made world live, brave little servo motors,whose couplers, whose eccentri…