All Features
Ryan E. Day
Just like its predecessors, this fourth industrial revolution (dubbed Industry 4.0 in 2011) is all about increasing productivity. Unlike the first three revolutions, today’s pivotal technologies hold forth the possibility to also improve efficiency, quality, and human satisfaction.
Steam power,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Technology firms are the drivers of disruption across industries, but things will play out differently for automobiles, according to John Paul MacDuffie, Wharton management professor and director of the school’s Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation.
Tomorrow’s vehicles will be built with…
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
The civil rights movement and Moore’s Law are colliding to transform politics. On the street, smartphone technology is being used to document social life as never before, putting power into the hands of the public and making eyewitnesses of us all.
This same technology, bolted onto cheap and easy-…
Chip Bell
Iam often asked by customer service leaders how to get the CEO to care about customers. They are convinced there is a missed tactic that, if implemented, would have the C-suite camping out in the contact center and inviting customers to board meetings. When I outline a number of possible approaches…
Judah Levine
As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA,…
Jo Napolitano
Artificial intelligence, or AI, requires a huge amount of computing power and versatile hardware to support that power. But most AI-supportive hardware is built around the same decades-old technology, and still a long way from emulating the neural activity in the human brain.
In an effort to solve…
Knowledge at Wharton
The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of…
Eryn Brown, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Last spring, things looked grim for Dora Herrera. Revenues at her family’s 45-year-old restaurant business, Yuca’s, had plummeted within a few short weeks as Covid-19 kept customers away from its two popular taco shacks in Los Angeles and…
John Toon
Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed 3D information from the research could help improve the reliability and performance of the batteries, which use solid…
Sharona Hoffman
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.
The question is, when healthcare algorithms…
Matt Fieldman
What is America Works, and why is it important to the future of American manufacturing?
The American manufacturing industry is at a crossroads, facing growing competition from foreign countries while struggling to develop a skilled, dedicated workforce here at home. American manufacturers are…
Ryan E. Day
One of the technologies driving Industry 4.0 is artificial intelligence (AI), and AI is enabling massive change in manufacturing. It is also revolutionizing the smart manufacturing supply chain as well.
It seems that for every benefit technology provides, it also spawns an associated challenge.…
Mark Esser
Alot has changed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during the past 120 years. For one thing, we were known as the National Bureau of Standards for the first 87 years of our existence. Then, in 1988, we became the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to…
Tinglong Dai, Christopher Tang, Ho-Yin Mak
More than 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. So far, Americans have been largely brand-agnostic, but that’s about to change as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rolls out.
The vaccine has been hailed as a game changer. It requires…
Anne Trafton
Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the “kombucha mother” used to ferment tea.
Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the…
Silke von Gemmingen
Spacecraft are developed on Earth, tested, fully assembled, and transported in one piece by a launch vehicle to their respective places of operation. Each component must be designed to withstand the high loads of the launch phase. In most cases, in addition to complex test procedures, this leads to…
Mark Schmit
The Covid-19 pandemic has asked much of manufacturing executives. They’ve had to make decisions about staffing and operations in the face of tremendous health and economic uncertainty—and then adjust or even change decisions based on myriad shifting and evolving factors.
They’ve had to retool to…
Anne Trafton
In the era of social distancing, using robots for some healthcare interactions is a promising way to reduce in-person contact between healthcare workers and sick patients. However, a key question that needs to be answered is how patients will react to a robot entering the exam room.
Researchers…
Johns Hopkins University
Since they came into use in 1938, electron microscopes have played a pivotal role in a host of scientific advances, including the discovery of new proteins and therapeutics as well as contributions made to the electronics revolution. But the field of electron microscopy must incorporate the latest…
Quality Digest
Digital transformation is the integration of technology into all areas of a business, which fundamentally changes how organizations operate and deliver value to their customers. But what does success look like in a digital transformation? Project is on time and budget? Stakeholders are engaged…
Denis Bergeron
From the earliest days of radioactivity research, radiation and cancer therapy have gone together like peas and carrots. But Zach Levine covered peas and carrots in an earlier blog post, so I will focus on radiation and cancer therapy.
Shortly after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the high-energy…
Chip Bell
I was fortunate enough yesterday to get my second Covid-19 vaccine. It was a giant relief, one that more than compensated for 24 hours of arm soreness. It was the peace of mind that, despite vaccine shortage or administrative challenges, I am now protected—at least 95 percent. The feeling of…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was 13, I had dreams of being a rock and roll star. For my birthday, I asked my parents for a guitar, and lessons to play it. My parents hired a staid instructor, and I was uninspired by the folk tunes she was teaching me. She was clueless about Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss... even Black…
Lucca Henrion, Duo Zhang, Victor Li, Volker Sick
One of the big contributors to climate change is right beneath your feet, and transforming it could be a powerful solution for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The production of cement, the binding element in concrete, accounted for 7 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions…
Tamela Serensits
Quality managers have a problem. The success of their quality program hinges on one thing. It’s not KPIs, and it’s not methodology. It isn’t even employee engagement or customer satisfaction. The one thing a quality manager needs most is leadership buy-in.
Quality programs fail because they do…