May 2007 Feature Articles

Who Are You?

Wiretapping Woes

Trouble ahead for those wanting to monitor Internet-based calls

A Recipe For Development

Take a university campus, attach a subdivision, stir in some start-up firms, and incubate.

At the Ace Awards, Engineers Are the Stars

Does Success Spoil Inventors?

A study of inventors in the disk-drive industry suggests that success can stifle creativity by channeling the mind along well-worn paths

Climate Control

We will be able to engineer the Earth to our liking—but we'd better start now

Computer Science, A Woman's Work

Tales of Nakamura

Bright lights, piles of cash, courtroom drama, and a lone inventor

Forum: Our Readers Write

CERN's Discerning Detectors

Novel pixel sensors will be key to capturing quarry

African at Heart

The Back Story

Big Magnet Glitch at World's Top Particle Accelerator

Could failure delay the intended start-up of CERN's Large Hadron Collider next spring?

...And More Forum

Thirst For Power

Can thousands of small dams solve Africa's power crunch?

There Will Be Cooking on Mars

Phoenix mission will take and heat samples that could contain life

Step Away From the Vehicle!

Robo-girls Take On the World

A lone all-girl team makes the semifinals of the FIRST Robotics World Championships

A Double Standard for Women Engineers?

When male scientists posed half-naked for a calendar in the 1990s they got kudos; now that female engineering students have done the same, they face recriminations

Eyes on the Prize

IEEE Spectrum sits in on energy equivalence debates—with millions of dollars for a "100 mpg car" riding on the results

The Music Industry Wants to Kill LimeWire

The P2P network's founder Mark Gorton is in the fight of his life