Gwendolyn Rak

6 min read Gwendolyn Rak is an assistant editor at IEEE Spectrum covering consumer electronics and careers. Touchscreen controls in some new car models are being replaced by conventional knobs and buttons. WinnieVinzence/iStock Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16, home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and steering wheels. With this “re-buttonization,”

4 min read Gwendolyn Rak is an assistant editor at IEEE Spectrum covering consumer electronics and careers. Optical sensors in Emteq’s glasses look back at the user to monitor facial expressions. Emteq Labs Emteq Labs wants eyewear to be the next frontier of wearable health technology. The Brighton, England-based company introduced today its emotion-sensing eyewear, Sense. The glasses contain nine optical sensors distributed across the rims that detect subtle changes in facial expression with more

Nearly every day since she was a child, Alex Leow, a psychiatrist and computer scientist at the University of Illinois Chicago, has played the piano. Some days she plays well, and other days her tempo lags and her fingers hit the wrong keys. Over the years, she noticed a pattern: How well she plays depends on her mood. A bad mood or lack of sleep almost always leads to sluggish, mistake-prone music. In 2015, Leow

3 min read Each sensor, shown here next to a dime, mimics the how the brain’s neurons send signals through spikes of electrical activity. Nick Dentamaro/Brown University To gain a better understanding of the brain, why not draw inspiration from it? At least, that’s what researchers at Brown University did, by building a wireless communications system that mimics the brain using an array of tiny silicon sensors, each the size of a grain of sand.