2025-10-01 02:00:04
IEEE Collabratec reached a milestone in August: more than 100,000 IEEE members (plus 250,000 nonmembers) on the online networking platform. To commemorate the achievement, IEEE released a 100,000-member badge for users.
The badges recognize members for their participation in IEEE Collabratec’s communities and discussion forums. They also reward users for creating networks with other IEEE members and solving IEEE Puzzlers brainteasers.
“Since 2021 IEEE Collabratec has been a game-changer in my membership journey,” IEEE Member Jaramogi Khalfani Adofo Odhiambo says. He is a member of the IEEE Uganda Section. “I connect with fellow volunteers around the world and have found mentorship and support for personal growth.
“Collabratec is more than a network; it’s a vibrant community that celebrates learning, leadership, and collaboration.”
The platform was launched in 2015 to help members stay connected with the organization and local sections.
Since its debut, IEEE Collabratec has introduced new features. Here are some recent additions:
“IEEE Collabratec has served as a truly unifying force across our global technical community—bridging disciplines, geographies, and generations,” IEEE Life Fellow Fredrick Mintzer says. Mintzer, recipient of the 2022 IEEE Emberson Award, is a frequent Collabratec contributor. “For a decade, Collabratec has embodied the One IEEE philosophy by fostering collaboration and empowering members and nonmembers alike to connect, contribute, discuss, debate, and grow together.”
To learn more about IEEE Collabratec, check out the user guide, FAQs, and users’ forum.
2025-09-30 22:00:03
Autonomous vehicles have eyes—cameras, lidar, radar. But ears? That’s what researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology’s Oldenburg Branch for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology in Germany are building with the Hearing Car. The idea is to outfit vehicles with external microphones and AI to detect, localize, and classify environmental sounds, with the goal of helping cars react to hazards they can’t see. For now, that means approaching emergency vehicles—and eventually pedestrians, a punctured tire, or failing brakes.
“It’s about giving the car another sense, so it can understand the acoustic world around it,” says Moritz Brandes, a project manager for the Hearing Car.
In March 2025, Fraunhofer IDMT researchers drove a prototype Hearing Car 1,500 kilometers from Oldenburg to a proving ground in northern Sweden. Brandes says the trip tested the system in dirt, snow, slush, road salt, and freezing temperatures.
The team had a few key questions to answer: What if the microphone housings get dirty or frosted over? How does that affect localization and classification? Testing showed performance degraded less than expected once modules were cleaned and dried. The team also confirmed the microphones can survive a car wash.
Each external microphone module (EMM) contains three microphones in a 15-centimeter-wide package. Mounted at the rear of the car—where wind noise is lowest—they capture sound, digitize it, convert it into spectrograms, and pass it to a region-based convolutional neural network (RCNN) trained for audio event detection.
If the RCNN classifies an audio signal as a siren, the result is cross-checked with the vehicle’s cameras: Is there a blue flashing light in view? Combining “senses” like this boosts the vehicle’s reliability by lowering the odds of false positives. Audio signals are localized through beamforming, though Fraunhofer declined to provide specifics on the technique.
All processing happens onboard to minimize latency. That also “eliminates concerns about what would happen in an area with poor Internet connectivity or a lot of interference from [radio-frequency] noise,” Brandes says. The workload, he adds, can be handled by a modern Raspberry Pi.
According to Brandes, early benchmarks for the Hearing Car system include detecting sirens up to 400 meters away in quiet, low-speed conditions. That figure, he says, shrinks to under 100 meters at highway speeds due to wind and road noise. Alerts are triggered in about 2 seconds—enough time for drivers or autonomous systems to react.
This display doubles as a control panel and dashboard letting the driver activate the vehicle’s “hearing.”Fraunhofer IDMT
The Hearing Car’s roots stretch back more than a decade. “We’ve been working on making cars hear since 2014,” says Brandes. Early experiments were modest: detecting a nail in a tire by its rhythmic tapping on the pavement or opening the trunk via voice command.
A few years later, support from a tier 1 supplier (a company that provides complete systems or major components such as transmissions, braking systems, batteries, or advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) directly to automobile manufacturers) pushed the work into automotive-grade development, soon joined by a major automaker. With EV adoption rising, automakers began to see why ears mattered as much as eyes.
“A human hears a siren and reacts—even before seeing where the sound is coming from. An autonomous vehicle has to do the same if it’s going to coexist with us safely.” —Eoin King, University of Galway Sound Lab
Brandes recalls one telling moment: Sitting on a test track, inside an electric vehicle that was well insulated against road noise, he failed to hear an emergency siren until the vehicle was nearly upon him. “That was a big ‘ah-ha!’ moment that showed how important the Hearing Car would become as EV adoption increased,” he says.
Eoin King, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Galway in Ireland, sees the leap from physics to AI as transformative.
“My team took a very physics-based approach,” he says, recalling his 2020 work in this research area at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. “We looked at direction of arrival—measuring delays between microphones to triangulate where a sound is. That demonstrated feasibility. But today, AI can take this much further. Machine listening is really the game changer.”
Physics still matters, King adds: “It’s almost like physics-informed AI. The traditional approaches show what’s possible. Now, machine learning systems can generalize far better across environments.”
Despite progress, King, who directs the Galway Sound Lab’s research in acoustics, noise, and vibration, is cautious.
“In five years, I see it being niche,” he says. “It takes time for technologies to become standard. Lane-departure warnings were niche once too—but now they’re everywhere. Hearing technology will get there, but step by step.” Near-term deployment will likely appear in premium vehicles or autonomous fleets, with mass adoption further off.
King doesn’t mince words about why audio perception matters: Autonomous vehicles must coexist with humans. “A human hears a siren and reacts—even before seeing where the sound is coming from. An autonomous vehicle has to do the same if it’s going to coexist with us safely,” he says.
King’s vision is vehicles with multisensory awareness—cameras and lidar for sight, microphones for hearing, perhaps even vibration sensors for road-surface monitoring. “Smell,” he jokes, “might be a step too far.”
Fraunhofer’s Swedish road test showed that durability is not a big hurdle. King points to another area of concern: false alarms.
“If you train a car to stop when it hears someone yelling ‘help,’ what happens when kids do it as a prank?” he asks. “We have to test these systems thoroughly before putting them on the road. This isn’t consumer electronics, where, if ChatGPT gives you the wrong answer, you can just rephrase the question—people’s lives are at stake.”
Cost is less of an issue: microphones are cheap and rugged. The real challenge is ensuring algorithms can make sense of noisy city soundscapes filled with horns, garbage trucks, and construction.
Fraunhofer is now refining algorithms with broader datasets, including sirens from the United States, Germany, and Denmark. Meanwhile, King’s lab is improving sound detection in indoor contexts, which could be repurposed for cars.
Some scenarios—like a Hearing Car detecting a red-light-runner’s engine revving before it’s visible—may be many years away, but King insists the principle holds: “With the right data, in theory it’s possible. The challenge is getting that data and training for it.”
Both Brandes and King agree no single sense is enough. Cameras, radar, lidar—and now microphones—must work together. “Autonomous vehicles that rely only on vision are limited to line of sight,” King says. “Adding acoustics adds another degree of safety.”
2025-09-30 21:00:03
Low Earth orbit, where most satellites operate, has become a whirlwind of metal shards and dead, tumbling debris.
Anyone with hardware or human crew in orbit knows the drill. Orbital collision warnings can be unremitting. Whether the object is a defunct satellite or a stray hunk of glass from a solar panel that shattered long ago, every item circling Earth is also a potential projectile. And nearly all of this junk, traveling at least eight times as fast as a rifle bullet, can be damaging in a collision. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites maneuvered around possible debris impacts 144,404 times over the first half of 2025. That’s a collision warning every couple of minutes, night and day, for six months straight—three times the rate of the previous six months. Looming on the horizon, too, is the threat of orbital junk overwhelming satellites’ ability to dodge disaster. Each collision then creates more fragments, in a runaway cascade that turns low Earth orbit into a hazard zone.
For satellite operators, sudden silences could be the first warning signs. Ground station crews that today coordinate elegant sequences of thruster burns will face more chaotic obstacle courses and bigger debris fields blooming across their display monitors. Communication lines and data traffic may drop from time to time, too, sowing chaos on the ground and menacing flights across the globe. And as the slow catastrophe builds, fuel reserves for satellite constellations will bleed down into the red from so many extensive orbital maneuvers. Spacecraft that’ve run dry today will be the seedbed for tumbling, hypervelocity shrapnel tomorrow.
This doomsday scenario is known as the Kessler syndrome, named after the American astrophysicist Donald Kessler, who in 1976 began circulating his first notices at NASA about possible runaway orbital debris. Now, as the magnitude of the space junk problem rapidly scales up, technological responses are ramping up as well. Solutions in the offing include high-resolution orbital tracking, AI-powered constellation management, and an emerging robotic tech called “active debris removal.” This last item involves lofting a specialized spacecraft into orbit, armed with grippers or other satellite-wrangling tech that can target and grab orbiting stuff. The removal craft then guides the space junk through reentry and the ultimate splashdown of whatever survives reentry into the middle of the ocean.
But tech alone may not be enough for the magnitude of the task ahead. The debris problem could simply be growing too fast. International treaties and government regulations may be needed to classify orbits as globally managed resources, like radio spectrum. Because as Kessler himself has pointed out, space is complicated—sometimes frustratingly so.
In the early days, those frustrations were related to simply getting the space community to realize the problem that lay ahead. Back in the early 1970s, when low Earth orbit was all but pristine, Kessler was a midcareer NASA scientist, having already notched important contributions to the Apollo and Skylab programs. As his colleague, the late NASA administrator Burton Cour-Palais, noted in a 2004 oral history, Kessler “was bringing up this orbital debris thing, and the higher-ups did not want to know about it at all.”
Cour-Palais also recalled being told to urge Kessler to “come up with solutions rather than problems.” Fortunately, neither took the overly cautious route.
In June 1978, the Journal of Geophysical Research published a paper by Kessler and Cour-Palais in which they argued that a rapidly growing belt of defunct satellites, collision fragments, and other detritus could “be a significant problem during the next century.” It’s a prediction that has come to pass. In April of this year, Kessler and Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham, in England, presented their latest models, concluding that space junk orbiting between 400 and 1,000 kilometers—where most low Earth satellites operate—is already unstable. And between 520 and 1,000 km, the researchers found, debris concentrations are at or near levels that might sustain runaway growth.
A recent internal report shared with IEEE Spectrum, written by analysts at the Menlo Park, Calif.–based LeoLabs, has divided the problem into what it calls “four waves of the Kessler syndrome.” The first three waves, it says, may have already begun. They are: nontrackable stuff like tiny steel fragments and glass splinters colliding with non-operational trackable objects; nontrackable stuff impacting functioning satellites and causing malfunctions; and trackable objects hitting other trackable objects and creating a clouds of fragments. The fourth wave, in which two large pieces of debris incite a chain reaction of other collisions, has yet to occur. In LeoLabs’ observations and models, satellites and operational spacecraft including the International Space Station, and China’s Tiangong space station continue to face manageable levels of collision avoidance maneuvers—for now.
“It is assumed these operational satellites will avoid catastrophic collisions with trackable objects,” the report concludes.
But according to Luc Piguet, CEO and cofounder of the Lausanne, Switzerland–based startup ClearSpace, challenges for operational satellites are real and mounting. “The Kessler syndrome is a slow, crawling effect—that when it starts accelerating, it’s already too late,” he says. “The Kessler syndrome is happening.”
The problem can be further segmented into specific problematic orbits, according to Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, which performs high-resolution debris tracking for private clients and government agencies.
“There are certain altitudes where we’ve already passed the threshold for the Kessler syndrome,” McKnight says. For instance, at 775 km altitude, as well as at 840 km and 975 km, the collision risk is scaling up rapidly. (See graph, “Low Earth Orbit’s Most High-Risk Places.”)
“We will hit a point where particular popular orbits are so risky to operate in that the benefits of operating there are outweighed by the cost and risk,” says Danielle Wood, head of MIT Media Lab’s Space Enabled Research Group.
According to the European Space Agency, 14.5 million kilograms of man-made stuff circles the planet today. Compare that to 11 million kg two years ago and 8.9 million kg in 2020—a 63 percent increase over the past five years.
McKnight says the Kessler problem comes into sharper focus when dividing mass in any given orbit by the volume of space that orbit occupies. The mass density in orbit, also known as the mass per cubic kilometer, provides a clue not only to the chance of orbital collisions but also to those collisions’ consequences. Two small orbiting items colliding won’t create nearly as much new debris as will two big ones. The more densely packed an orbit is, in other words, the more treacherous it is to keep a satellite at that orbit. “Mass per cubic kilometer is debris-generating potential,” McKnight says, which would be a great thing to know with confidence in all the different regions of low Earth orbit.
In 2002, Space Shuttle astronauts retrieved these solar panels from the Hubble Space Telescope—revealing how destructive even small projectiles are when traveling at low Earth orbit speeds. ESA
However, says Katherine Courtney, chair of the Global Network on Sustainability in Space, knowing where all orbiting stuff is today has become a tall order. “A substantial portion of smaller space junk can only be extrapolated using data collected from returned spacecraft and historical records. The vast majority can’t be tracked from the ground,” Courtney adds.
Moreover, says Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist and space historian at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Mass., once stuff in orbit goes missing, further complications emerge. Collisions between the missing matter and other debris can completely knock the collisions’ by-products into different orbits.
“The operating satellites are in nice circular orbits,” McDowell says, “whereas the collision debris is crossing many orbits and affecting many more.”
What’s now needed as the problem grows larger is a complete rethink, says Moriba Jah, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I don’t subscribe to the Kessler syndrome,” Jah says. “It’s not that cascading collisions can’t happen. It’s that the framework oversimplifies the problem and doesn’t give us a way to manage or evolve the system.”
Consider instead, Jah says, a parameter he calls “orbital carrying capacity.” “If we start from the end, we can say that carrying capacity is consumed when our ability to make decisions to avert harm no longer work,” he continues. “So to me, that doesn’t necessarily look like you’re bumping into stuff. It also looks like you’re spending fuel moving around stuff so much that you can’t do the things that you wanted to do to begin with.”
As SpaceX proved 144,404 times from December 2024 through May of this year, the Starlink constellation’s capacity to maneuver its hardware around space junk is impressive.
“Starlink is a brilliant constellation,” McKnight says. “They’re like a granny driving on the highway. They pump their brakes. They avoid everything.”
However, Starlink’s own public record also showcases how rapidly the collision hazards in orbit are evolving. The company’s publicly disclosed data reveals a 22-fold increase since 2020 in the amount of ducking and dodging the constellation has needed to perform to avoid collisions with other stuff in orbit.
Everyone’s ducking and dodging these days, too.
“Collision avoidance is a standard practice now for every operator,” says Tim Flohrer, head of the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office.
“You want to keep your operations making sense, communicating with everybody else,” says Marlon Sorge, technical fellow at the Chantilly, Va.–based Aerospace Corp., “and not making more of the stuff that you can’t communicate with.”
Yet, space junk isn’t the only class of noncommunicative stuff up there. “More than half of the unidentified objects are Chinese satellites,” says Courtney of the Global Network on Sustainability in Space. “So they’re active satellites, but they’re just not registered as identifiable objects.”
The tracked debris, the untrackable tiny debris, the bigger things that are also incommunicado—all of it combines to make for an increasingly massive headache.
“Every collision-avoidance maneuver is a nuisance,” Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Safety office, has said. “Not only because of fuel consumption but also because of the preparation that goes into it. We have to book ground-station passes, which costs money. Sometimes we even have to switch off the acquisition of scientific data. We have to have an expert team available round the clock.”
So who or what, then, could possibly keep up with the rapidly scaling nature of the Kessler problem? Artificial intelligence is the almost unanimous answer.
Many of the world’s major players in low Earth orbit, including small satellite startups and big national space programs, are currently testing and developing AI constellation-management systems. Machine-learning algorithms are proving increasingly adept at making more accurate collision warnings and performing automated decision-making—as well as sharpening the resolution of small object detection to find smaller orbiting stuff than what non-AI-powered tracking tech can see. Some companies and research teams are also developing AI tools to go beyond just keeping pace with the problem, using AI to optimize fuel usage and maintain ideal satellite configurations for low battery usage and simplified signal traffic as well.
However, for all its smarts, AI still can’t make the most difficult orbital hazards go away. That’s why some companies are approaching the Kessler problem as one of disposing, rather than dodging.
A number of startups are actively pursuing ways to extract the most dangerous orbital objects—defunct rocket stages, dead satellites, space collision fragment clouds, and space-race relics.
“The technology available to remove debris today is really toward larger pieces of debris,” says Andrew Faiola, commercial director of the Tokyo-based company Astroscale. “We’re just maturing that capability to be able to effectively, safely, and securely remove large pieces of debris.”
Astroscale and ClearSpace aim to launch spacecraft over the next few years that will each target an aging satellite (a Eutelsat OneWeb satellite and ESA’s PROBA-1, respectively) for a prototype removal mission.
The European radar imaging satellite Sentinel-1A caught a millimeter-sized particle impacting one of its solar panels, leaving behind a 40-centimer wide zone of damage. ESA
“You need to do controlled entry,” ClearSpace’s Piguet says. “This means you need to push this satellite into Point Nemo over the South Pacific, where there’s no airlines, ground traffic, and no inhabited island.”
Ideally, then, between smart constellation management, active collision avoidance, and active cleanup, low Earth orbit will become something closer to a regulated and moderated space—much like airspace around major metro areas today.
“It’s much the same as air-traffic control,” Faiola says. “As the technology gets better, you start to see aircraft being stacked more closely together. You have the same amount of real estate, but you can put more objects in there more safely when you have better visibility and situational awareness of where everything is. It’s the same in space.”
Space tech and space tech alone may one day resolve the Kessler syndrome.
But as a complement to the technological innovation, international space agreements and law are also being reconsidered, because much of the existing space law standards were agreed on decades ago, during an entirely different era in low Earth orbit.
For instance, between the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the 1972 Space Liability Convention, even an untraceable fragment of metal in space is effectively owned by the nation that launched it. This arguably means that that nation may need to give permission for anyone else to remove the fragment from orbit.
“There’s no national borders up there,” says Faiola. “But every object that is cataloged is also owned by someone, a state. And you’re not allowed to touch someone else’s stuff without their permission.”
In August, Japan announced it would be developing its own legal frameworks for removing space junk from orbit. And this November, in Vienna, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs will be hosting a space law conference to tackle these issues as well.
International agreements need reconsidering in other ways, too. Some space experts Spectrum spoke with argue for additional regulations to prevent orbits from further clogging up.
“There will have to be internationally coordinated agreements on who gets what orbit and how many satellites you can have in that orbit,” says Smithsonian’s McDowell.
Courtney envisions something like a worldwide space command network. “We need to be designing solutions that allow the growth to continue,” she says. “What we need is a global space traffic control solution like we have for air traffic today.”
Jah of the University of Texas at Austin argues for ultimately bringing orbital space closer to its original state of being, as he puts it, “a viable commons.” When a new player—whether a company or a national space agency—wants to put something into a given orbit, he says, that new orbiting asset should be added to a master spreadsheet somewhere.
“If another country wants to be able to be in that orbit, there should be an equitable way to share the carrying capacity of that orbit,” he says.
Rockets, satellites, and launch systems today still follow the space race–era legacy designs that treat orbital space like an infinite junkyard, he adds. “Right now, every single object that we launch into orbit is the equivalent of a single-use plastic,” Jah says. “We need to invest in reusable and recyclable satellites.”
Even if the Kessler problem on the home planet can be solved, says Courtney, the same thing could happen on other planets and moons. “We’re very worried about low Earth orbit, but [there’s also] all the commercial activity and all of the great-power competition for landing things on the moon and Mars,” she says.
“We have no space-traffic coordination solutions for cislunar space, and yet that’s the race that’s just starting now,” she says. “We’re expanding outward into the solar system, and we’re just taking these problems with us.”
2025-09-30 20:00:03
One of the robotics projects that I’ve been most excited about for years now is iRonCub, from Daniele Pucci’s Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy. Since 2017, Pucci has been developing a jet-propulsion system that will enable an iCub robot (originally designed in 2004 to be the approximate shape and size of a 5-year-old child) to fly like Iron Man.
Over the summer, after nearly 10 years of development, iRonCub3 achieved lift-off and stable flight for the first time, with its four jet engines lifting it 50 centimeters off the ground for several seconds. The long-term vision is for iRonCub (or a robot like it) to operate as a disaster response platform, Pucci tells us. In an emergency situation like a flood or a fire, iRonCub could quickly get to a location without worrying about obstacles, and then on landing, start walking for energy efficiency while using its hands and arms to move debris and open doors. “We believe in contributing to something unique in the future,” says Pucci. “We have to explore new things, and this is wild territory at the scientific level.”
Obviously, this concept for iRonCub and the practical experimentation attached to it is really cool. But coolness in and of itself is usually not enough of a reason to build a robot, especially a robot that’s a (presumably rather expensive) multi-year project involving a bunch of robotics students, so let’s get into a little more detail about why a flying robot baby is actually something that the world needs.
In an emergency situation like a flood or a fire, iRonCub could quickly get to a location without worrying about obstacles, and then on landing, start walking for energy efficiency while using its hands and arms to move debris and open doors. IIT
Getting a humanoid robot to do this sort of thing is quite a challenge. Together, the jet turbines mounted to iRonCub’s back and arms can generate over 1000 N of thrust, but because it takes time for the engines to spool up or down, control has to come from the robot itself as it moves its arm-engines to maintain stability.
“What is not visible from the video,” Pucci tells us, “is that the exhaust gas from the turbines is at 800 °C and almost supersonic speed. We have to understand how to generate trajectories in order to avoid the fact that the cones of emission gases were impacting the robot.”
Even if the exhaust doesn’t end up melting the robot, there are still aerodynamic forces involved that have until this point really not been a consideration for humanoid robots at all—in June, Pucci’s group published a paper in Nature Engineering Communications, offering a “comprehensive approach to model and control aerodynamic forces [for humanoid robots] using classical and learning techniques.”
“The exhaust gas from the turbines is at 800 °C and almost supersonic speed.” —Daniele Pucci, IIT
Whether or not you’re on board with Pucci’s future vision for iRonCub as a disaster-response platform, derivatives of current research can be immediately applied beyond flying humanoid robots. The algorithms for thrust estimation can be used with other flying platforms that rely on directed thrust, like eVTOL aircraft. Aerodynamic compensation is relevant for humanoid robots even if they’re not airborne, if we expect them to be able to function when it’s windy outside.
More surprising, Pucci describes a recent collaboration with an industrial company developing a new pneumatic gripper. “At a certain point, we had to do force estimation for controlling the gripper, and we realized that the dynamics looked really similar to those of the jet turbines, and so we were able to use the same tools for gripper control. That was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for us: first you do something crazy, but then you build the tools and methods, and then you can actually use those tools in an industrial scenario. That’s how to drive innovation.”
There’s one more important reason to be doing this, he says: “It’s really cool.” In practice, a really cool flagship project like iRonCub not only attracts talent to Pucci’s lab, but also keeps students and researchers passionate and engaged. I saw this firsthand when I visited IIT last year, where I got a similar vibe to watching the DARPA Robotics Challenge and DARPA SubT—when people know they’re working on something really cool, there’s this tangible, pervasive, and immersive buzzing excitement that comes through. It’s projects like iRonCub that can get students to love robotics.
In the near future, a new jetpack with an added degree of freedom will make yaw control of iRonCub easier, and Pucci would also like to add wings for more efficient long-distance flight. But the logistics of testing the robot are getting more complicated—there’s only so far that the team can go with their current test stand (which is on the roof of their building), and future progress will likely require coordinating with the Genoa airport.
It’s not going to be easy, but as Pucci makes clear, “This is not a joke. It’s something that we believe in. And that feeling of doing something exceptional, or possibly historical, something that’s going to be remembered—that’s something that’s kept us motivated. And we’re just getting started.”
2025-09-30 02:00:04
We forge ahead with scientific quests,
but even zealous efforts hit a wall
trying to make what nature most detests:
nothing at all.
It seems like such a little thing to do—
removing every molecule. We find
that though we displace almost all, a few
remain behind.
It takes attentive planning and robust
equipment in a lab to do the chore
of pumping vacuum pressure down to just
a millitorr.
The stalwart researcher persists and loses
sleep, but can’t reach perfection—I’m afraid
the universe still stubbornly refuses
to be unmade.
Even in deepest space, a cubic meter
contains some particles. We must assess
there is no void, although conditions teeter
on emptiness.
The quantum mysteries will vex and weary
the brightest mind, the sharpest physicist.
True nothingness, while wonderful in theory,
does not exist.
2025-09-30 00:00:04
This article was originally published by Canary Media.
At a dock along the banks of the Cousins River, Chad Strater loaded up his small aluminum workboat with power tools and a winch. Strater, who owns a marine construction business, was setting out to tinker with floating equipment at a nearby oyster farm. On the quiet morning in August, with the sun already beating down hard, his vessel whirred to life, only without the usual growl of an oil-guzzling motor. The boat is all electric.
Just north of where the Cousins River meets Casco Bay, Willy Leathers was powering up his own electric watercraft, which had its first outing in July. Leathers uses his 28-foot (8.5-meter) boat for cultivating oysters at Maine Ocean Farms, where roughly 3 million of the animals grow in dozens of floating cages.
Both Strater and Leathers said they switched to electric workboats for several reasons. Their new watercraft are a cleaner alternative to the smelly, polluting petroleum-powered vessels that dominate Maine’s 3,500 miles (5,633 kilometers) of coastline. Electric propulsion is also significantly quieter than a gas or diesel motor. For Leathers, whose 10-acre (4-hectare) sea farm is a significant presence in the cove where he operates, the swap is about being a good neighbor to the shoreside community.
“It’s an innovation born from necessity for us,” said Strater about his electric boat, which he docks each night at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, the nonprofit boatyard and aquaculture innovation hub he runs with several other small business owners. “[The boat] really works well for what we do with it, and we’re letting farmers use it to see how it could work for them.”
Battery-powered vessels are starting to catch on in the United States and worldwide as companies and maritime authorities work to reduce emissions and improve the experience of cruising waterways. The technology ranges from small outboard motors on workboats and recreational watercraft to powerful inboard systems on ferries, tugboats, and supply vessels for offshore wind farms and oil rigs.
In recent decades, Norway, with its extensive coastline and ample government funding, has spearheaded the transition globally. China, which is both the world’s largest shipbuilder and battery manufacturer, has rapidly deployed hundreds of battery-powered vessels over the last several years. Falling battery costs, better technology, and stricter environmental rules are compelling some vessel owners to install partial or fully electric systems, primarily for watercraft that operate near the shore or on fixed routes. For commercial fishing in particular, customers are helping to drive the push to clean up.
“Everyone’s more concerned now with where their food comes from, and we’ve seen that [consumers] are looking for that complete sustainable supply chain,” said Ed Schwarz, the head of marine solutions sales in North America for Siemens Energy, which has built electric propulsion systems for U.S. ferries.
Maine Ocean Farms founders Eric Oransky [left] and Willy Leathers switched to an electric workboat in July 2025.Brendan Bullock
Electrification has only very recently come to the U.S. aquaculture sector. In Maine, the small but fast-growing segment includes nearly 200 farms for shellfish, fin fish, and edible seaweed. Strater and Leathers are among the first in their business to trade gas motors for electric propulsion—a switch they say they’re hoping to accelerate. Oil-guzzling motors are among the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions for the state’s multibillion-dollar seafood sector.
Still, electrifying commercial watercraft can be a difficult course to navigate, given the higher up-front costs of electric motors and the lack of charging infrastructure—and grid infrastructure in general—in rural waterfront communities.
Early adopters like Strater and Leathers said they hope the experiences gained from their demonstrations can help pave the way for decarbonizing Maine’s blue economy. With the help of the Island Institute, a Maine-based nonprofit that works on marine-related energy transitions, Leathers is collecting performance data from his vessel to share more broadly with the industry.
“People say it looks cool and shiny and looks like it operates great,” Lia Morris, the Island Institute’s senior community development officer, said of electric boats. “But we really want to be able to prove out the [business] case.” Electric boats can cost between 20 percent and 30 percent more than a gas- or diesel-powered vessel of a comparable size. However, owners can save on maintenance and fuel over the long term, Strater’s business partner Nick Planson said.
“The high-level math that we’ve come up with” is a financial break-even point of “about four to five years, and then over a 10-year time span, you’re definitely coming out way ahead based on the vastly reduced maintenance cost, replacement cost of failed equipment, and fuel costs,” said Planson.
But the initial price tag presents a significant hurdle. Strater and Planson’s sleekly designed, no-frills watercraft cost US $100,000 to build and outfit with a single electric outboard motor. Leathers’s boat, called Heron, cost about four times as much. It has two electric outboards and a ramp for unloading and hauling more than 10,000 oysters at a time from the sea farm to distributors waiting on the dock. Its hull is also equipped with a small cabin and toilet.
Both operations relied on grant funding to defray the expense of going electric.
For their part, Strater and Planson used about $50,000 from a larger U.S. Department of Agriculture small business grant they got in 2024 to establish a use case for electric workboats in the aquaculture industry. Leathers’s business, Maine Ocean Farms, was included on a collaborative $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant last year that earmarked about $289,000 for boat building and propulsion systems, in addition to other funds for charging infrastructure and data collection.
The prospects for funding future projects are now much murkier under the Trump administration, maritime policy experts say.
The DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which awarded the money to Maine Ocean Farms and its partners, is facing significant budget cuts in the next fiscal year. The GOP-backed spending law that passed in July rescinded some unobligated grant funding for cleaning up marine diesel engines. While other programs were spared, it’s unclear whether the current Congress will approve new funding for initiatives ranging from electrifying huge urban ports to deploying low-emissions ferries in rural communities.
“We can go really fast for a short distance. We can go really slow for a long distance, and it works for what we do with it,” says Strater.
But federal grants aren’t the only way to address the higher cost of electric boats. Strater and Planson also worked with Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a Maine-based community development financial institution focused on climate resilience, to establish a “marine green” loan program that can make the up-front costs of switching to electric propulsion more accessible to small businesses.
“The more electric engines that are being employed in Maine helps lift the whole tide for everyone,” said Nick Branchina, director of CEI’s fisheries and aquaculture program. As part of its marine green lending, CEI offers loans starting at $25,000 for small businesses to make the switch to electric propulsion and comfortably afford the cost of batteries or a shoreside charging installation.
Planson said that as electrification moves beyond initial grant-funded projects, the challenge is keeping systems affordable. He said he wants to see other small business owners able to “take a reasonable swing” at electric propulsion.
Buying a boat, of course, is only the first obstacle. Electric vessel owners must also learn how to use their new propulsion systems and find a place to charge them.
This summer, Leathers said he’s had no trouble making the nearly 2-mile (3-kilometer) round trip from the slip where he docks Heron in South Freeport, Maine, to his farm on Casco Bay. With a full charge, he can make trips slightly farther to meet distributors closer to Portland. But as temperatures drop this winter, Leathers said he’s not sure how far the outboards’ two batteries will take him. Cold weather can reduce battery capacity and impact performance, shrinking an electric motor’s range. It’s a part of Leathers’s demonstration to find out what the impacts are in practice.
Like Leathers, Strater and Planson also work year-round. They said they’re both impressed with how their boat performed last winter after launching in the fall of 2024. For Planson, who markets battery-powered equipment to aquaculture farmers as part of his startup, Shred Electric, a boat’s ability to run through the year’s coldest months is a key selling point.
“The proof is in the pudding,” said Planson. “When you’re working with…waterfront applications, it really needs to work every day and all year.”
Strater and Planson said their boat’s range was an important consideration when they partnered with the startup Flux Marine to build the electric outboard motor. With limited shoreside charging infrastructure in place, the boat has to make it out and back on a single charge, sometimes to aquaculture operations 7 miles (11 kilometers) away. In the 10 months since the boat’s launch, Strater has learned that range correlates to speed. He can modulate the boat’s pace depending on how far he wants to go.
“We can go really fast for a short distance. We can go really slow for a long distance, and it works for what we do with it,” he said.
Soon, Maine’s early adopters will have shared access to a higher-capacity Level 2 charger that will be installed at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation and can charge batteries in little over 2 hours, or three times as fast as the current system. The startup Aqua SuperPower was awarded a portion of the DOE funding last year to install additional marine chargers there and at a wharf in Portland owned by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Island Institute also helped with grant funding for the charger at the Sea Meadow boatyard.
Maine will need much more high-capacity charging infrastructure for the marine industry to transition to electric propulsion, said Morris, of the Island Institute. As the state’s aquaculture and fisheries industries look to grow beyond small-scale operations, other businesses will need to charge more frequently to make longer, farther trips up and down the coast.
Expanding charging stations north of Casco Bay represents what Morris calls a “chicken and egg” problem: a dynamic where chargers are either installed before demand gets high and sit unused, or electric boats hit the water and there’s not enough charging infrastructure, stalling future adoption.
This challenge is compounded by both New England’s aging grid infrastructure and the remote nature of some of the region’s waterfront access points. Getting the right amount of power to a charging station on the shore can be costly, even in Yarmouth, which sits on Casco Bay. Often it’s the last mile that can be the most expensive. At Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, three-phase power, which can accommodate higher loads, is limited by the dirt road that separates the boat launch from the more heavily trafficked U.S. Route 1.
“There are a lot of complicated questions,” Morris said. “I don’t think it’s unique to Maine, it’s any rural area, but complicated questions and conversations with the utilities and the rural municipalities are going to have to be solved for.”
Back on the water, Leathers docked his electric boat, Heron, alongside the sea farm’s barge, where thousands of oysters pass through for processing on harvest days. He switched the motor off and hopped onto the floating platform. For a moment, the bay was calm to the point of near silence. Then Leathers picked up an oyster cage with a rattle, turning it over in his hands as water splashed out. The sounds of the workday began.
“As a whole industry, I think it’s going to take proving that someone like us can do it,” Leathers said. “And then the next person kind of snowballing after that.”