IEEE TryEngineering is dedicated to inspiring intellectual curiosity in children.

The technologies shaping our world, including in the realms of artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and ocean exploration, are evolving rapidly. Helping young learners understand the concepts is essential to preparing the next generation of problem-solvers, creators, and engineers.

TryEngineering has introduced a STEM book series for youngsters ages 8 to 12 through the Lerner Publishing Group.

The series, Tomorrow’s Technology With TryEngineering, Powered by IEEE, makes complex topics more approachable and engaging, with each book combining age-appropriate explanations, real-world examples, and design challenges that encourage curiosity and critical thinking. The series is based on ebooks and videos available at tryengineering.org.

For the series, TryEngineering partnered with several other IEEE groups including the Communications, Computer, and Oceanic Engineering societies and the Transportation Electrification Council.

Whether used in the classroom, a library, or at home, the books can help pupils connect STEM concepts to the technologies they encounter every day, including computers and smartphones.

Six topics in the collection

Here are the books in the new collection:

Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Smart Technology explores the systems behind streaming services, search engines, and health care. Readers learn how AI works while exploring ethical concerns such as bias, deepfakes, hallucinations, and privacy. Pupils can better understand one of the most influential technologies of our time as it evolves.

Communication Technology: From Morse Code to Smartphones teaches readers about smoke signals, semaphore towers, telephones, and wireless networks. The pupils can gain an understanding of how engineers are changing communications technology through innovations such as 6G and space-based networks. The book highlights career opportunities in the aerospace and telecommunications fields.

Electric Vehicles: Powering the Future of Transportation covers how e-cars, e-bikes, e-scooters, and electrified trains are transforming the way people travel. Readers can discover how hybrid and fully electric vehicles operate and how the batteries that power them work. They also can learn about the roles engineers play in developing smarter transit systems.

Ocean Engineering: Protecting Our Ocean Environments highlights the vital ecosystem role played by the world’s oceans, which require careful stewardship. play in our ecosystem. Readers can learn how engineers study the underwater world using submersibles and floats, how they address pollution, and how they protect marine environments.

Semiconductors: The Building Blocks of Modern Electronics focuses on the technology behind nearly every electronic tool we use. Microchips power smartphones, computers, and countless other products, all thanks to semiconductors. Readers can learn about insulators and conductors, how microchips are manufactured, and why semiconductor engineering is a fertile field for innovation.

Signal Power: The Hidden Waves Behind Modern Tech explores how engineers analyze and manipulate signals to make technologies work more effectively. Whether it is a phone call reaching the correct person despite background noise or a medical device monitoring a patient, signal processing plays crucial roles in modern life. The book introduces different wave types, the signal processing workflow, and careers in the field.

The book series can help children understand the technologies shaping the world around them while encouraging them to think like engineers and innovators. By connecting STEM concepts to real-world applications, the series can make learning more meaningful and engaging.

The Tomorrow’s Technology With TryEngineering series is available through Amazon, Bookshop, and Lerner. More about the collection may be found here.

As the debate rages over whether the recent spate of rogue AI agents is a step toward AGI or a more conventional engineering problem, Nvidia is offering its own answer to problem.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday introduced a toolkit of software and hardware products that add independent security layers around AI agents to ensure they stay within their test environments even if they attempt to break out.

The release follows a string of hacking incidents involving AI models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Meta that bypassed security controls to escape their testing environments and access real-world systems. The first and most prominent example occurred this summer when OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face while trying to complete a cybersecurity task. And the hits keep on coming — OpenAI published a new site dedicated to reports of its AI agents going rogue.

Huang said Monday during an interview with CNBC that its new Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform would have prevented these breaches.

Nvidia, which has made tens of billions of dollars selling its GPU and CPU chips to AI labs, doesn’t support slowing down development or adding new regulations to the industry to solve the security problem. The answer, the company believes, is to move some security controls outside the agent altogether — creating a constant and independent security guard that will keep AI agents in check.

“AI’s extraordinary potential for society will only be realized if we solve AI safety,” Huang said in a statement. “As we continue to discover the frontier of AI capabilities, we must accelerate discovery at the frontier of AI safety. Safety and security require full-stack engineering.”

The new Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform combines OpenShell, its open-source software for controlling what agents can access while they operate, with Sentry, an independent monitoring system that runs on Nvidia’s BlueField-4 data processing units. Nvidia says placing Sentry on a separate processor — rather than on the CPU or GPU where the AI agent operates — provides an isolated view of the agent’s activity.

OpenShell isn’t new; the company announced the software in March. But it’s the combination that Nvidia believes will provide the security layer needed to keep the industry plugging along. OpenShell provides the software boundary around the agent, while Sentry adds another line of defense at the hardware level tha the company says will continuously monitor behavior and “quarantine agents that attempt to move outside their boundaries in milliseconds.”

Nvidia listed dozens of companies that have signed on to to support the effort and use the open-source platform including Anthropic, Arm, Microsoft, Oracle, and SpaceX. OpenAI is not listed as a participating company.

Huang told CNBC in an interview Monday that work on this effort started a year ago following the introduction of OpenClaw, an operating system of agents created by Peter Steinberger. In March, Nvidia released NemoClaw, an enterprise-grade AI agent platform and its own version of OpenClaw that baked in security.

“When you deploy an agent, no matter how smart, the first thing you do is to take away all of its rights,” Huang said during his CNBC interview, later comparing these security measures to how human employees and even executives are managed with companies.

Nvidia’s release was widely supported by those who have cautioned that a slowdown in development could allow China to surpass the U.S. in AI.

David Sacks, a founder, venture capitalist, former White House AI czar, and co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said Nvidia’s announcement is a reminder that agent safety is an engineering problem.

“Recent breakouts weren’t proof that development must stop,” he wrote on X. “They were proof that the sandbox was too weak. The runtime environment was poorly designed and misconfigured.”

As the AI model wars continue, Anthropic has released the newest version of Sonnet, the company’s mid-tier model, which it says will work much faster (and for significantly less) than its predecessor.

The lab describes Sonnet 5.5 as an ideal assistant for everyday tasks — including coding and creating office documents.

5.5’s predecessor, Sonnet 5, was announced about three months ago. At the time, the model’s selling point was efficient agentic deployment — the ability to run agents at a lower cost than competitors.

The big selling point with 5.5, meanwhile, is speed. Anthropic claims that Sonnet 5.5 is 30 percent faster than its predecessor, and that its rate of token burn is significantly slower.

In the Anthropic hierarchy of models, Sonnet is less powerful than the Opus model, but can be more useful in certain circumstances because its agility. In particular, Anthropic’s benchmarks show Sonnet 5.5 performing better than Opus 5.5 on agentic coding, likely because of its ability to spawn multiple agents without exceeding cost limits.

Sonnet 5.5 is also said to have significant cyber capabilities, with the company claiming that it has “comparable” cyber capabilities to Opus 5. As a result, Anthropic says that 5.5 is the first Sonnet model that will be subject the same cyber safeguards that apply to Fable and Opus.

The company also plans to release a new version of Haiku — its smallest model — in the coming weeks, although it didn’t give a firm date as to when that would happen.

The last year has seen a flurry of new model releases from the major AI labs. Just last week, OpenAI released a number of new models — including enhanced versions of Sol and Luna, its mid-tier and budget-friendly models. Meta also announced a new model, which it said would power an upcoming feature associated with its smart glasses.