Dubbed the "Solar Impulse of the Seas," the first boat to be powered solely by renewable energies and hydrogen hopes to make its own historic trip around the world. A water-borne answer to the Solar Impulse—the plane that completed its round-the-globe trip using only solar energy in July—the Energy Observer will be powered by the Sun, the wind and self-generated hydrogen when it sets sail in February as scheduled. The multi-hulled catamaran is in a shipyard at Saint-Malo on France's west coast, awaiting the installation of solar panels, wind turbines and electrolysis equipment, which breaks down water to produce its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen.

When they wanted to stash the Ark of the Covenant away at the end of the first Indiana Jones film, the government did what any self-respecting bureaucratic institution would, filing it away in a giant warehouse. Navigating even the most well-appointed warehouse spaces can get tricky, and keeping tabs on missing inventory a downright nightmare, requiring full staffs over several day-long periods to count and re-count pallets, in hopes of determining whether anything has gone missing. And let’s be honest for a minute: Humans just aren’t great at counting. Robots, on the other hand, well, that’s what they’re designed to do.

Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample, in millisecond time intervals, proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing, and weaving, a research team from UC San Diego and Monash University in Australia has identified promising drug leads that may selectively combat heart disease, from arrhythmias to cardiac failure. Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, the researchers used the computing power of Gordon and Comet, based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Stampede, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, to perform an unprecedented survey of protein structures using accelerated molecular dynamics or aMD.

Every day, we rely on our physical surroundings--friends, gadgets, and even hand gestures--to manage incoming information and retain it. In a Review published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, two researchers explain the myriad ways in which forms of assistance from gestures to GPS affect both what we know and what we think we know. Evan F. Risko, a Canada Research chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Waterloo, and co-author Sam Gilbert, a Royal Society research fellow at University College London, call these behaviors "cognitive offloading"--physical actions that reduce the mental effort needed to perform a task.

The Blue Waters supercomputer is playing an instrumental role in a White House project aimed at mapping out the Arctic. High-resolution topographic maps of Alaska that were released last week were created by Blue Waters. They are the first high-resolution, high-quality images of the region. Collaborators from Ohio State and Cornell universities are working with Paul Morin, head of the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center, on his ArcticDEM project, using Blue Waters to create digital elevation models of the region. These DEM’s are computer-generated 3D topographic maps that show the height of objects on the surface of the earth.

Engineers at Sandia are developing new datacenter cooling technologies that could save millions of gallons of water nationwide. In different parts of the country, people discuss gray-water recycling and rainwater capture to minimize the millions of gallons of groundwater required to cool large data centers. But the simple answer in many climates, said Sandia National Laboratories researcher David J. Martinez, is to use liquid refrigerant. Based on that principle, Martinez — engineering project lead for Sandia’s infrastructure computing services — is helping design and monitor a cooling system expected to save hundreds of millions of gallons nationally if the method is widely adopted.

I remember three things about my first computer science class in college. First, improbably, the professor was named Ramm, as in “random access memory.” Second, the class was about processors, and I only had a vague idea what a processor was. Third, it was the last computer science class for most of my female classmates, who quickly decided they’d rather major in something else. I never would have guessed that my time as a computer science student would turn out to be pretty much the high water mark for women in the field. The percentage of computer science majors who are women has gone down from 37 percent in 1984 to just 18 percent today.

Argonne National Laboratory is partnering with the University of Chicago and the City of Chicago to launch an open access urban sensing project - the Array of Things - to better understand and improve the cities. The Array of Things (AoT) will collect streams of data on Chicago's environment, infrastructure, and activity. This local, open data collection can then be used by researchers, city officials and software developers to study challenges such as air pollution, flooding, traffic safety and assessing the nature and impact of climate change.

Virtually all companies are doing digital transformation wrong. We’re placing it around the edge, keeping it at arm’s length, like it’s a problem and not an opportunity. If companies are to succeed, we need to rebuild around what’s possible, with the greatest toolkit we’ve ever seen. We celebrate what we’ve done and what’s changed, not what was actually possible or what changes have yet to happen. I believe we should be collectively disappointed at our inaction — it’s time we thought harder, took greater risks and embraced a new world.

Many of today's automobiles leave the factory with secret passengers: prototype software features that are disabled but that can be unlocked by clever drivers. In what is believed to be the first comprehensive security analysis of its kind, Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and a group of students at George Mason University found vulnerabilities in MirrorLink, a system of rules that allow vehicles to communicate with smartphones.

UC Berkeley artificial intelligence expert Stuart Russell will lead a new Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Russell, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and the Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering, is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is considered the standard text in the field of artificial intelligence, and has been an advocate for incorporating human values into the design of AI. The primary focus of the new center is to ensure that AI systems are beneficial to humans, he said.

Socially conscious inventors are the true champions of global progress, though they are rarely recognized. Their innovations and inventions shake up our world, tackling some of the planet's biggest problems with bold ingenuity. From tiny gadgets that can cleanse water in a flash to satellites that are mapping global poverty in an unprecedented way, innovations are constantly making strides toward solving massive social problems. These nine innovations sought to tackle global inequality in August.

New Zealand's kiwi may be one of the world's oddest birds – flightless, nocturnal, an enigmatic dirt digger with nostrils at the end of its long bill. But the national symbol also has a lot to tell the world about evolution during the most recent ice age. According to research published in the prestigious U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team led by Jason Weir, biological sciences professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, today's kiwi are much newer birds – genetically speaking – than previously thought.

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning.

Seven women who work in IT departments at research institutions around the country have been chosen to help build and operate SCinet, the very high capacity SC conference network, under the “Women in IT Networking at SC” program. Now in its second year, WINS is a collaboration between the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network and the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research. Although women have been members of SCinet since the earliest days, but WINS was launched to further expand the diversity of the SCinet volunteer staff and provide professional development opportunities to highly qualified women in the field of networking.

As water becomes a more precious and scarce commodity, effective use and conservation require that researchers test different water management strategies. It’s a complex problem that involves conservation, groundwater and seawater desalination and water reuse, as well as the uncertainty about future climate change and development patterns. Managing the flow of the Colorado River, which winds almost 1,500 miles through seven states and some of the most arid land in the country, has been a big job for the past century. Like many other U.S. waterways, the Colorado River is under increasing pressure from a growing throng of consumers.

The recent floods in Louisiana have reminded the nation of the devastation these disasters can cause, resulting in more than a dozen deaths and damaging more than 40,000 homes. With support from the National Science Foundation, David Maidment and his team created a water model prototype for the science community for research purposes. That prototype helped establish the National Water Model, which now delivers forecast information, data, decision-support services and guidance to essential emergency services staff and water management personnel.

The National Science Foundation announced a $110 million, five-year award to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and 18 partner institutions to continue, and expand, the activities undertaken through the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, a cornerstone of the nation's cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. XSEDE accelerates open scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity and capability of researchers, engineers, and students, and broadening their participation in science and engineering.

From climate-change predictions to models of the expanding universe, simulations help scientists understand complex physical phenomena. But simulations aren’t easy to deploy. Computational models comprise millions of lines of code and rely on many separate software packages. For the largest codes, configuring and linking these packages can require weeks of full-time effort. Recently, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team deployed a multiphysics code with 47 libraries on Trinity, the Cray XC30 supercomputer being assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A code that would have taken six weeks to deploy on a new machine required just a day and a half during an early-access period on part of Trinity.

Galaxies are complex—many physical processes operate simultaneously, and over a huge range of scales in space and time. As a result, accurately modeling the formation and evolution of galaxies over the lifetime of the universe presents tremendous technical challenges. In this talk I will describe some of the important unanswered questions regarding galaxy formation, discuss in general terms how we simulate the formation of galaxies on a computer, and present simulations that the Enzo collaboration has recently done.

Microsoft today pushed out in a blog post for users of its consumer services new resources to reduce hate speech. Users will now be able to communicate directly with the company to report hate speech, and petition for reinstating content via new online forms. Most people are familiar with efforts by social networks like Twitter and Facebook to ensure safety within their respective online communities. Just last week, Twitter announced the suspension of an additional 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism.

Often described as the blueprint of life, DNA contains the instructions for making every living thing from a human to a house fly. But in recent decades, some researchers have been putting the letters of the genetic code to a different use: making tiny nanoscale computers. In a new study, a Duke University team led by professor John Reif created strands of synthetic DNA that, when mixed together in a test tube in the right concentrations, form an analog circuit that can add, subtract and multiply as they form and break bonds.

In the beginning, it was just about getting rid of the keys to his office. American biohacker Amal Graafstra, 40, decided in 2005 that he wanted to be done with such archaic technology "from like 700 BC." He looked at iris scanning and fingerprint reading as solutions for opening his office door, but decided those options were expensive and unreliable. Inspired by the way pets are commonly tagged, he settled on a safe radio-frequency identification (RFID) implant. "I used to say that if I was beaten up and naked in the back alley, I still want to get into my door."

Ultrasound imaging is used around the world to help visualize developing babies and diagnose disease. Sound waves bounce off the tissues, revealing their different densities and shapes. The next step in ultrasound technology is to image not just anatomy, but specific cells and molecules deeper in the body, such as those associated with tumors or bacteria in our gut. A new study from Caltech outlines how protein engineering techniques might help achieve this milestone. The researchers engineered protein-shelled nanostructures called gas vesicles—which reflect sound waves—to exhibit new properties useful for ultrasound technologies.

A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot. This small, 3D-printed robot -- nicknamed the octobot -- could pave the way for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous machines.